All posts tagged ‘Leo Szilard’

Dec. 2: It’s a double milestone for nuclear energy. The first man-made sustained nuclear chain reaction was created this day in 1942. And just 15 years later, the first full-scale nuclear power plant went online.

1942: Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues achieve a successful, controlled chain reaction in a squash court underneath the football grandstand of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. It lays the groundwork for the first atomic bombs.

Fermi and Szilard had been working on nuclear fission at Columbia University in New York, when Albert Einstein wrote of their work to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Einstein feared that German nuclear researchers might gain an unbeatable lead in the field and develop an atomic weapon that could win the war.

The Roosevelt administration responded with the then-secret, now-famous Manhattan Project. Top U.S. atomic scientists soon gathered in Chicago to see just how feasible it was to start a nuclear chain reaction, starting with a controlled rather than explosive one.

The original idea was to build a nuclear pile at a location in the Argonne Forest about 30 miles outside Chicago, but there were construction problems. Remarkably, the experiment was relocated to the University of Chicago campus inside city limits.

Construction began Nov. 16, 1942. The team got uranium from an Iowa State University researcher and Westinghouse Electric. Staffers worked around the clock to build a wooden structure on which they placed a lattice of 57 layers, comprising six tons of uranium metal and 40 tons of uranium oxide embedded in 380 tons of graphite blocks.

The whole apparatus was encased in a custom square balloon built by Goodyear Tire. The Chicago Pile-1 cost $2.7 million (about $36 million in today’s money).

The Dec. 2 experiment began at 9:45 a.m. with more than 50 people in attendance. A three-man “suicide squad” was ready to douse the reactor in case it threatened to get out of control. Besides the main On/Off switch, there was a weighted safety rod that would automatically trip if neutron intensity got too high, a hand-operated backup safety rod, and “SCRAM” — the safety control rod ax-man, a top staffer wielding an ax to cut a rope to drop the safety rod, if all else failed.

The suicide squad wasn’t needed. The pile achieved a sustained nuclear reaction at 3:25, and Fermi shut it down at 3:53. Those 28 minutes changed the world.

So secret was the project that at a party a few days later, the scientists’ spouses didn’t know what the all the congratulations were about. They wouldn’t find out what had happened and where the technology was headed for another two-and-a-half years. And then, the world knew.

1957: The light-water breeder reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania — the first in the United States — goes to full power on the anniversary of Chicago Pile-1.
Continue Reading “Dec. 2, 1942: Nuclear Pile Gets Going
Dec. 2, 1957: Nuclear Power Goes Online” »

1866: Sci-fi legend and determined futurist Herbert George Wells is born into the lower middle class in England. The prolific author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and many more immeasurably influential works will eventually produce an essential literary legacy that has since transcended time altogether — while terrorizing minds with debilitating narratives of alien invasions, human-animal hybrids, nuclear apocalypse and worse.

Visionary H.G. Wells was raised by his Protestant mother Sarah Neal, who worked as a domestic servant, and his free-thinking shopkeeper father Joseph Wells, who actually made most of his money as a semi-pro cricketer. The family’s delicate financial situation was upended when Joseph fractured his thigh in 1877, and his sons were booted out of private schools and forced into apprenticeships.

The social demotion depressed Wells, who had broken his own leg in 1874 and spent the downtime getting lost in books procured for him at the local library. Somehow, the lover of literature’s endless scope couldn’t imagine himself as a draper or a chemist. That class stratification went on to influence the social novels of his middle period, like Kipps — about a dead-end draper who suddenly comes into money.

The literary wish-fantasies of the bookworm Wells were destined for more galactic accomplishments. And once he finally secured a position as a student teacher after begging for release from his apprenticeships, his imaginative career took off.

He won a scholarship to London’s awesomely named Normal School of Science, which now has the more boring name Royal College of Science. He studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley, nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his evolutionary evangelism. (His grandson Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 sci-fi classic Brave New World would compete with Wells’ own predictive 1910 novel When the Sleeper Wakes for generations of readers.) By 1890, Wells finally had his B.S. in Zoology and a brilliant future as a cultural and creative prophet ahead of him.

Wells hit the literary mother lode on his first try in 1895, banging out the 32,000-word novella The Time Machine and forever popularizing the concept of time travel in popular culture and science. In fact, Wells himself became synonymous with it, skipping across centuries as a character in films like Time After Time and television shows like Lois & Clark and Dr. Who.

By the time the turn of the century arrived, Wells had eternally sequenced the cultural genes of mad scientists (The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man), dystopian social engineering (When the Sleeper Wakes), and alien invasion and total war (The War of the Worlds), all before turning 35.

Once the 20th century detonated, Wells’ ceaselessly hungry mind churned out novels and treatises on political unity (A Modern Utopia), suffragettes (Ann Veronica), geopolitical conflict (The War in the Air), technology (The World Set Free) and even corny romance (The Passionate Friends). By a rough count, he averaged well over two books a year, some fiction and some nonfiction.

He was also highly productive in his love life, having multiple affairs with women like birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and writers Rebecca West, Elizabeth Van Arnim, Amber Reeves and others, some of whom bore him heirs to the sci-fi throne.

Wells also bore strange accidental fruit that changed the world in other ways. Robert H. Goddard, who invented the first fuel rocket and thereby the Space Age, was deeply inspired after reading The War of the Worlds at 16. Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction after reading about the then-fictional atomic bombs theorized in Wells’ The World Set Free.

Wells’ conception of a polymath utopia that renders Christianity obsolete in his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come — which also predicted the outbreak of World War II, give or take a year — so pissed off crusty moralist C.S. Lewis that he caricatured Wells in his less-interesting sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength. But Lewis never had a chance: Along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells is now widely regarded as a father of science fiction, while Lewis is still lost in a wardrobe with lions and witches.

There is simply not enough time (that word again) — nor words, really — to fully explicate Wells’ tectonic impact on culture, entertainment and science as we know it, and will know it. A year after the end of World War II, Wells died of unknown causes in the very London that helped him make his name.

His suggested epitaph in The War in the Air read: “I told you so. You damned fools.” He was right.

Source: Various

Photo: via Wikipedia

See Also:

• Sci-Fi Visionary H.G. Wells Travels Through Time
• Oct. 30, 1938: ‘War of the Worlds’ Induces Panic
• Oct. 30, 1938: The Martians Have Landed in New Jersey!
• Your Favorite Sci-Fi Flicks, From Metropolis Through the ’50s
• Close Encounters of the Worst Kind
• Twitterers Stage Mock Martian Invasion a la War of the Worlds
• July 27, 1866: Trans-Atlantic Cable Connects Old World to New
• Sept. 21, 1756: McAdam Paves the Way
• Sept. 21, 1937: The Hobbit Opens Up a Brave New World

1930: Albert Einstein and fellow nuclear scientist Leo Szilard receive an American patent for a new kind of refrigerator that requires no electricity.

The most famous physicist of the 20th century wasn’t a Thomas Edison: The fridge would prove to be one of Einstein’s few forays into the world of commonplace engineering.

The refrigerator uses chemical reactions of ammonia, butane and water to turn a heat input into a cold output.

Ammonia gas is released into a chamber with liquid butane in it. This reduces the boiling point of the butane, causing it to evaporate, and draw in energy from the environment, cooling the area outside the evaporator. The mix of gases pass through to a condenser filled with water. The ammonia dissolves into the water, and the butane condenses into liquid, which sits atop the water-ammonia mixture. The butane runs back into the evaporator, a heat source is used to drive the ammonia back into gas, and the ammonia heads to the evaporator to begin the cycle again.

Though the fridge never became a commercial product, Swedish company Electrolux did license the scientific duo’s most promising patents. And in recent years, some academics have built coolers based on the cycle Einstein and Szilard described.

An Oxford team led by Malcolm McCulloch built a prototype fridge in 2008. A German group (pictured at right) also re-created the fridge, as did Georgia Tech Ph.D. student Andy Delano in 1998.

Beyond the desire to retrace Einstein’s footsteps, the refrigerator is intriguing because it doesn’t use freon or electricity, which could make it a cleaner, simpler alternative in poor countries.

“It’s basically an absorption-type refrigerator that uses ammonia, water and butane to create a chemical phenomenon that allows you to run the whole thing at a constant pressure, so you don’t need moving parts like a pump or a compressor,” Delano explained. “It provides cooling with only heat as an input. Literally, you heat one end, and the other end gets cold.”

The only problem is that compared to a modern refrigerator, Einstein’s design isn’t very efficient at cooling per unit of energy input. The Oxford team, however, thinks it can quadruple the cooling output with some tweaks to the system.

Einstein’s only other United States patent was for a “light-intensity self-adjusting camera” (.pdf) that would have correctly exposed your photos, no matter what the lighting conditions were.

Szilard was a bit more productive in the patent realm, but most of his related to nuclear reactors and assigned to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Source: Various

Correction: As originally posted, this article gave the wrong year for the patent and the wrong home nation for Electrolux.

See Also:

• How Wired.com Built Beer Robot, Our DIY Kegerator
• July 14, 1850: Gorrie Demonstrates Ice-Maker
• July 17, 1902: An Invention to Beat the Heat, Humidity
• Gallery: Einstein’s Legacy: Inside the Quest for Gravity Waves
• Extreme Ultraviolet Laser Challenges Einstein
• Time’s Up, Einstein
• Beam Me Up an Einstein, Scotty
• Nov. 11, 1856: Bessemer Becomes the Man of Steel
• Jan. 16, 1936: Day at the Races, and Your Nag in a Photo Finish
• July 7, 1936: Get a Grip
• Dec. 24, 1936: Radiation Used to Treat Disease for the First Time

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.