Archives February 2014

“I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that's okay— the bat had to get Ozzy shots.” Ozzy Osbourne, rock vocalist Since antiquity, rabies had been feared as a death sentence. In 1884 Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) injected material from rabid dogs into rabbits, removing their spinal cords after they had died of the disease. When the cords were suspended over a vapor of potassium hydroxide, Pasteur found the more the cords dried, the fewer infectious agents survived. He made a series of graduated vaccines, the strongest comprising spinal cord dried for just one day, and the weakest, cord dried for fourteen days. The vaccine was tested in forty-two dogs, twenty-three of whom received fourteen injections (starting with the weakest vaccine, and ending with the strongest), while nineteen received no treatment. At the end of the experiment, all the dogs were exposed to rabies; none of the more...

At the same time that the Linotype machine was being developed, Tolbert Lanston (1844-1914), a government clerk in the United States, was inventing another composition system that he called Monotype. Lanston's initial patent was awarded in 1885, but he was not successful until he founded the Lanston Monotype Machine Company in Washington in 1887. In Lanston's system, letters, spaces, and other characters were selected mechanically from instructions contained on a paper tape into which patterns of holes, each representing a different character or space, had been punched using a keyboard. Although typesetting using Monotype was not as quick as Linotype, where complete lines of text were cast, Monotype text could be corrected more easily, spacing could be more finely controlled, and its versatility made complex setting possible. Lanston used cold metal strips into which letters were punched to produce raised reverse type for printing, but realized that much finer definition more...

“... we [must] diversify our energy sources and reduce our dependency on foreign oil:" Mary Bono Mack, U.S. politician It is thanks to Russian Vladimir Shukhov (1853-1939) that we can meet the fuel demand for modern engines. In 1891 he designed a refinery to convert crude oil into more useful things like gasoline and kerosene. Crude oil is a naturally occurring fluid that consists of a mix of hydrocarbons of various molecular lengths. Crude oil straight from the ground does not burn well, although its smaller molecules, which burn more easily, can be extracted by using fractional distillation. However, a large portion always remains as larger molecules. To make these long-chain molecules burn more easily, they can be broken into shorter chains by a process called thermal cracking. Shukhov patented a method of heating and pressurizing the oil to the extent that it would start to breakup into smaller molecules. more...

While the need to wipe your nose is as old as the need to sneeze, it took a surprisingly long time to come up with a solution that disposed of nasal mucus politely and hygienically. Although a seemingly simple solution, the key features of facial paper tissues are that they are cheap, soft, disposable, and absorbent, especially in comparison to other similar types of paper products. Even toilet paper is not as effective, being designed to break down in water. In fact when the Kimberly-Clark Corporation first developed the material that would later make them household names, it was to use as bandages in World War I. Cellucotton, as it was called, was made from processed wood pulp and was five times as absorbent and half as expensive as cotton. As a result of army nurses using cellucotton as disposable sanitary pads, Kimberly-Clark introduced the first disposable feminine hygiene product more...

We often think of thoughts as instantaneous, but in truth it stands to reason that they are limited by the speed of certain chemical reactions and electrical impulses in our brain. Given that these physical activities accompany thinking, it also stands to reason that if one looks hard enough, one should be able to measure the electrical activity, despite the seemingly fleeting nature of brain activity The recording of these impulses—or electroencephalography—matured at something of a snail's pace until the work of Hans Berger (1873-1941). In 1875, English physician Richard Caton figured out that he could measure brain activity in animals with a galvanometer. A Polish physician, Adolph Beck, also working with animals, advanced the topic further in the 1890s, going so far as to discover the location of some sensory impulses and noting a change in activity that took place with loud noises or bright light. The link between more...

"Ransom Olds used [the assembly line] to jump his production from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 In 1902." Curtis Redgap, automobile enthusiast Just as motor cars were appearing on the market, Ransom Eli Olds (1864-1950) had an idea that was to revolutionize industry—the assembly line. After building his first gasoline-powered car in 1896, Olds set out to mass-produce successors to his beloved "Oldsmobile." Spreading himself thinly. Olds tried to produce a large range of models. Then, in March 1901, his company burned to the ground. The fire destroyed all but one of his models, the "Curved Dash" Oldsmobile. Olds focused on producing this model exclusively and made a phoenixlike comeback. He soon had more orders than he could actually meet. Recalling how he had watched workers at a musket rifle factory assemble guns in assigned stations, Olds came up with an ingenious scheme for a car assembly line. He more...

By the end of the 1980s, powerful lobbies within the U.S. music industry had all but killed off Digital Audiotape (DAT) as a popular recording medium and replacement for the aged and low-fidelity Philips Compact Cassette. This led the way for the Sony Corporation of Japan to develop its own proprietary digital recording format. Introduced in 1992, the MiniDisc resembles a small computer floppy disk. It is a magneto-optical, disk based data storage medium able to contain up to eighty minutes of digitized audio. The disk is placed in a suitable recorder and a laser heats one side, which makes the material susceptible to a magnetic field; a magnetic head on the other side of the disk alters the polarity of the heated area, recording the digital data—a series of ones and zeros—onto the disk. To play back the audio, the laser senses the polarization of the reflected light and more...

"Our greatest glory is not in never  falling, but in getting up every time we do" Confucius, Chinese thinker and educator The Wright brothers' historic flight of 1903 had made aeronautics a worldwide phenomenon. Air shows became increasingly popular spectacles throughout the world. A Russian artillery school graduate, Gleb Kotelnikov (1872-1944), was attending such a show in 1910 when he witnessed the death of a pilot. He was so affected by the accident that he vowed to create a safety device to help prevent such deaths. The parachute is not a particularly new idea—there are many accounts of rudimentary parachutes being used throughout the ancient world. Early prototypes of a Kotelnikov parachute contained within the pilot's helmet failed, yet Kotelnikov was unperturbed and eventually devised a parachute within a knapsack that could be worn within the confines of a plane's cockpit. Despite the dangers to their military pilots, many governments more...