THE WORLD'S FIRST DYNAMO

Faraday's electromagnetic discovery is a breakthrough in understanding electricity.

pictorial visualation@google image

From Faraday's notebook, on the "Rotation of current experiment,"  @google image

           A year earlier he had been earning the staggering sum of  #1,000 a year as a scientific consultant. Now Michel Faraday was devoting himself exclusively to sum. But the cut in pay was worth it. He had long been convinced that magnetism and electricity were closely related. Already he knew that an electric current could produce magnetism, and on August 24, 1831, during an epoch-making period of nine days of brilliant experimentation of the Royal Society in London, he proved that magnetism could produce electricity. Using very simple equipment ( a magnet, a copper coil, and a basic ammeter), he demonstrated that moving a wire through a magnetic field induces an electric current whose voltage is proportional to the speed of the movement. Here was, in effect of the world's first dynamo. The principle that he has discovered underlies the fundamental operation of most modern-day electrical machines. Faraday was not only a brilliant experimental scientist but also one of the most practical.
            Born in 1791, the son of a poor Yorkshire blacksmith, amazingly, Faraday had little formal education. He was an apprentice to bookbinder before attracting the attention of Sir Humphrey Davy and becoming a dedicated chemist and physicist, and a superb lecturer. He discovered Benzene, invented the system of oxidation numbers, devised an early form of the Bunsen burner, developed the laws of electrolysis, and helped along the birth of nanoscience, as well as giving us the "Faraday cage," the "Faraday constant," and the "Faraday effect."
             More than any other man, Michael Faraday made possible the generation of electricity. It took another generation before his discoveries found full practical expression, but humankind is in his debt.


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^1001 days that shaped the world.@Imulse
^Rotation of current experiment.
  

EARTH SEEN FROM THE MOON

The Earthrise photograph is taken eight months before the first landing on the moon.

       The Apollo8 mission carried astronauts Frank Borman, William Anders, and Jim Lovell into lunar orbit. It was the first occasion on which humans had traveled beyond the gravitational field of Earth to that of another body. Their task was to photograph the lunar surface, but as they rolled the spacecraft and came around the far side of the moon, they saw distant earth rising above the vast, inert surface of the moon. Both Borman, the mission commander, and Anders caught the moment on the film. Borman captured Earth in monochrome just as emerged over the lunar horizon; Anders with it risen a few degrees into the black sky, in color, a swirl of blue and white. The picture showed, for the first time, Earth from distant space, a small planet partly shrouded in darkness: a fragile, fluid, integrated world, fascinating and attractive, in contrast to the monolithic, gray, and inert moon, that Lovell described as "like plaster of Paris or grayish beach sand." he added, "the vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and makes you realize just what you have here on Earth."
        In fact, because the moon keeps the same face continually turned on Earth, Earth does not "rise" or "set" from the surface, but remains at the same point in the sky permanently.
         The Earthrise photograph was taken up by the developing environmental movement and proved a powerful graphics image for the notion, proposed by James Lovelock, of "Gaia," Earth as a self-correcting, almost intelligent organism.
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BANGLADESH DECLARES INDEPENDENCE

East Pakistan secedes, provoking a military response from its western counterpart.

          When East Pakistan's political leaders issued a declaration of  independence from Pakistan, the move came as great surprise. since its creation in 947, Pakistan was an unpolitical entity, with two territories separated by more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of Indian land. Apart from the Islamic religion, the two parts had little in common. West Pakistan politically dominated the two-winged state. the more populous East received much less than half of government spending, was underrepresented in the military, face discrimination in the award of government contracts, and had its political leadership marginalized. The inept government response to the 1970 cyclone was for many the final straw. In the elections, the separatist East Pakistan Awami League won a landslide victory and had an overall majority in the National Assembly. The military simply refused to accept the results. The declaration of independence was an expected reply.
           The government in West Pakistan, of course, was not prepared to leave such a challenge unanswered. It had already begun to lunch a brutal campaign of repression. A primary victim was the Hindu minority.The hurriedly raised Mukti Bahini (Liberation force) fought back using guerrilla warfare. The issue would eventually be decided by India, who, incensed by the attacks on Hindus and by the military buildup in the East, intervened in December. They rapidly advanced and took Dacca (Dhaka) within days. The new nation of Bangladesh had become a reality.

THE UNIVERSE IS MUCH LARGER THAN WE THOUGHT

Edwin Hubble announces the discovery of  other galaxies, revealing that the universe is much larger than we thought.

          Until the 1920s, it was widely assumed that the galaxy of stars of which our sun is one was the only galaxy in existence. Astronomers, however, had already begun to suspect that there might be other structures farther out in space. One such Astronomer was a young American from Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble. He focused on nebulae - clouds of interstellar dust and gas-- and from 1919 studied them at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. He discovered that some object thought to be nebulae were actually large-scale aggregates of stars, or galaxies like our own. In 1923, for example, he found thirty-six stars inside the Andromeda nebulae, which he subsequently calculated to be 900,000 light years away from us and an enormous distance beyond our own galaxy's edge. The astronomers published hi research result on the first day of 1925.
           Hubble classified the galaxies into three main types- spiral, elliptical, and irregular. He not only demonstrated that the universe is immensely bigger than previously thought, but went want to show that it is expanding, meaning that the other galaxies are moving away from us. In 1929, he found that the speed at which the galaxies recede increases with their distance from us (Huble's Law) and established a ratio (Hubbles Constant) between the speed and the distance. Subsequent investigations suggest that ratio has not always remained the same, but over time has decelerated and accelerated.
             Hubble continued working at Mount Wilson virtually until his death in 1953. The Hubble space Telescope was named in his honor. 

THE MASTERY OF THE SEAS

The HMS Dreadnought gives Britain the lead in the race for global naval supremacy

          As Britain new warship HMS Dreadnought slid into the water at Portsmouth dockyard in 1906, the nature of the world's navies changed. All existing Battleships were now obsolete. Its design was so radical that it gives it name to a whole new style of ship. Inspired by the thinking of Admiral Fisher, once commander - in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet and now First Sea Lord, The professional head of the Royal Navy,  the design brought together all the recent developments in propulsion, armor, and gunnery to create a fast, powerful ship capable of destroying  any other ship. All future British warships would follow this model.
           Other maritime nations - including the U.S,Japan,France,Italy and Russia - were obliged to follow this design if they were to project maritime power. But the major repercussions were felt in the new German Empire, where  Kaiser Wilhelm II, supported by his navy minister, Admiral Tirpitz, had a policy of noval rivalry with Britain in the hope of challenging her predominance in the world's oceans. Both nations invested in more such ships with ever more sophisticated designs. The imperial German ship program was major worry for the British. In World War I, the two fleets would eventually face each other at the battle of Jutland, although although the outcome proved inconclusive.
             The Dreadnought concept dominated the world's navies until the new technologies of submarines, aircraft and carriers. By the end of  the World War II, the Dreadnought was obsolete.

COMMUNICATION BY SPACE SATELLITE (FIRST TELEVISION BY SATELLITE)

The lunch of Telstar 1 enables television transmission to be sent back to earth by satellite and makes the world seem a little smaller.

           Communication by space satellite, which has today become the basis of a thriving commercial industry and a vital factor in military operations, was first suggested by the writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1945. One of the first to carry to idea forward in the 1950s was a U.S engineer working for Bell  Telephones, John R. Pierce, who played a leading part in the work that led to the lunch of the Echo Communications satellite in 1960 and Talstar 1 in 1962.
            Echo reflected microwave radio signals back to Earth from its aluminum surface, but Telstar was a more sophisticated device, which for the first time allowed television transmissions to be winged back to Earth. It was launched by American Telephone and Telegraph in cahoots with Bell Telephones and the British and French post offices. a gigantic antenna, built in Maine, near andover, was locked on to the satellite, and subsequent televisions picture was relayed across the Atlantic to be received at stations in England and French.
             The first picture from Telstar showed the flag at the Andover station, but it was presently transmitting a baseball game between the Chicago cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies, and President Kennedy used it to give a live transatlantic press conference. Telstar 1 went out in of action in February  1963, possibly affected by radiation from the testing of nuclear weapons. It was replaced by Telstar 2. Development continued, and in 1964 the syncom 3 satellite relayed pictures of the Tokyo Olympic Games across the pacific. 

THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

Niepce takes the first photograph after searching for years for an image fixative

Photography, one of the great inventions of the early nineteenth century, was created by a Frenchman, sixty-two-years old Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He his brother were inventors, developing a boat driving by an internal-combustion engine, The pyrelophone, in 1798. From 1816, Niepce tried to ''fix'' an image produce by a camera obscura, which projects a scene onto a surface using the principle of a pinhole camera, sometimes with mirrors and lenses. He experimented with silver halide-coated paper and produced an image of window view, but the negative image venished when exposed in daylight.
      He sought a way of producing a positive image, and in 1822 succeeded in making a contact print of an engraving onto a sheet of paper through the action of light on a glass plat coated with Judia bitumen. Two years later he made the first permanent images from the camera obscura, although these required an exposure time of many hours. He experimented with the material of photographic plate and in 1827 visited England to demonstrate  his pewter technique to the Royal Society at kew. He did not win a prize because he would not reveal the chemicals used in this process. Around the same time, he produced a successful image-- a view from his window exposed over eight hours -- etched onto a tin plate, now regarded as the world's first true photograph. From 1829, he worked with Louis Daguerre; Niepce died in july 1833, leaving Daguerre to create the daguerreotype in 1839.

THE DOOR TO NUCLEAR ENERGY AND ATOMIC WEAPONS

NUCLEAR FiSSION

    Otto Hahn opens the door to nuclear energy and atomic weapons

Otto Hahn "the founder of the atomic age," was a German scientist who discovered nuclear fission in 1983 at the mounting tensions that would lead to World War II escalated. Fortunately, as an anti-Nazi, his genius was not used by Hitler.
       Hahn was born in 1879, graduated from Marburg University in 1904, and worked at University College,London, discovering the isotop radiothorium (thorium 228). Transferring to McGill University, Montreal, in 1905, he worked under Sir Ernest Rutherford before becoming a professor at Berlin University in 1906. There he discovered ionium the "mother substance" of radium, married and fathered a son. He also began his thirty-year collaboration with Lise Meitner, an Austrian chemist. After being conscripted to develop poison gases in World War I, Hahn wrote the book Applied Radiochemistry, which become the "bible' of U.S Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb.
        Hahn's most important discovery was made after he bombarded uranium with neutrons, leading to the splitting of the uranium nucleus into atomic nuclei of medium  weight - nuclear fission. In 1934 Hahn resigned from Berlin University in protest at the persecution of Lise Meitner and other Jewish colleagues. He procured Meitner a passport, enabling her to emigrate. Hahn was entered at the end of the War near Cambridge, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945, Hahn spent the time before his death in 1968 warning against the atomic arms race and the dangers of radioactive pollution.