Michael Faraday: His Life and the Liquefaction of Gases
Michael Faraday was born on September 22nd, 1791, at Newington in Surrey, England to a Sandemanian family (Crowther, 7). The Sandemanians were an almost unknown off-shoot of the Presbyterian Church. Faraday was baptized in the Church but only became an official member in 1821. His religion was an important part of his life, though it featured little in his work (Crowther, 25-26 and Day, 28). From an early age Faraday showed a passion for facts and distrust for authority, two qualities that would later on characterize his scientific studies (Crowther, 9). He always had to see something occur for himself before putting any stock in it. He repeated experiments he saw in scientific books and journals to convince himself of their veracity. His first professional foray into the field of chemistry was in 1813 as an employee of the famous Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution in London (Crowther, 12). It was Faraday's enthusiasm for science which helped him attain the position for, till that time, he had been well on the way to a career as a bookseller. He eagerly went to work on his passion. His first published paper, "An Analysis of Naturally Occurring Caustic Lime" appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science in 1816 (Crowther, 19).
Faraday's work on the liquefaction of gases came at a time when the Royal Institution was experiencing lean times and researchers had been forced to turn their attention towards the commercial aspects of science in order to survive. In between working on steel for surgical instruments and improving the manufacture of glass for optics, Faraday continued his research. After fruitlessly heating gases in an attempt to liquefy them, Faraday chan...
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Nikola Tesla is a man that many individuals associate with brilliance. Moreover, Tesla is a name that ignites impulses within an individual’s brain which illuminate, via bio-circuitry, the thought association of Tesla and brilliance, similar to the force we term as electricity. Brilliance however, shouldn’t be the only descriptive word to come to mind when thinking of one of the greatest engineers and inventors to live. Innovation and determination should be undoubtedly included in the list of descriptive words of Mr. Nikola Tesla. For without the innovative mind of Tesla, midcentury inventions as well as current technological advances would be nonexistent, or worse, credited to Thomas Edison.
Ewald Georg von Kleist is a German scientist who created the capacitor in November of 1745. Regrettably, Kleist did not have the proper paper work to claim in the records that the design of the capacitor was his idea. Many months later, a Dutch professor named Pieter van Musschenbroek created the Leyden jar, the world’s first capacitor (on record). It was a simple jar that was half filled with water and metal above it. A metal wire was connected to it and that wire released charges. Benjamin Franklin created his own version of the Leyden jar, the flat capacitor. This was the same experiment for the more part, but it had a flat piece of glass inside of the jar. Michael Faraday was the first scientist to apply this concept to transport electric power over a large distance. Faraday created the unit of measurement for a capacitor, called Farad.
Wireless is a methodical account of the early development of wireless telegraphy and the inventors who made it possible. Sungook Hong examines several early significant inventions, including Hertzian waves and optics, the galvanometer, transatlantic signaling, Marconi's secret-box, Fleming's air-blast key and double transformation system, Lodge's syntonic transmitter and receiver, the Edison effect, the thermionic valve, and the audion and continuous wave. Wireless fills the gap created by Hugh Aitken, who described at length the early development of wireless communication, but who did not attempt "to probe the substance and context of scientific and engineering practice in the early years of wireless" (p. x). Sungook Hong seeks to fill this gap by offering an exhaustive analysis of the theoretical and experimental engineering and scientific practices of the early days of wireless; by examining the borderland between science and technology; depicting the transformation of scientific effects into technological artifacts; and showing how the race for scientific and engineering accomplishment fuels the politic of the corporate institution. While the author succeeds in fulfilling these goals, the thesis, it seems, is to affirm Guglielmo Marconi's place in history as the father of wireless telegraphy.
Kilbane, Dorris, “Martin Cooper: But, Is It Useful?” Electronic Design, Oct. 20 2003, Web, 22 April 2014.
Stoehr, Taylor. Hawthorne's Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth Century Life and Letters. Hamden: Archon Books, 1978.
Mottelay, F. P., (2013, November 20) Bibliographical History of Electricity and Magnetism, p. 114. retrieved from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(astronomy)
This paper is a discussion of the role played by the ideals of the Enlightenment in the invention and assessment of artifacts like the electric battery. The first electric battery was built in 1799 by Alessandro Volta, who was both a natural philosopher and an artisan-like inventor of intriguing machines. I will show that the story of Volta and the battery contains three plots, each characterized by its own pace and logic. One is the story of natural philosophy, a second is the story of artifacts like the battery, and the third is the story of the loose, long-term values used to assess achievement and reward within and outside expert communities. An analysis of the three plots reveals that late eighteenth-century natural philosophers, despite their frequent celebration of 'useful knowledge,' were not fully prepared to accept the philosophical dignity of artifacts stemming from laboratory practice. Their hesitation was the consequence of a hierarchy of ranks and ascribed competence that was well established within the expert community. In order to make artifacts stemming from laboratory practice fully acceptable within the domain of natural philosophy, some important changes had yet to occur. Still, the case overwhelmingly shows that artifacts rightly belong to the long and varied list of items that make up the legacy of the Enlightenment.
Thin solid films were probably first obtained in 1838 by electrolysis. They were systematically prepared by Faraday in 1857.
Ferinad Puretz, Max. 'True Science', Review of Peter Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist. N.p.: n.p., 1980. Print.
If Thomas Edison taught the world anything it was to believe in the impossible. One of his most popular sayings dealt with this impossibility and the fact that most men give up when something looks impossible. However, innovators should remember that if Edison had stopped when something looked impossible, some of the greatest inventions would never have been created.
Edison’s career, the fulfillment of the American dream of rags-to-riches through hard work and intelligence, made him a folk hero to his countrymen. In temperament he was an uninhibited egotist, at once a tyrant to his employees and their most entertaining companion, so that there was never a dull moment with him. He was charismatic and courted publicity, but he had difficulty socializing and neglected his family. His shafts at the expense of the "long-haired" fraternity of theorists sometimes led formally trained scientists to depreciate him as anti-intellectual; yet he employed as his aides, at various times a number of eminent mathematical physicists, such as Nicole Tesla and A.E. Kennelly. The contradictory nature of his forceful personality, as well as such eccentricities as his ability to catnap anywhere, contributed to his legendary status. By the time he was in his middle 30s Edison was said to be the best-known American in the world. When he died he was the venerated and mourned as the man who, more than any other, had laid the basis for the technological and social revolution of the modern electrical world.
Dyson, Ae, and Morris Beja, eds. To the Lighthouse. London: Macmillan, 1970. pp 19, 198.
Of all the scientists to emerge from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there is one whose name is known by almost all living people. While most of these do not understand this mans work, everyone knows that his impact on the world is astonishing.
Faraday visualized a magnetic field as composed of many lines of induction, along which a small magnetic compass would point. The aggregate of the lines intersecting a given area is called the magnetic flux. Faraday attributed the electrical effects to a changing magnetic flux.
The research that established Faraday as the foremost experimental scientist of his day was, however, in the fields of electricity and magnetism. In 1821 he plotted the magnetic field around a conductor carrying an electric current; the existence of the magnetic field had first been observed by the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted in 1819.