Biographical encyclopedia
Download 17.33 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
|
511 [788] EDISON
EDISON [788] sand people who had come out of New York City to watch. Newspaper re porters from all the world came to cover the event and to marvel at one who was easily the greatest inventor since Archi medes [47] and very possibly of all time. In a way, this was the climax of Edison’s life, for nothing quite so dra matic ever happened again, although he worked on for more than half a century, and effectively, too. For instance, in order to make the electric light practical, Edison had to develop an electric gener ating system that would supply elec tricity as needed and in varying amounts, as lights were switched on and off. This required more ingenuity, if anything, than the electric light itself and was the greater feat, but by 1881 Edison had built such a generating station and within a year he was supplying about four hundred outlets divided among 85 customers. Edison might not have had the profundity of a Newton [231] or a Maxwell [692], but for sheer ingenuity he had no master. In the business of producing elec tricity, Edison came into conflict with men such as Tesla [867] and Wes tinghouse [785] and here the hard-driv ing Edison sometimes showed the less at tractive side of his nature. In 1889 Edison tackled the problem of taking a series of photographs in rapid succession and then projecting them on a screen one after the other to give the il lusion of motion. This too had been at tempted, one way or another, for many years, with varying success, and no one man can clearly be credited with the in vention of the motion picture. However, Edison made a crucial discovery. He used a strip of “film” of the sort in vented by Eastman [852] and took a series of photographs along its length. These could be flashed on the screen in rapid succession by means of perfora tions along the sides of the film through which sprocket wheels could be used to move the pictures before the flashing light at a carefully regulated speed. In 1903 his company produced The Great
story. Once he had done all this, Edison’s interest flagged and others went on to develop the device further. Edison had no patience with slow and analytical thought. His favorite method of working was to read everything and try everything in an all-devouring attack on every phase of a problem. He often conquered by sheer weight of effort. When eight thousand attempts to devise a new storage battery failed, he said, “Well, at least we know eight thousand things that don’t work.” “Genius,” he said, scorning those who spoke of insight, “is one percent inspira tion and ninety-nine percent perspi ration.” This worked for him, to be sure, but there are few human beings with Edison’s capacity for perspiration. He was not always successful, how ever. At the turn of the century, he lost all he had in an attempt to work out a new method of dealing with iron ore. But he just went on to succeed in new directions. Edison did record one purely scientific discovery. In 1883, in one of his experi ments looking toward improving the electric light, he sealed a metal wire into a light bulb near the hot filament. To his surprise, electricity flowed from the hot filament to the metal wire across the gap between them. Edison wrote it up in his notebooks, patented it in 1884, and de scribed it in the technical literature. It had no immediate utility for his pur poses, so he did not follow it up with his accustomed intensity. However, the Edison effect became very important indeed when the elec tronic structure of matter came to be un derstood in the next decade, thanks to the more scientific approach of men such as J. J. Thomson [869], Fleming [803] put the Edison effect to use and out of his work arose the great electronics in dustry, including, of course, radio and television. Although Edison was not, in the usual sense of the word, a scientist, he, more than anyone else, introduced the practi cal by-products of scientific advance to the public. He also helped foster the con fusion (particularly in the United States) between science and invention, a confu sion that has inhibited public support
[789] BELL
BELL [789] and understanding of basic science until the mid-twentieth century. In 1960 Edison was elected as a member of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [789] BELL, Alexander Graham Scottish-American inventor Born: Edinburgh, Scotland, March 3, 1847 Died: Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Sco tia, August 2, 1922 Bell was born into a dynasty interested in the problems of speech. Both father and grandfather had studied the me chanics of sound and Bell’s father had been a pioneer teacher of speech to the deaf.
Between 1868 and 1870 Alexander, who was largely family-trained and self- taught, worked along with his father in studying speech and in teaching deaf children in Edinburgh. Two brothers, however, died of tuberculosis and he himself was threatened. What was left of the family moved to Canada in August 1870 and Alexander’s health improved. The next year he went to the United States and in 1873 was appointed profes sor of vocal physiology at Boston Uni versity. He fell in love with one of his deaf pupils, which helped drive him on even more furiously in his studies. He married her in 1877. He became inter ested in the mechanical production of sound and labored to improve the tele graph, basing his work on the theories of Helmholtz [631], and received the strong encouragement of the aged Henry [503]. When Bell referred ruefully to his own lack of electrical know-how, Henry said, “Get it!” It seemed to Bell that if the sound wave vibrations could be turned into a fluctuating electric current, that current could be reconverted into sound waves identical with the original at the other end of the circuit. In this way, sound could be carried across wires at the speed of light. One day, having spilled battery acid on his pants while working with an in strument designed to carry sound, he au tomatically cried out to his assistant, “Watson, please come here. I want you.” Thomas Watson, at the other end of the circuit on another floor, heard the instru ment speak and ran downstairs, beside himself with joy. It was the first impor tant telephonic communication. On March 7, 1876, Bell patented the telephone. Others disputed Bell’s priority as absolute inventor, but Bell was cer tainly the first to commercialize the in strument successfully. In 1882 he be came a citizen of the United States. Edison [788] went on to devise a mouthpiece containing carbon powder, which transmitted electricity with greater or less efficiency as it was compressed or not compressed by the fluctuating air vibrations set up by sound. This created a current that fluctuated in perfect time to sound waves and greatly increased the ease with which the sounds could be made out. The device was so beautifully simple even without the improvement that it disappointed the great Maxwell [692], who expected something far more subtle of a device that could carry a voice. However, simple or not, the telephone was a feature of the Centennial Exposi tion held at Philadelphia in 1876 to cele brate the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was the great hit of the occasion, and the visiting Brazilian emperor, Pedro II, was greatly impressed, dropping the instrument to say, “It talks!” a fact that made head lines. The next to try was a British visi tor, no less a person than Kelvin [652], who was equally impressed. In almost no time the telephone was introduced onto the American scene. In 1877 Queen Vic toria herself acquired a telephone. Bell was famous and rich at thirty. Bell continued his inventive career, working out improvements on Edison’s phonograph, for instance. In 1881 he dramatically invented a metal-locating device to find the bullet in the body of President Garfield, who was slowly dying of an assassination attempt. The device was a workable one but was frustrated on this occasion because no one thought of removing the steel-springed mattress,
[790] WALLACH
LANGERHANS [791] the metal of which interfered with the search. Bell built a summer home in Nova Scotia, founded the American journal Science in 1883, and subsidized it gener ously in its first few years. He grew in terested in aeronautics and supported Langley [711] financially, experimented with air conditioning and even with ani mal breeding. He received many honors during his life and in 1915 when the first transcontinental telephone line opened, Bell (in the East) spoke once again to his old assistant Watson, who was now in the Far West. Once again he said, as he had forty years before, “Watson, please come here. I want you.” And the words spread, not from one room to an other, but from one coast to another. In 1950 Bell was elected to a niche in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [790] WALLACH, Otto (vahl'ahkh) German organic chemist
Kaliningrad, USSR), March 27, 1847
1931
In 1867 Wallach entered the Univer sity of Göttingen for his graduate work. There he obtained his Ph.D. in 1869, studying under Wohler [515], and Hof mann [604]. He went on to the Univer sity of Bonn in 1870, where he served as assistant to Kekule [680]. He stayed at Bonn for nineteen years, becoming a professor of chemistry in 1876. In 1879 he had to undertake instruction in phar macy, which was an untried field to him, but he threw himself into it with vigor. For one thing, he found that he now had to deal with natural products, which were important as pharmaceuticals, and his chemist’s instinct made him want to determine their molecular structure. Kekule advised him against this, point ing out they formed mixtures that were too complex to be separated. Wallach was not to be deterred so Kekule let him have, as a starter, some bottles of essen tial oils that had been standing on his shelves, unopened, for fifteen years. These essential oils contained a group of substances called terpenes, of which such examples as menthol and camphor are best known to the general public. (The realization of their importance has grown steadily since Wallach’s time, as it has turned out that vitamin A and re lated compounds, as well as the various steroids of which vitamin D and the sex hormones are examples, are related to the terpenes.) In 1884 Wallach began a line of research that was to last some twenty-five years. In that time he pains takingly separated one terpene from an other and established the structure of each. The feat was difficult, as Kekule had warned, but not impossible. Many of the terpenes have pleasant odors and Wallach’s work did much to develop the modem perfume industry. In 1889 Wallach received a profes sorial appointment at Gottingen, where he succeeded Viktor Meyer [796], and in 1910 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on terpenes. Throughout his life, he was interested in art and, to the end, maintained an im pressive art collection. [791] LANGERHANS, Paul German physician Born: Berlin, July 25, 1847 Died: Funchal, Madeira, July 20, 1888
Langerhans, the son of a physician, got his medical degree in 1869 from the University of Berlin where he studied under Virchow [632] among others. While still a student, he worked in Vir chow’s laboratory and it was there that he began to specialize in microanatomy, studying tissues under the microscope. For his doctoral dissertation in 1869 he prepared the first careful description of the microscopic structure of the pan creas. In the process he noted the nu merous groups of cells that differed from the cells in the body of the pancreas. These groups have since been called the islets of Langerhans. It was not till con siderably later that the function of the is lets in secreting insulin was discovered and it was Banting [1152] who first
[792] DE VRIES DE VRIES
showed how to prepare insulin from them. In 1874 Langerhans was forced to in terrupt his career because of tubercu losis. Eventually he retired to the island of Madeira in an attempt to find a cure. He practiced medicine there till his death. [792] DE VRIES, Hugo Marie (duh vrees) Dutch botanist Born: Haarlem, February 16, 1848
Died: Lunteren, May 21, 1935 De Vries, the son of a government official, studied botany under Julius Sachs [699], earned his M.D. in 1870, and in 1878 became a professor of bot any at the University of Amsterdam. In 1883 he studied the effect of salt solu tions of different concentrations on plant cells, work that was to inspire Van’t Hoff [829] to go on to do theoretical analyses of the properties of solutions. This work was to win the latter a Nobel Prize. De Vries devoted a great deal of thought to Darwin’s [554] theory of evo lution and saw that the great flaw in it was that there was no explanation for the manner in which individuals might vary; yet it was only on that unex plained manner of variation that the changes of evolution could in turn be ex plained. De Vries devised a theory of how different characteristics might vary independently of each other and recom bine in many different combinations. This, in fact, amounted to a rediscovery of Mendel’s [638] theories. In 1900 he had done enough work on plants to feel sure that the rules he had worked out were correct. Before publish ing, he went back over the literature to see what, if anything, existed on the sub ject. Imagine his amazement when he came across the papers of Mendel and found his own laws worked out in full detail a generation earlier. In the same year of 1900, Correns [938] in Germany and Tschermak [999] in Austria, both unknown to De Vries and to each other, had separately worked out the laws of inheritance. Each had then searched through the literature and had come across Mendel’s papers. It is one of the most glorious chapters in scientific history that not one of the three men made any effort to claim credit for a discovery that, intellectually at least, was independently their own and which would have meant great fame. Each man, with the ideal integrity of the true scientist, announced Mendel’s discovery and introduced his own work only as confirmation. The laws of inheri tance are therefore still known as Men- delian.
De Vries was able to go beyond Men del in one respect, thanks to an acciden tal discovery made in 1886. The Ameri can evening primrose had been intro duced to the Netherlands some time be fore, and De Vries, out on a walk, came across a colony of these plants growing in a waste meadow. It did not take the sharp eye of a botanist to see that some were widely different from others. He brought them back and bred them separately and together and found the same results that Mendel had found. But he also found that every once in a while, a new variety, differing markedly from the others, would grow and that this new variety would perpetuate itself in future generations. Evolution ceased to be an infinitely slow process that could be theorized about but not observed. Here it went on under De Vries’s very eyes. The forming of new varieties could be expected and experimentation with evolution could proceed. Bateson [913] was also moving in this direction. De Vries evolved a new doctrine of evolution by sudden jumps or mutations (from a Latin word meaning “to change”). Actually, this sort of thing had always been known to herdsmen and farmers, who had frequently seen the production of freaks, or “sports.” Some freak characteristics had even been put to use, as for instance the short-legged breed of sheep (a mutation) in 1791 that could not jump over fences and was therefore useful and was preserved. Fur thermore, several nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Huxley [659] and 515 [793] LILIENTHAL EOTVOS
Nageli [598] had suggested evolution by jumps, but without evidence. Unfortunately, herdsmen do not usu ally draw theoretical conclusions from their observations or tell scientists about them, nor do scientists involve them selves with the mechanics of herding to test their theories (at least, not often enough in the nineteenth century). So it was not until 1901 that theory and ob servation met in the person of De Vries. In any case, De Vries, by rediscover ing the Mendelian laws of inheritance and adding to them his own theory of mutation, plugged the hole in Darwinian theory and successfully completed its structure. The mutation theory also modified the theories of Weismann [704] by showing that the germ plasm could be altered after all, although the nature of the alterations remained to be worked out over the succeeding half century. [793] LILIENTHAL, Otto (lil'een-thal) German aeronautical engineer
1848
Died: near Rhinow, Germany, August 10, 1896 Like many another man of the time, Lilienthal dreamed of human flight. In his case, the dream began at the age of thirteen, but it was not until he had grown and had completed his service in the Franco-Prussian War that he could begin to try to turn his dream to reality. He concentrated on imitating the en gineering of birds but was satisfied to achieve a gliding flight without any at tempt to make the wings flap (a pitfall for many other inventors). In 1877 he built his first device, one with arched wings like a bird, and was able to show that these were superior to flat wings. (Modern airplane wings are still curved, though not exactly after the fashion of birds.) By 1891 Lilienthal launched himself on his first glide. Gliding became the great aeronautical sport of the 1890s as ballooning had been just a century ear lier, but none outdid Lilienthal in this re spect. He launched himself into the air successfully more than two thousand times. Then in 1896 he launched himself unsuccessfully once, while testing a new rudder design, and died of injuries sus tained in the crash. He might otherwise have lived an additional seven and a half years, to see the Wright brothers [961, 995], also gliding enthusiasts, demon strate that by mounting an engine on a glider it could be converted into an air plane. [794] EOTVOS, Roland, Baron von (oit'voish) Hungarian physicist Born: Budapest, July 27, 1848 Died: Budapest, April 8, 1919 Eotvos was the son of a renowned Hungarian statesman and writer. He studied at the University of Heidelberg where he obtained his Ph.D. summa cum
sorial appointment at the University of Budapest. His most important work dealt with gravity. He worked with the torsion bal ance of the kind used by Cavendish [307] to measure the mass of the earth, but increased its sensitivity to unprece dented heights. This he used for geo physical purposes. From tiny variations in gravitational pull from place to place on earth’s surface, he could make deduc tions as to the nature of the structure be neath the surface. Secondly and far more important, Eotvos used it to determine the rate of gravitational acceleration of falling bod ies (a problem that had originally exer cised Galileo [166]) and did so, again, with unprecedented precision. In the pro cess, he showed that gravitational mass and inertial mass (which have no obvi ous connection) are identical to less than five parts per billion. This very close identity encouraged Einstein [1064] to assume an actual identity and develop from it his general theory of relativity. Eotvos helped found the Hungarian Mathematical and Physical Society and served as its first president. He was an ardent mountain climber in addition and he climbed a number of European peaks that had not been climbed before.
Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|