The blog is mainly a general knowledge page for all age groups who are interested in improving their knowledge.
I have tried to make the explanations as simple as I can.
I have made use of tht for gathering the facts.
In 1800, Alessandro Volta of Italy built the voltaic pile and discovered the first practical method of generating electricity. Count Volta also made discoveries in electrostatics, meteorology and pneumatics. His most famous invention, however, is the first battery.
Alessandro Volta - Background
Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy in 1745. In 1774, he was appointed as professor of physics at the Royal School in Como. While at the Royal School, Alessandro Volta designed his first invention the electrophorus in 1774, a device that produced static electricity. For years at Como, he studied and experimented with atmospheric electricity by igniting static sparks. In 1779, Alessandro Volta was appointed professor of physics at the University of Pavia and it was while there that he invented his most famous invention, the voltaic pile.
Alessandro Volta - Voltaic Pile
Constructed alternating discs of zinc and copper, with pieces of cardboard soaked in brine between the metals, the voltaic pile produced electrical current. The metallic conducting arc was used to carry the electricity over a greater distance. Alessandro Volta's voltaic pile was the first battery that produced a reliable, steady current of electricity.
Alessandro Volta - Luigi Galvani
One contemporary of Alessandro Volta was Luigi Galvani, in fact, it was Volta's disagreement with Galvani's theory of galvanic responses (animal tissue contained a form of electricity) that led Volta to build the voltaic pile to prove that electricity did not come from the animal tissue but was generated by the contact of different metals, brass and iron, in a moist environment. Ironically, both scientists were right.
Named In Honor of Alessandro Volta
Volt - The unit of electromotive force, or difference of potential, which will cause a current of one ampere to flow through a resistance of one ohm. Named for Italian physicist Alessandro Volta.
Photovoltaic - Photovoltaic are systems that convert light energy into electricity. The term "photo" is a stem from the Greek "phos," which means "light." "Volt" is named for Alessandro Volta, a pioneer in the study of electricity.
Industrial Revolutions During the 18th century dramatic changes took place in history. People started to shift from an agrarian culture to a more sophisticated machine culture.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein, the father of modern physics, is not only a great scientific figure of the 20th century but is one of the biggest theorists and intellectuals of all time. Einstein was born on the 14th of March 1879 in the state Ulm of the German empire, but within a year of his birth his family moved to Munich. As a child he had problems in speech and learning but as he grew he proved to be a mastermind at mathematics and physics.
He was a theoretical scientist and his work consists of theories and ideas rather then practical work. He is well known for his theory of relativity and for explaining the perihelion advance of Mercury.
His work further includes: Explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, the photon theory , wave-particle duality theory, the quantum theory of atomic motion in solids, the zero-point energy concept, the semi classical version of the Schrödinger equation, and the famous photoelectric law. He also won a Nobel Prize in 1921 for photoelectric effect law
Robert Goddard was a professor at Worcester Clark University in Massachusetts, USA. Goddard was fascinated by stories of Man going to the Moon. However, he realised that any vehicle used to go there could not use solid fuel as it could not generate sufficient power for a rocket to leave the atmosphere and defeat gravity. The propulsion system would generate explosive power at the end of a rocket to propel it. Goddard concluded that any fuel would have to be liquid. Goddard also faced the problem that the power generated by a rocket would have to be greater than the weight of the rocket itself - and it would need some power to spare. Goddard believed that if hydrogen could be piped into a combustion chamber sufficiently quickly and burnt with liquid oxygen, it would produce the desired force to propel a rocket to the Moon. Goddard experimented with solid fuel rockets to refine his techniques. During World War Onehe also invented the bazooka which the US Army took up shortly before the end of the war in 1918. In 1920, Goddard wrote a report about his rocket engine tests and sent it to the Smithsonian Institute. It was called "A method of reaching extreme altitude". The New York Times got hold of a copy and severely criticised Goddard and his work. It claimed that Goddard lacked the knowledge given out to pupils in school on basic physics. Rather than dishearten Goddard, the criticism spurred him into 20 years of intensive research. In 1926, Goddard launched his first prototype rocket, called Nell, at his aunt’s farm. Nell stood 10 feet tall. When its oxygen-gasoline fuel mix was ignited, nothing happened….at first. Then the ignition caught and Nell was launched at 60 mph and climbed to a modest 14 metres before falling back into a cabbage patch. Goddard’s work attracted the attention of Charles Lindburgh - the first man to fly across the Atlantic. He introduced Goddard to Harvey Guggenheim - a millionaire financier who provided Goddard with sufficient funds to continue his research. Goddard moved to New Mexico and worked under the strictest of secrecy. Was this because of the potential military use of his invention ? Probably not. One newspaper referred to the success of Nell in 1926 as "Moon rocket misses target by 238,799 miles". Why attract the attention of those who belittled your work ?
During the 1930’s, few American scientists wanted to talk to Goddard but he met with German engineers. The American military took no notice of his work. When World War Two broke out, Goddard was so worried by the attention the Germans had given to his work, that he contacted the American military and showed them film of his Nell’s rocket. The military was not interested. In 1944, the first V2’s hit London.
After the war, Goddard had the opportunity to examine a V2. He found that a lot of the work on the V2 copied his own work. The Nazis had taken his papers and read his 200 patent applications.
Goddard, far left, working on one of his engines
Goddard died of throat cancer in 1945. His work was taken up by American and, ironically, German scientists working for the Americans. In 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the Moon after being taken out of the Earth’s atmosphere by Apollo 11. In 1969, the New York Times wrote a public apology to Goddard - the man who gave to science a liquid-fuel rocket.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977 was divided, one half jointly to Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain" and the other half to Rosalyn Yalow "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones"
When his meticulously researched paper sent for publication was returned by the Philosophical Magazine from London with not-so-flattering remarks, Satyendranath Bose did not lose heart. He was so sure of his finding. This was in 1924.
Born on January 1, 1894, Bose studied in Calcutta and was brilliant in his studies. His classmate was the other great (also forgotten) Meghnad Saha, and the legendary Jagdish Chandra Bose was his teacher.
At 22, Bose was appointed lecturer in Calcutta University, along with Saha. In 1921, he joined the then newly created Dacca University as Reader in Physics. He had a couple of papers published by the same journal earlier, co-authored with Saha. It was here while teaching that he wrote this paper for deriving the Planck's Law. His paper was titled ‘Planck's Law and Light Quantum Hypothesis.'
Golden period
The early decades of 1900 were a golden period in the growth of science. It was teeming with great scientists in the western world competing with one another creditably. This was the period when classical sciences such as physics, chemistry, astronomy and medicine were outpacing one another, despite little and inefficient communication. The Moore's law of today would pale into insignificance if we apply it to that period.
In 1900, Max Planck explained in the theory of black body radiation that light is emitted in discrete amounts (quanta) rather than as a continuous wave. But his derivation of this formula was not satisfactory to other scientists, in fact even to himself. However, his formula held true to everyone's surprise.
Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize-winning paper explained the photoelectric effect based on Planck's quanta as photons in 1905. (Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for this paper, not for his papers on Relativity!) But many of his colleagues were not fully convinced of his yet-to-be-developed photon theory. The world was waiting for a new theory on fundamental particles to fill the gaps.
Under these circumstances, Bose re-sent the paper to Albert Einstein in June 1924, with a fervent appeal for his perusal and opinion. “Though a complete stranger to you, I do not feel any hesitation in making such a request,” he wrote. (He was being modest; he had earlier translated Einstein's Relativity papers into English with Einstein's permission). Little could he have foreseen the impact this was going to have.
Einstein immediately recognised the significance of this paper. This paper was going to substantiate and revolutionise his theory of photoelectric effect. Einstein himself translated Bose's paper into German and sent it to Zeitschrift für Physik with his endorsement for publication. With his demigod status, Einstein's words carried much weight. It was promptly published, and immediately Bose shot into prominence.
Seminal phenomenon
Einstein personally invited Bose to work with him, and their efforts culminated in the Bose-Einstein statistics, an important and seminal phenomenon in quantum physics.
His work was wholeheartedly supported and appreciated by the leading lights in quantum theory, such as Louise de Broglie, Erwin Schroedinger, Paul Dirac and Heisenburg.
In honour of Bose' (and every Indian), Paul Dirac coined the word ‘Boson' for those particles which obey Bose's statistics. In atomic theory, only Fermions (named after Enrico Fermi) and Bosons were named after physicists. What a wonderful distinction conferred on our great scientist.
He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 — and forgotten afterwards.
This is not intended to be a scientific article, but a grim reminder of our apathy to our eminent scientists who had toiled with great shortcomings, yet came out with flying colours. J.C. Bose, P.C. Ray, M. Saha, C.V. Raman and countless other yesteryear scientists, who had achieved so much, were acclaimed internationally, yet ignored and were in oblivion at home.
Is it not a shame that Bose is known more to westerners (even now) than to Indians? How many of us are aware of his communication to Einstein and the subsequent events. It is perplexing why this little incident of Bose sending his paper to Einstein has not found a place in our schoolbooks!
We overlook scientists and their achievements. Yet we don't fail to adulate and elevate Tendulkars, A.R. Rahmans, Kamal Hasans and Khans for their achievements on the screen/ in entertainment. No complaints. Just why don't we extend this courtesy to our real achievers?
We, Indians, are blessed with many festivals to celebrate. Quite a few are new years! Apart from January 1, we have many new years, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, etc. Of these, we chose unanimously to celebrate the astronomically insignificant date of January 1 as our own, and bash up our streets with unrestrained celebration with booze, dance and gaiety.
Why cannot January 1, birthday of Satyendranath Bose, be celebrated also as a National Scientist Day? Our National Science Day falls on February 28 in remembrance of the Raman Effect.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1978 was awarded jointly to Werner Arber, Daniel Nathans and Hamilton O. Smith "for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics".
Pharmacology has a particularly rich history of serendipity. The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming is the best known example. Similarly, the concept that certain chemicals can be used to cure cancer developed after soldiers exposed to mustard gas in World War II developed reduced numbers of white cells in the blood, leading to the use of the chemically related nitrogen mustard as an anti-leukemic drug. The hallucinogenic properties of LSD unfolded when Albert Hoffmann ingested some accidentally while working to develop a drug to control hemorrhage after childbirth and migraine. Serendipity even has a major role in Arthur Hailey's novel Strong medicine in the discovery of an aphrodisiac. In an example of life imitating art, the ability of the new anti-impotence drug sildenafil (Viagra) was discovered accidentally during a search for a cardiovascular vasodilator. Examples of serendipity also exist in surgery. Microvascular surgery originated when had to join small blood vessels in a dog during an experiment. Realizing that this required the help of a microscope, he proceeded to use one — but also recognized its potential for surgical practice. Another example of serendipity is the surgical glove, developed by Julius H. Jacobson IIWilliam Halsted to prevent his operation-room nurse (whom he subsequently married) from developing dermatitis due to the mercuric chloride used for asepsis. Halsted asked the Goodyear Rubber Company to fashion thin rubber gloves for her. That post-operative infections decreased following the use of gloves was a later but much more useful offshoot of this invention.
Accidental Discoveries Accidents in medicine: The idea sends chills down your spine as you conjure up thoughts of misdiagnoses, mistakenly prescribed drugs, and wrongly amputated limbs. Yet while accidents in the examining room or on the operating table can be regrettable, even tragic, those that occur in the laboratory can sometimes lead to spectacular advances, life-saving treatments, and Nobel Prizes.
A seemingly insignificant finding by one researcher leads to a breakthrough discovery by another; a physician methodically pursuing the answer to a medical conundrum over many years suddenly has a "Eureka" moment; a scientist who chooses to study a contaminant in his culture rather than tossing it out stumbles upon something entirely new. Here we examine three of medical history's most fortuitous couplings of great minds and great luck.
A laborer scrapes the bark from a cinchona tree. The bark is then sundried and pulverized to make the drug quinine.
Quinine
The story behind the chance discovery of the anti-malarial drug quinine may be more legend than fact, but it is nevertheless a story worthy of note. The account that has gained the most currency credits a South American Indian with being the first to find a medical application for quinine. According to legend, the man unwittingly ingested quinine while suffering a malarial fever in a jungle high in the Andes. Needing desperately to quench his thirst, he drank his fill from a small, bitter-tasting pool of water. Nearby stood one or more varieties of cinchona, which grows from Colombia to Bolivia on humid slopes above 5,000 feet. The bark of the cinchona, which the indigenous people knew as quina-quina, was thought to be poisonous. But when this man's fever miraculously abated, he brought news of the medicinal tree back to his tribe, which began to use its bark to treat malaria.
Since the first officially noted use of quinine to fight malaria occurred in a community of Jesuit missionaries in Lima, Peru in 1630, historians have surmised that Indian tribes taught the missionaries how to extract the chemical quinine from cinchona bark. In any case, the Jesuits' use of quinine as a malaria medication was the first documented use of a chemical compound to successfully treat an infectious disease. To this day, quinine-based anti-malarials are widely used as effective treatments against the growth and reproduction of malarial parasites in humans.
A depiction of Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps, a boy of eight, on May 14, 1796.
Smallpox vaccination
In 1796, Edward Jenner, a British scientist and surgeon, had a brainstorm that ultimately led to the development of the first vaccine. A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge.
With this in mind, Jenner took samples from the open cowpox sores on the hands of a young dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with pus he extracted from Nelmes' sores. (Experimenting on a child would be anathema today, but this was the 18th century.) The boy developed a slight fever and a few lesions but remained for the most part unscathed. A few months later, Jenner gave the boy another injection, this one containing smallpox. James failed to develop the disease, and the idea behind the modern vaccine was born.
Though doctors and scientists would not begin to understand the biological basis of immunity for at least 50 years after Jenner's first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide.
Physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923), discoverer of the X-ray.
X-Rays
X-rays have become an important tool for medical diagnoses, but their discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had little to do with medical experimentation. Röntgen was studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs. One earlier scientist had found that cathode rays can penetrate thin pieces of metal, while another showed that these rays could light up a fluorescent screen placed an inch or two away from a thin aluminum "window" in the glass tube.
Röntgen wanted to determine if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. While performing this experiment, Röntgen noticed that a glow appeared in his darkened laboratory several feet away from his cardboard-covered glass tube. At first he thought a tear in the paper sheathing was allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the cathode-ray tube to escape. But he soon realized he had happened upon something entirely different. Rays of light were passing right through the thick paper and appearing on a fluorescent screen over a yard away. Röntgen found that this new ray, which had many characteristics different from the cathode ray he had been studying, could penetrate solids and even record the image of a human skeleton on a photographic negative. In 1901, the first year of the Nobel Prize, Röntgen won for his accidental discovery of what he called the "X-ray," which physicians worldwide soon adopted as a standard medical tool.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1979 was awarded jointly to Allan M. Cormack and Godfrey N. Hounsfield "for the development of computer assisted tomography"
Benjamin Franklin was probably the most significant "founding father" of the United States of America who never served as its President. But he was much more than a statesman: he was a man of letters, a publisher, a philosopher, a scientist, and the first major American inventor.
Franklin was born in Boston in 1706. At age 12, he was apprenticed to his older brother James, a printer; but Franklin resented being ordered about, and so five years later he virtually ran away from home. He moved to Philadelphia, then London, then back to Philadelphia, where he established his own printing office (1728). Like his contemporary inventor Benjamin Banneker, Franklin used his polymathic knowledge to publish an almanac ("Poor Richard: An Almanack" - 1732-58). In 1748, Franklin retired from printing, in order to devote himself fully to various aspects of biology and physics that had captivated him for some time. His most famous experiment, of course, was flying a kite with a key attached to its string, proving that lightning carries an electrical charge (1752). Franklin had by then already invented the lightning rod, which he primarily intended for use atop ships, not houses. After he reached 40 years old, Franklin needed to wear glasses for reading as well as for everyday nearsightedness. In order to save himself the trouble of constantly switching between them, he cut the lenses in half horizontally, and joined the tops of his everyday lenses to the bottoms of his reading glasses, thereby inventing the world's first bifocal glasses. Franklin also conceived the mid-room furnace, the "Franklin Stove." In those days rooms could only be heated with a fire in a fireplace, which by definition was set into a wall. Franklin knew that, since heat radiates from a fire in all directions, a fireplace was inefficient. So he built a cast-iron furnace that could be placed in the middle of a room. The heat it generated spread out in all directions, and was also absorbed by the furnace's iron walls, so that the stove provided warmth even after the fire went out.
However, Franklin's design was flawed, in that his furnace vented the smoke from its base: because the furnace lacked a chimney to "draw" fresh air up through the central chamber, the fire would soon go out. It took David R. Rittenhouse, another hero of early Philadelphia, to improve Franklin's design by adding an L-shaped exhaust pipe that drew air through the furnace and vented its smoke up and along the ceiling, then into an intramural chimney and out of the house. Franklin's other inventions include an odometer and first known medical catheter. In addition, he first conceived a number of institutions, including the American Philosophical Society (1728), first American Fire Department (1736), and what became the University of Pennsylvania (1742). He was Philadelphia's first Postmaster General (1736), and of course played a major role in the formation of the United States of America. One of the last roles he played before his death at age 84 in 1790 was President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.
Benjamin Franklin was a true philosopher in the earliest sense of the word: interested in all aspects of the natural world, including mankind's place in it, he learned through his own experimentation and his conversation with those who shared his interests; and he showed little interest in patenting or profiting from the things he invented and discovered. Scientifically speaking, he may be the best role model that 21st-century American inventors could find.
Benjamin Franklin was probably the most significant "founding father" of the United States of America who never served as its President. But he was much more than a statesman: he was a man of letters, a publisher, a philosopher, a scientist, and the first major American inventor.