tingilinde

thomas midgely jr

A great piece on an inventor with two inventions that proved incredibly destructive.

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Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

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It makes you think of Clair Patterson, the age of the Earth and lead.

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Patterson knew that if he compared the lead levels in shallow and deep water, he could calculate how oceanic lead has changed over time. Recently deposited by rain storms and rivers, water churning near the sea’s surface is younger than water that has sunk to the seafloor. The same strategy applied to sediment. Sand resting atop the seafloor is relatively new, but sediment buried 40 feet below is older. In geology circles, it’s called the Law of Superposition: the deeper the strata, the older.

Patterson collected samples from all depths and returned to his ultraclean lab. “Then a very bad thing happened,” he recalled. He found that the samples of young water contained about 20 times more lead.

This was not normal.

Mining the literature for an explanation, Patterson stumbled on data about leaded gasoline. The numbers correlated. “It could easily be accounted for by the amount of lead that was put into gasoline and burned and put in the atmosphere,” he later explained.

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ford on international women's day

From a few days back.  Go to their link after watching the video.    

 

a tip of the hat to Sarah

 

fifty years of alto

The machine that set in motion much of what was to come.

 

 

the birth of a word

John Herschel coined the word photography on February 28, 1839 in a letter to Henry Fox Talbot.  Talbot was a painter turned inventor who had an early photographic process. The problem was the images faded too quickly.  He enlisted John Herschel (Herschel's father and aunt were rather famous too) for help with good results. Then Talbot caught wind of work by Louis Degurre and wanted to claim his (and Herschel's) place.  He wrote to Herschel proposing a name that could be used in a scientific paper.  Herschel understood the power of a name. 

 

In a letter of February 28, 1839, Herschel objected to the term “photogeny” to describe Talbot’s new image-making process, noting that it “recalls Van Mons’s exploded theories of thermogen & photogen.” This associative defect, Herschel argued, is amplified by the word’s poetic deficiencies: “It also lends itself to no inflexions & is not analogous with Litho & Chalcography.” Instead, Herschel proposed “photography.” On March 12, he read before the Royal Society a paper titled “Note on the Art of Photography or the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Representation” — the first public utterance of the word photography. 

        - Figuring by Mary Popova

 

 

alex lewyt

A vacuum cleaner innovator and animal lover with a classic prediction.

 

why lego won

a mechanical flight computer

Ken Sheriff looks at the Bendix Central Air Data Computer.

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Determining the airspeed and altitude of a fighter plane is harder than you'd expect. At slower speeds, pressure measurements can give the altitude, air speed, and other "air data". But as planes approach the speed of sound, complicated equations are needed to accurately compute these values. The Bendix Central Air Data Computer (CADC) solved this problem for military planes such as the F-101 and the F-111 fighters, and the B-58 bomber.1 This electromechanical marvel was crammed full of 1955 technology: gears, cams, synchros, and magnetic amplifiers. In this blog post I look inside the CADC, describe the calculations it performed, and explain how it performed these calculations mechanically.

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tesla and history

A good piece that squares with my own readings.  A tip of the hat to Bart

shift happens

If you're really into keyboards .. a Kickstarter for a book project.