All posts tagged ‘simultaneous discovery’

1791: Michael Faraday is born. In his 76 years on the planet, the chemist-physicist will make fundamental contributions to our understanding of electricity and magnetism, advise governments and establish lasting institutions of scientific education.

Faraday came from a working-class family and had to go to work after rudimentary schooling in reading, writing and arithmetic. But genius won out.

Faraday became a bookbinder’s apprentice in his teens and continued his education by reading the books he was binding. An article on electricity in the Encyclopedia Britannica inspired him to buy some equipment and conduct experiments himself.

Faraday joined London’s City Philosophical Society in 1810 to hear the lectures there and participate in scientific discussions. Then, in 1812, a client of the bookbindery gave the earnest young man tickets to hear a series of lectures by pioneering chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution.

Thirsty for knowledge, Faraday took copious notes. He organized them, added illustrations and bound them into a book. Faraday secured an interview with Davy, presented him with the bound copy and asked to be hired as a lab assistant.

Davy was impressed but had nothing open at the moment. True to his word, however, he did hire Faraday the next year … at about $10 a week (the rough equivalent of $140 in today’s money).

A few years later, Davy asked his assistant to follow up on the work of Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted, who had just discovered that an electrical current would deflect the needle of a magnetic compass. Faraday theorized that magnets created force fields, and he designed an experiment that significantly one-upped Oersted in 1821.

Faraday suspended a wire above a magnet. When he passed a current through the wire (whose bottom end hung in a dish of conductive mercury), the wire rotated around the magnet, following lines of magnetic force. It was a prototype for the electric motor, using electricity to create motion. It just needed to be scaled up.

The discovery was a sensation — perhaps a little too much of one. Davy, a scientific rock star of his day, was envious. He accused Faraday of stealing the idea from him and tried to block the young man’s election to the Royal Society. Davy backed off but never withdrew the charges. Faraday became a Fellow of the Royal Society and lab director at the Royal Institution in 1825.

Faraday decided to tread gingerly and shied away from electrical experimentation. He worked instead on analytical chemistry and the compression of gases, discovering benzene in 1825.

Davy died in 1829, perhaps from the after-effects of his frequent inhalation of nitrous oxide and other gases, including carbon monoxide. That gave Faraday free rein to resume his work on electricity.

He discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831. Reversing his effect of using a magnet and electricity to create motion, he used a magnet and motion to generate electricity. No messy, voltaic cells needed, it was the progenitor of steam, hydro and diesel generators.

Faraday plumbed the mysteries of electrochemistry in the 1830s, coining such words as electrode and ion, and establishing the laws of electrolysis.

But wait, there’s more.
Continue Reading “Sept. 22, 1791: Faraday Enters a World He Will Change” »

1913: English metallurgist Harry Brearley casts a steel alloy that’s resistant to acidity and weathering. Because his sponsor names it “stainless steel,” Brearley will often be credited as the inventor, but there are more metallurgists than metals in this story.

Even the hometown British Stainless Steel Association acknowledges that Brearley was not alone.

English and French researchers had learned as early as the 1820s that iron-chromium alloys resisted some acids. But they were restricted to low- rather than high-chromium-content alloys, because they hadn’t yet figured out the necessity of lowering the carbon content.

Two Englishmen filed a patent for an acid-resistant steel with 30 to 35 percent chromium and 2 percent tungsten in 1872. But it was a French researcher named Brustlein who in 1875 detailed the importance of low carbon content. He determined that a high-chromium alloy would need carbon content below 0.15 percent or thereabouts.

The race was on. Very slowly. Many attempts produced many failures over the next 20 years.

Hans Goldschmidt of Germany broke the logjam in 1895 with the development of the aluminothermic reduction process for producing carbon-free chromium. French metallurgist Leon Guillet forged ahead, so to speak, with work on iron-nickel-chromium alloys in the first decade of the 20th century, but seemingly ignored their resistance to corrosion. Back in Germany, P. Monnartz and W. Borchers discovered in 1911 that having a minimum 10.5 percent chromium seriously increased steel’s resistance to corrosion.

Enter Harry Brearley of Sheffield, England. He started working on a project in 1912 for a small-arms manufacturer that wanted to prevent its rifle barrels from eroding away quickly from the heat and friction of gunshot. Brearley needed to etch his steel-alloy samples to examine their granular structure under the microscope, but when he used nitric acid, the high-chromium samples resisted being dissolved. His focus shifted from erosion resistance to corrosion resistance.

After trying various combinations with 6 to 15 percent chromium and differing measures of carbon, he made a new alloy on Aug. 13, 1913, containing 12.8 percent chromium and 0.24 percent carbon. It resisted not only nitric acid, but lemon juice and vinegar as well.

So he took his discovery of “rustless steel” to Sheffield cutler R.F Mosley. A manager there, Ernest Stuart, renamed it “stainless steel.”

But wait, there’s more. Metallurgists at Germany’s Krupp Iron Works were also working on high-chromium, corrosion-resistant steel alloys of various compositions between 1908 and 1914. Elwood Haynes and two other Americans were doing parallel work in the years 1908-1911, and Max Mauermann of Poland displayed something similar at the 1913 Adria exhibition in Vienna. And there’s a Swedish claimant as well.

Brearley, however, did formulate the first alloy to be called stainless steel, and he recognized potential uses others had not seen. Today is the 97th anniversary of his discovery.

Source: British Stainless Steel Association

This article first appeared on Wired.com Aug. 13, 2008.

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• Feb. 18, 1913: 'Isotope' Goes From Greek to Geek
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1877: Emile Berliner files a patent caveat for a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner.

Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner’s carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades. And they may not have been capable of surmounting such great distances, hindering one of humanity’s most important advances.

Like most of today’s microphones, early designs turned compressions in the air, otherwise known as sound, into electrical signals. But the results didn’t sound good by any account, and the device lacked practicality for widespread use. Bell’s microphone, for instance, involved suspending a diaphragm above a pool of electrified liquid.

Berliner’s patent application improved on the existing design by adding a layer of carbon particles in between two contacts, one of which acted as a diaphragm for catching sound waves. Movements of the diaphragm created varying pressure on the carbon particles, allowing more or less electricity to pass between the contacts.

This process converted sound waves into electricity more accurately than any other microphone could at the time. It became commonplace in telephones, and even radio, until the appearance of the condenser microphone in the mid-1920s.

Although Berliner’s microphones still sounded hissy, they proved critical not only for encoding speech into electricity, but for amplifying the signal in the wire every so often to compensate for electrical resistance. Without that amplification, Bell’s telephone would have remained a mere curiosity, rather than transforming the world.

In those pre–vacuum-tube, pre-transistor days, Berliner’s carbon-disk microphones were coupled to little speakers to amplify the signal mechanically over long distances. Presumably, you’d be able to eavesdrop on a conversation simply by standing near one of these mechanical repeaters.

Bell paid $50,000 for Berliner’s microphone patent (about $1.1 million in today’s money) and began manufacturing telephones using the technology in 1878. But controversy dogged the patent, which was eventually thrown out, much to Berliner’s dismay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Thomas Edison, and not Berliner, invented the carbon microphone.

In truth, neither can claim total credit.

As Bell executive W. Van Benthuysen told The New York Times (.pdf) in December 1891, the idea of transmitting speech by varying the current between two contacts as they are affected by sound waves was common knowledge in some circles, having appeared in published works as early as 1854 — well before either Berliner or Edison (who filed a similar patent) claimed credit for the idea in 1877.

“It was known long before the date of Bell’s [formerly Berliner's] patent that the resistance of a circuit is varied without being broken by variations in the intimacy of contact or amount of pressure between the electrodes in contact, from one to the other of which a current is passing,” said Van Benthuysen, adding that France’s Count Du Moncel had written extensively on the topic over two decades earlier.

Nonetheless, Berliner reputedly went to his grave in 1929 convinced that Edison had stolen his idea. Before that, he did receive ample credit for another crucial invention: the lateral-cut disc record, whose design is still prized by hipsters and purists alike. Before that, everybody was using Edison’s phonograph cylinders, which took up much more space, and were difficult to duplicate.

Berliner’s records were used in toys from 1888 until 1894, when his company began selling records using a logo of a dog cocking its ear towards a record player. Modified versions of the “His Master’s Voice” logo have been used by record companies around the world, including RCA in the United States. It now forms the retail entertainment chain HMV’s logo.

The saga of the carbon-button microphone comes as a reminder that while history feels the need to assign great ideas to individual people, their origins are often murky and collaborative in nature, and owe no small part to people ripping each other off.

We couldn’t find any accounts of Emile Berliner’s first words transmitted by microphone, but they were probably not “Ich bin ein Berliner” — as nice as that would have been.

Source: Various

Photo: Emile Berliner sits with a couple of microphones in 1927./Courtesy Library of Congress
Diagram courtesy TutorVista

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1904: British engineer John Ambrose Fleming invents and patents the thermionic valve, the first vacuum tube. With this advance, the age of modern wireless electronics is born.

Although the Supreme Court eventually invalidated Fleming’s U.S. patent — ruling that the technology he used for his invention was already known — he remains the acknowledged inventor of the vacuum tube, a diode (having two electrodes) that would have far-reaching applications. The tube was standard equipment in radio receivers, radar sets, early television sets and other forms of electronic communication for at least half a century, until it was replaced by solid-state electronics in the mid-20th century.

The principle of thermionic emission, essentially the transmission of a charged current using a heated conductor, was certainly well-understood before Fleming incorporated it into his tube. It was first reported in 1873, and a number of other engineers and physicists — including Thomas Edison — had experimented with it.

Fleming’s vacuum tube, however, represented a major breakthrough in the technology.

For his work, Fleming received a knighthood in 1929 and was awarded the Medal of Honor by the Institute of Radio Engineers (now the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in 1933.

Fleming lived long enough to see the fruits of his labor literally save Britain during World War II. Radar sets using Fleming’s diodes proved decisive in the Battle of Britain, allowing a relatively small number of British fighter planes to effectively turn back the Luftwaffe’s onslaught against the home island.

Fleming died in 1945 at the age of 95.

Source: Radioelectronics.com, Wikipedia

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• Jan. 7, 1904: A Distress Call for Ships in Danger Upon the Sea
• March 5, 1904: Having a Ball
• May 4, 1904: U.S. Dives Into the Panama Canal
• July 21, 1904: All Aboard for Siberia, Tovarich
• Sept. 14, 1904: Birth of the Craziest Road Race Ever

1675: Gottfried Leibniz writes the integral sign ∫  in an unpublished manuscript, introducing the calculus notation that’s still in use today.

Leibniz was a German mathematician and philosopher who readily crossed the lines between academic disciplines. He had a doctorate in law, served as secretary of the Nuremberg alchemical society and fancied himself a poet.

He also conducted diplomatic missions in London and Paris. While visiting those cities, Leibniz acquainted himself with such scientific luminaries as Christiaan Huygens, Robert Boyle, Robert Hook, John Pell and Jacques Ozanam. He showed an unfinished calculating machine to the Royal Society, which elected him a fellow.

Leibniz discussed with his English colleagues his interest in summing series and the geometry of infinitesimals, and he corresponded with them when he was back in France. They apprised him of books in the field and also told him about Isaac Newton’s yet-unpublished work on the subject.

Newton wrote to Leibniz through an intermediary, and they began an exchange of letters that often took weeks or even months to reach their recipient. The muddled back-and-forth eventually led to bad blood, with Newton claiming that Leibniz had stolen his work in founding the science of calculus.

Newton’s letters, however, described results, not methods. The legal and philosophical formalism in which Leibniz had been trained allowed him to create his own symbolic system, including not just the integral sign but the same notation of differentials we still use. Newton published his system slightly before Leibniz, but the German’s notation was superior.

Continental and English mathematicians would spend decades arguing over who invented the calculus, but it seems yet another example of simultaneous discovery. The two scientists were of the same era, associated in the same circles, read the work of the same precursors, and shared some of their own ideas. It should amaze no one that they came to the same results in slightly different mathematical language at nearly the same time.

Leibniz contributed mightily to our knowledge of differential equations. He discovered the method of separation of variables, first reduced homogeneous equations to separable ones, and figured out how to solve first-order linear equations. He also worked on the multinomial theorem.

The math department of St. Bonaventure University in western New York state celebrates Integral Day on Oct. 29 to honor Leibniz. The mathematics suite is decorated with integral and summation ornaments, and students and faculty eat “calculus cookies” and imbibe “summation cider,” presumably with infinitesimal nibbles and sips. Students compete in a calculus contest to win a gift certificate at the college bookstore.

Does Newton deserve more credit? Maybe, but it’s Leibniz’s language you learned in your calculus class. And ol’ Isaac gets his props for many other discoveries, so don’t overestimate the gravity of the situation. Happy Integral Day, Gottfried!

Source: Eric Weisstein’s World of Math, MacTutor History of Mathematics

Image: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz may have been inspired by his cascading hairstyle when he first wrote the integral symbol ∫ in an unpublished manuscript.
Painting: Bernhard Christoph Francke

This article first appeared on Wired.com Oct. 29, 2008.

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1868: A French astronomer spots an unknown element, now known as helium, in the spectrum of the sun during a much-anticipated total eclipse. The event marks the first discovery of an “extraterrestrial” element, as helium had not yet been found on Earth.

Astronomers had been eagerly awaiting a total solar eclipse since 1859, when German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff figured out how to use the analysis of light to deduce the chemical composition of the sun and the stars. Scientists wanted to study the bright red flames that appeared to shoot out from the sun, now known to be dense clouds of gas called solar prominences. But until 1868, they thought the sun’s spectrum could only be observed during an eclipse.

French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen camped out in Guntoor, India, to watch as the moon passed in front of the sun and revealed the solar prominences. Like other sun-gazers that morning, Janssen discovered that the prominences were mostly made of super-hot hydrogen gas. But he also noticed something extra: Using a special prism instrument called a spectroscope, he determined that the line of yellow light everyone had assumed to be sodium didn’t match up to the wavelength of any known element.

Janssen wanted to keep studying the mysterious line, and he was so impressed by the brightness of the sun’s emission lines that he felt sure they could be seen without an eclipse, if he could just figure out how to block other wavelengths of visible light. Working feverishly over the next few weeks, Janssen built the first “spectrohelioscope,” a device specifically designed to examine the spectrum of the sun.

Unbeknownst to Janssen, a second scientist was also working on the same problem 5,000 miles away. English astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer succeeded in viewing the solar prominences in regular daylight in October 1868. In stunning scientific synchronicity, the two scientists’ papers arrived at the French Academy of Sciences on the same day, and today both men are credited with the first sighting of helium.

At the time, however, Lockyer and Janssen got ridicule rather than accolades for their discovery. Other scientists didn’t believe the astronomers’ account of a new element … until 30 years later, when Scottish chemist William Ramsay discovered a perplexing earthly gas hidden inside a chunk of uranium ore.

Ramsay sent the sample to Lockyer for confirmation. The scientist was thrilled by the element’s “glorious yellow effulgence,” which he described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1895. Finally vindicated, Janssen and Lockyer were honored by the French government with a gold medal bearing both their faces.

Source: Various

Image 1: A recent solar eclipse, courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.
Image 2: Pierre Jules César Janssen, Wikipedia commons.

See Also:

• May 28, 585 B.C.: Predicted Solar Eclipse Stops Battle
• Jan. 9, 1643: Astronomer Sees Ashen Light of Venus
• Sept. 23, 1846: Neptune Right Where They Said It Would Be
• July 14, 1868: Tape Measure Clicks In
• June 23, 1868: Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap … Ding!
• Aug. 18, 1947: Birth of the Cool (Company, That Is)
• May 19, 1910: Halley’s Comet Brushes Earth With Its Tail
• May 29, 1919: A Major Eclipse, Relatively Speaking
• April 21, 1994: Our Solar System Is Not Alone