Category: science

Calendar: February 18

Year: Day to Day Men: February 18

The Pose

The eighteenth of February in 1838 marks the birth date of Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach. Due to his contributions to the physics of shock waves, the ratio of the speed of flow or object to the speed of sound is named the Mach number in his honor.

Born at the village of Brno-Chrlice in South Moravia, a part of the Austrian Empire, Ernst Mach was educated at home by his parents until the age of fourteen. He studied for three years at a secondary school in the city of Kroměříž. In 1855, Mach enrolled at the University of Vienna where he studied physics and medical physiology. In 1860, he received his doctorate in physics under Austrian physicist and mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen, the first to design an electromagnetic machine which used its electrical induction for power generation. 

In 1864, Mach turned down the chairman of surgery position at the University of Salzburg to accept a professorship of mathematics at the University of Graz, the second largest and oldest university in Austria. Two years later, Mach was appointed Professor of Physics at the university. In that position, he continued his work in psychophysics, a field that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. In 1867, Mach became the chair of experimental physics at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University, a position he held for twenty-eight years before returning to Vienna.

Ernst Mach’s primary contribution to the science of physics were his photographs and descriptions of spark shock waves as well as the later studies of ballistic shock waves. Using the technique of schlieren photography, Mach and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. Invented in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler, schlieren photography is, essentially, a process of photographing fluid flows by measuring the spatial variations in the intensity of a light source shining on or from behind the target object.

Mach’s initial studies in experimental physics was primarily on the refraction, polarization, diffraction and interference of light in different media and under external influences. Further explorations dealt with supersonic fluid mechanics. In a collaboration with photographer Peter Salcher, Mach presented a 1887 paper on his research that correctly described the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a projectile. They confirmed the existence of a shock wave of conical shape with the projectile at the apex. The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound (Vp/Vs) is called the Mach number in honor of his work in the field. This ratio is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in the fields of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics.

Ernst Mach also made many contributions to the fields of psychology and physiology. Among these are his discovery of the oblique effect, the relative deficiency in the perception of oblique contours as compared to vertical or horizontal contours. Mach formed an experiment in which he placed a line to make it appear parallel to an adjoining one. Errors in the observer’s perception occurred least for horizontal or vertical orientations and largest when the lines were set at an incline of forty-five degrees. Mach’s experiment showed a perceptible change in the appearance of an object occurs with a forty-five degree rotation.

Another contribution by Mach to the field of sensory perception was the study of effects caused by the optical illusion known as Mach bands. Through this illusion, he explored the edge detection ability of the human visual system. The Mach bands exaggerate the contrast between edges of slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they touch. From this study, Mach made a distinction between what he called the physiological space, specifically visual, and geometrical space. 

Ernst Mach survived a paralytic stroke in 1898. He retired form the University of Vienna three years later and received an appointment to the upper chamber of the Austrian Parliament. In 1913, Mach left Vienna and moved to his son Ludwig’s home in Vaterstetten in Upper Bavaria near Münich. Ernst Mach continued his writing and correspondence until his death in February of 1916 at the age of seventy-eight.

Calendar: February 17

Year: Day to Day Men: February 17

Attention Caught

The seventeenth of February in 1674 marks the date of the Ambon earthquake in the Maluku Islands, the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia and the largest ever recorded in that country.

The geological area of the Indonesian North Maluku Islands is located in the zone of convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. This area is dominated by a complex mixture of tectonic elements, including collision, subduction and vertical fractures which shift horizontally. In the search for the cause of the Ambon earthquake, immediate to deep-focus earthquakes with a depth of sixty kilometers or more were ruled out as the source. 

Known historical events of that type did not generate the scale of tsunami that struck the islands. The 1938 Banda Sea earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.5 and Rossi-Forel intensity of VII (very strong tremors), generated a minor tsunami of only 1.5 meters (5 feet). Researchers ruled out faulting as a source because the Ambon earthquake had an extreme run-up height of at least 100 meters on the northern shore of Ambon,

The likely source of the tsunami appears to have been an earthquake generated undersea-landslide. Although never confirmed, two faults are seen as likely sources of that landslide; the South Seram Thrust and an unnamed fault found on the island of Ambon. Published research journals have not assigned a magnitude to the event; however, from collected databases, it has been estimated as an earthquake with the magnitude of 6.8 at a depth of 40 kilometers (25 miles).

A German botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, Georg Eberhard Rumphius was assigned in 1654 to the Ambon archipelago. Accompanied by his wife and two daughters, he assumed the position of merchant in 1662 and, on his own time, undertook a study of the Spice Islands’ flora and fauna. Rumphius and his family were present on the island at the time of the 1674 earthquake; his account of the earthquake is the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia. 

The Ambon earthquake occurred on Saturday evening, between 19:30 and 20:00 Eastern Indonesian Time, when the island inhabitants were celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year. The shaking earth rang the large bells on the local Victoria Castle and knocked people off their feet. 

The collapse of seventy-five stone buildings killed eighty-four people and injured another thirty-five. Water spurted into the air from wells and the ground, some upwards to 6 meters (20 feet). Clay and sand also erupted from the ground. Among the dead from the earthquake were Rumphius’s wife and two daughters, killed by a collapsing stone wall. 

Immediately after the earthquake, a mega-tsunami swept through the coastal areas of Ambon Island. The earthquake produced a tsunami which reached heights as much as 100 meters (330 feet) and nearly crested the coastal hill areas. This tsunami resulted in the additional deaths of over two thousand individuals.

Notes: The translated summary notes of Georg Everhard Rumphius on the 1674 Ambon and Seram earthquake are recorded in the files of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. These notes are located at: https://iotic.ioc-unesco.org/1950-ambon-tsunami/1674-tsunami-in-ambon-and-seram/ 

Calendar: February 5

Year: Day to Day Men: February 5

Hidden Face

The fifth day of February in 1924 marks the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s first broadcast of the hourly time signal known as the Greenwich Time Signal. Originally the idea of the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Watson Dyson and the head of the BBC John Reith, the signal was originally controlled by two mechanical clocks with electrical contacts attached to their swinging pendulums. These sent a signal to the BBC which converted them to the oscillatory tone broadcast.

Situated on a hill in southeast London, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, played a major role in the history of navigation and astronomy.The site of the observatory was established in 1851 by Sir George Airy as the Prime Meridian, the historic geographical reference line. By 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage were using it as the reference meridian on their charts and maps. Long symbolized by a brass strip in the observatory’s courtyard and later one of stainless steel, the Prime Meridian is now marked by a powerful green laser. As the Prime Meridian passes through its site, the Royal Observatory gave its name to what became Greenwich Mean Time, today known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

The Greenwich Time Signal (GTS) is a series os six short tones, or beeps, broadcast at one-second intervals by many BBC radio stations. Introduced in 1924, these tones have been generated by the BBC since 1990 to mark the precise start of each hour. The six short beeps occur on each of the five seconds leading to the hour and on the hour itself.  Each beep is a one kilohertz tone, approximately a fifth of a semitone above musical B5. The first five beeps last a tenth of a second each; the final beep last half a second. The change of hour occurs at the beginning of the last beep.

The beeps for national radio stations are timed relative to the UTC, the primary time standard by which the world regulates its time. The UTC is based on International Atomic Time (TAI) which is maintained by an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world that measure time by monitoring the resonant frequency of atoms. Electron states in an atom are associated with different energy levels; in transitions between these states, they interact with a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation. This phenomenon serves as the basis for the International System of Unit’s definition of a second, the basis for International Atomic Time.

Note: The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, has the International Astronomical Union’s code number ooo, the first on the list.

Calendar: February 3

Year: Day to Day Men: February 3

Thick Branches

The third day of February in 1923 marks the birth date of American zoologist, entomologist, educator and comparative psychologist Charles Henry Turner. He was one of the first scientists to examine whether animals display complex cognition through his studies of arthropods, specifically spiders and bees.

Born in Cincinnati to Thomas Turner and Addie Campbell, Charles Henry Turner entered the University of Cincinnati in 1896 and studied under comparative neurologist and geologist Clarence Luther Herrick, who had worked on the Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1891, Turner became the first African American to receive a graduate degree at the college. A summary of his undergraduate thesis was published in the journal “Science”, considered one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals.

Turner received his Master of Science from the University of Cincinnati in 1892. He remained at the university as an assistant instructor in its biological laboratory until 1893. Originally Tuner studied for his Doctorate at Ohio’s Denison University but the program was discontinued. He attained his Doctorate in Science at Atlanta’s Clark University where he served as Chair of the Science Department until 1905. Clark University’s Turner-Tanner Hall is named in his honor. 

While teaching for a year as principal of Cleveland’s College Hill High School, Charles Turner continued his studies on insect behavior and pursued a doctorate degree at the University of Chicago which he achieved, magna cum laude, in 1907. Turner was among the first African Americans to receive a doctorate from that university. In 1907, he was a delegate for the Seventh International Zoological Congress held in Boston. There he met such eminent zoologists as Charles Whitman, Frank Lillie and Charles Child. 

Turner published forty-nine papers on invertebrates, including “Psychological Notes on the Gallery Spider” and “Experiments on the Color Vision of Honeybees”, with three papers published in the journal “Science”. Turner was the first person to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch; he also discovered honeybees’ awareness of visual patterns and cockroaches’ trial and error learning. In doing his experiments, Turner advanced the studies of associative learning such as seen in stimulus substitution. He showed that a conditioning stimulus became a reliable predictor of reaction from an unconditioned stimulus. 

Charles Turner’s studies were different from the majority of his contemporaries as he clearly adopted a cognitive perspective to analyze animal behavior. While most scientists believed that animals, such as insects, were driven by innate reactions to external stimuli, Turner used such concepts as memory, learning and expectation in his research. This view of animal cognition would be confirmed through later systematic observations by Edward Thorndike in the early 1900s.

Between 1898 and 1908, Turner applied for a position at the Tuskegee Institute but the Institute could not afford his salary. Unsuccessful at getting an appointment to the University of Chicago, he accepted a teaching position in 1908 at Summer High School in St. Louis, Missouri where he remained until his retirement in 1922 due to ill health. Charles Henry Turner died at the age of fifty-six in February of 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. He was interred at Lincoln Cemetery, a historically African American cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.

Calendar: January 30

Year: Day to Day Men: January 30

Ginger on White

January 30th of 1910 marks the death of African-American inventor Granville Tailer Woods who registered nearly sixty patents in his lifetime and made vital contributions to the railroad industry. He also made improvements to technological devices such as the telephone, telegraph and phonograph.

Born in Columbus, Ohio in April of 1856, Granville Woods received little education as a young man. As a teenager, he was employed in a variety of work including as  a steel mill worker and an engineer in both a railroad machine shop and onboard the British steamer, Ironsides. Between 1876 and 1878, Woods resided in New York City and took courses in engineering and electricity, subjects he knew were necessary for industry’s future. 

Returning to Ohio in 1878, Woods was employed by the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy Railroad Company for eight months and later by the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad Company as an locomotive engineer for thirteen months. It was during this time that he began to form ideas for his later invention, the inductor telegraph. In the spring of 1880, Woods moved to Cincinnati where he founded the Woods Electric Company to develop, manufacture and sell electrical apparatus. In 1884, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace; his later patents were predominantly for electrical devises. 

Granville Wood’s 1885 patent for an improved telephone transmitter, which allowed a station to send voice as well as Morse code over a single wire, was purchased by the American Bell Telephone Company owned by Alexander Graham Bell. In 1887, he secured his patent for the creation of a magnetic coiled-wire field, that placed under a train, enabled communication between stations and moving trains by using the ambient static electricity of the existing telegraph lines. Challenged twice in court by Thomas Edison over the rights to this patent, Woods defeated Edison by proving there were no existing devices by which he could have relied on to make his device. 

Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads, an idea he modeled after a system developed by Charles van Depoele. Wood’s 1888 patent relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads, without exposing wires, through electrical contact rails. Once the train car had passed, the wires were no longer live and risk of injury was diminished. The invention was successfully tested in 1892 on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster in Coney Island. Patented in 1893, Woods sold the patent to General Electric in 1901.

In 1896, Granville Woods patented a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, which became known as the safety dimmer. This device was safe and efficient and saved theaters forty per cent of electricity use. Between 1902 and 1907, Woods patented twelve devices that made improvements on the country’s railway system. Among these were devices that improved motor and vehicle control, automatic air brakes, and safety apparatus.

The first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War, Granville Tailer Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at New York City’s Harlem Hospital on the 30th of January in 1910. His burial at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, New York was without headstone or ceremony. In 1975 with donations from cooperations that used Woods’s patents, a headstone was erected at his grave site. In 2006, Granville T. Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia.

Calendar: January 17

Year: Day to Day Men: January 17

A Sunny Day

The seventeenth of January in the year 1761 marks the birth date of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, 4th Baronet, who was a Scottish geologist and geophysicist. He was the first to use an analogue modeling synthesizer to investigate the formation of folds in the earth’s layers. Hall’s discoveries in this field were published in 1815.

Born at Dunglass Castle in East Lothian,  James Hall was the only son and heir of Sir John Hall, 3rd Baronet who had served on the Grand Jury for the 1748 Edinburgh trial of those involved in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. James Hall studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh during the 1780s. At Edinburgh, he studied under Professor of Medicine and Chemistry Joseph Black and Regius Professor of Natural History John Walker, one of the main scientific consultants of his day.

From attending Walker’s courses, Hall learned how to use the chemical compositions of minerals to determine the relative age of the earth’s layers. Walker also emphasized in his classes the importance of chemistry to the study of geology. After his studies, Hall travelled Europe to seek book dealers who dealt in works on mineralogy, geology and chemistry. His travels to France brought him into contact with nobleman and chemist Antoine-Laurant de Lavoisier who wrote the first extensive list of elements. Lavoisier was also instrumental in the development of the metric system as well as the reformation of chemical nomenclature through a set of rules for the generation of systematic names. 

Upon his return to his home in Scotland, Sir James Hall continued his studies in the fields of chemistry and geology. During the 1780s and 1790s, he was interested in geologist James Hutton’s ‘Theory of the Earth” which suggested that the strata of the planet was continually being worn or melted down, thus making the planet a giant system of circulating material. Hall traveled with Hutton and professor John Playfair in the spring of 1788 on a boat trip to Siccar Point on Scotland’s Berwickshire coast. At Siccar Point, they discovered a rock formation that became known as Hutton’s Unconformity. This geological phenomenon marked the location where rock formations, created at different times and by different forces, joined together. Other locations in Scotland were later identified by Hutton. 

Initially skeptical of the chemical viability of Hutton’s theory, Hall soon published several papers on the chemical composition of the strata. He experimented on granite to prove that it was possible for molten rock to form a continuous sequence of deposits, typically in parallel layers. By melting basalt in an iron furnace, Hall demonstrated its return to the original form when cooled; his melted limestone proved that, melted under pressure, limestone did not decompose. These findings were published by Hall in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s scientific journal “Transactions”. 

Sir John Hall traveled throughout Europe to examine the geological formations of Mount Etna and the Alps mountain range, both areas formed from the collision of the planet’s tectonic plates. He also studied the similarity of lava flows in Italy to geological sites in Scotland. Hall, in addition to his works in the field of science, was also the author of various works on architecture among which was his 1797 “Essay on the Origins and Principles of Gothic Architecture”. Sir John Hall, 4th Baronet, died at home in the central area of Edinburgh survived by a wife and six children. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in central Edinburgh. 

Calendar: January 9

Year: Day to Day Men: January 9

Betty Boop Coffee

On the ninth of January in 1839, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre presented a full description of his daguerreotype process to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences held by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, the man who proved the wave theory of light. 

The first permanent photograph from nature was made by French inventor Nicéphore Niépee in 1826 through his heliographic process; however, the quality of the image was poor and the process required an exposure time of eight hours. Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, the first practical process of photography, improved the quality of the image and reduced to exposure time to thirty minutes.

Born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, in November of 1787, Louis Daguerre apprenticed in theater design, architecture and panoramic painting under Pierre Prévost. He was originally a revenue officer and later a scene painter for opera sets. In 1822, Daguerre opened the Diorama, an exhibition venue in Paris which presented three-dimensional pictorial views that changed with various lighting effects. He later opened a second establishment in London’s Regent Park.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône in March of 1765, Nicéphore Niépee initially began experimenting in 1813 in the recently developed printing technique, lithography. Unskilled in drawing and unable to obtain a proper lithographic stone, he sought a way to make images automatically. Niépee made experiments and developed the heliographic process of using light and light-sensitive supports to produce images. He initially used a substrate of light-sensitive bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light, to obtain an image on glass. With the use of a camera in 1826, he was able to fix an image on a metal plate made of pewter. However, Niépee was unable to reduce the exposure time by either optical or chemical means.

In 1829, Nicéphore Niépee agreed to the repeated requests by Louis Daguerre for a partnership to perfect and exploit his heliography process. After four years of working without any advancement, Niépee died in July of 1833. Deguerre, building upon Niépee’s discoveries, eventually succeeded in greatly reducing the exposure time. He also discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then made permanent by a solution of common salt. 

For this discovery, Louis Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1839, he and the heir of Nicéphore Niépee were assigned annuities of six-thousand and four-thousand Francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process. 

Notes: Lithography was invented circa 1796 in Germany by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder. By chance, he discovered the ability to duplicate his scripts by writing then in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and them printing them with rolled-on ink. As the local limestone retained the crayon marks on its surface, multiple images, called lithographs meaning in Latin stone marks, could be printed in large quantities. It was not until 1820 that lithography became commercially popular.

Calendar: January 7

Year: Day to Day Men: January 7

Sending a Message

The seventh of January in 1927 marks the placement of the first official transatlantic telephone call. The call, transmitted by radio waves, was held between Walter S. Gifford, the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British General Post Office. 

The telephone call between Walter S. Gifford in New York City and Sir Evelyn P. Murray in London was a shared communication of prepared statements on the significance of the new technology with regards to facilitating business and fostering better understanding. The line was then opened for personal and business-related calls. By the day’s end, a news dispatch had been sent from Europe to  America and over six million dollars worth of business had been transacted. The Gifford-Murray call was recorded for its historical significance and resides in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Before the telephone, long distance communication was conducted through letters, early models of fax machines, and telegraphs. Over a period of several years, the telephone was developed by inventors and businessmen; however, the definitive inventor of the telephone is still a matter of controversy. In 1840, American electrical experimenter and professor Charles Grafton Page discovered a way to use electricity passing through a wire to make sound. During the 1850s, Italian inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that connected his Staten Island, New York, laboratory to his second-floor bedroom.

In 1871, Antonio Meucci submitted a patent caveat, the required legal document, for his telephonic device to the United States Patent Office; however, there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of voice sound in his granted patent request. In 1876,  Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission by vocal sound through undulatory electric current.  Elisha Gray, an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, also played an important part in the development of the telephone with his creation of the liquid transmitter, an important component of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent. 

On the morning 14th of February in 1876, Elisha Gray’s lawyer submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a signed and notarized patent caveat that described a telephone using a liquid transmitter. In the same morning, a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell’s application. The question of whose patent application had precedence became controversial. When proof of Bell’s invention of the liquid transmitter idea was required, Bell pointed to an earlier application which used mercury as a circuit breaker. This argument was accepted as proof even though mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. Bell’s amendment to his claim enabled him to acquire U. S. patent 174, 465 on the 7th of March in 1876 for the invention of the telephone.

 

Anak  Krakatau

Anak  Krakatau

Anak Krakatau has grown at an average rate of five inches (13 cm) per week since the 1950s. This equates to an average growth of 6.8 meters per year. The island is still active, with its most recent eruptive episode having begun in 1994. Quiet periods of a few days have alternated with almost continuous Strombolian eruptions since then.

Hot gases, rocks, and lava were released in an eruption in April 2008. Scientists monitoring the volcano have warned people to stay out of a 3 km zone around the island. Several videos of Krakatoa on YouTube show recent footage of eruptions and of the inside of the crater as seen from the rim of the volcano.

On 6 May 2009 the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia raised the eruption alert status of Anak Krakatau to Level III. A Level Three alert signifies an increasing tendency toward eruption, relatively high unrest, and magna close to the crater. A recent expedition to the volcano has revealed that a 100-meter (328-foot)-wide lava dome is growing in its crater. The dome has two active vents that eject incandescent gas.

Volcanic Crevasse

Photographer Unknown, Volcanic Crevasse at Grimsvotn, Iceland

Grímsvötn is a volcano in South-East Iceland. It is in the highlands of Iceland at the northwestern side of the Vatnajökull ice-cap.

Grímsvötn is a basaltic volcano which has the highest eruption frequency of all the volcanoes in Iceland and has a southwest-northeast-trending fissure system. The massive climate-impacting Lake fissure eruption of 1783–1784 was a part of the same fissure system. Grímsvötn was erupting at the same time as Laki during 1783, but continued to erupt until 1785. Because most of the volcano lies underneath Vatnajökull, most of its eruptions have been subglacial and the interaction of magma and meltwater from the ice causes phreatomagmaticexplosive activity.

Grimsvotn erupted again on 21 May 2011 with 12 kilometer high plumes accompanied by multiple earthquakes. This forced the cancelation of nine hundred flights in Iceland, the United Kingdom, Greenland, Germany, Ireland and Norway on the 22-25 May.

Frosted Sand Dunes of Mars

NASA, Frosted Sand Dunes: Mars

In this amazing photo taken by NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we see frosted sand dunes on Mars from above. The photo was taken on March 27, 2016 at 15:31 local Mars time.

“Sand dunes cover much of this terrain, which has large boulders lying on flat areas between the dunes. It is late winter in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and these dunes are just getting enough sunlight to start defrosting their seasonal cover of carbon dioxide. Spots form where pressurized carbon dioxide gas escapes to the surface.”- NASA