People That Are Jerks

Isaac Newton: I was surprised to learn that he was kind of a self-centered egotist. Really the only thing he had going for him was his astonishing genius.

Humphrey Davy: He made some important discoveries, which saved many lives, but he was very concerned about his own reputation. For being mean to Michael Faraday, I classify Davy a jerk.

John Hunter: This guy stole the body of a giant Irishman from the reinforced casket he’d built specifically to avoid being put on display in Hunter’s museum. What’s even more outrageous is that the body is still on display in Hunter’s museum. Hunter was also just kind of a creepy dude in general.

Samuel Morse: Wait, really, Morse? Yep! Turns out Samuel Morse didn’t know much of anything about electricity, but he was happy to pretend he did to please potential investors. He was one of Cyrus Field’s telegraph “experts” who raised £350,000 for a project doomed to failure.

Elisha Perkins: He’s less well known than Mesmer, but he too rode on Galvani’s coattails, trying to pitch his quack cure on the basis of electromagnetism in the body. Perkins sold pointy metal “tractors” that were supposed to cure disease just by touching the body and drawing out (or putting in?) electric energy. He ruined it for everyone for 30 years.

Richard Owen: Let’s face it, nobody liked this guy. John is welcome to support him in the comments.

People That Are Awesome

Charles Kingsley: He was a devout Christian, outspoken minister, and staunch supporter of Darwin. He firmly believed that humans should study the natural world to better appreciate God’s works. He was also a sharp-witted novelist, who wrote a delightful satire of the evolution debate. For merging good science with good religion, and being a fun guy at the same time, Charles Kingsley is awesome!

William Herschel: He was trained as a musician, but he managed to build the world’s best telescopes in a little room of his house using dung. He then discovered Uranus. How cool is that?

Michael Faraday: A stark contrast to Newton and Davy, Faraday was a humble, devout, self-made man who worked his way up from a bookbinder’s apprentice to the leading scientist of a global empire. He was one of the founders of my own discipline of electrical engineering. He was a great lecturer who cared deeply about education and public engagement in science. He was also a phenomenal experimentalist, though he left mathematical theory to others, like Thomson.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin: Is there anything Kelvin didn’t do? When he got through with revolutionizing thermodynamics, he swooped into the telegraph debates, gave a mathematical foundation to Faraday’s observations, and invented almost every electrical measurement instrument that would be used for the rest of the century. He seemed to dabble in every part of science, from the age of the earth to the mariners’ compass. He defeated his enemies by sheer force of brilliance, and was gracious in victory. He also managed to get rich from his scientific work. When I get home, I want to learn more about Kelvin, and possibly hang his portrait on my wall.

Oliver Heaviside: Perhaps the most underappreciated Victorian scientist. Heaviside was a terrible communicator, and most of his contemporaries didn’t understand a word he said. But what he was saying was brilliant. Heaviside finally solved the telegraph’s theoretic problems with his telegraphers’ equations. He invented the operator method for differential equations, much to the outrage of conservative mathematicians. And he reduced Maxwell’s large, complicated theory to the elegant set of four partial differential equations we know today.

Magnus Hirschfeld: One of the first gay rights activists, back before anyone was talking about gay rights. This sexologist was a brave and noble pioneer!

Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Besides having an awesome name, an awesome hat, and an impressive smoking habit, Brunel was the model of heroic engineering. He built things bigger, stronger, and faster than anyone had built them before. He lost a lot of people money in the process, but he always kept going, pushing the limits of what everyone thought was possible. Even though he didn’t do much with electricity, Brunel makes my list of engineering role models.

… and finally…

Our class. You all have been amazing these past two months. This was the best summer I’ve ever had, and I’m going to miss everyone so much! Now I know that some Harvard folks aren’t half bad. Best of luck to you all in the future!

Submarine cables, unlike landlines, are surrounded by water, which makes them act as giant capacitors. They form a low pass filter, smearing and distorting the telegraph signal. The Victorian electricians called it “retardation of signals”. Faraday described the effect in his 1854 paper “On Electric Induction – Associated cases of Current and Static Effects.” He correctly observed that the slow charging and discharging in submarine cables was caused by charge building up on the outer surface of the wire and the inner surface of the water, forming a capacitor. Then the history gets tricky. According to several of my secondary sources, Faraday said that a thicker cable will have a greater retardation effect. I couldn’t find that in any of his writings, but it does seem to fit in with what he thought; and the original source for this historical claim is Charles Bright, who was in no hurry to defend Whitehouse. It would be a great topic for further research, but as far as I can tell, Faraday agreed with Whitehouse.

Faraday’s (alleged) prediction makes sense at first – a bigger wire would indeed hold more charge. But Faraday wasn’t so good at math. An intuitive, simplified explanation: If you scale up a cylindrical capacitor, keeping all ratios the same, the surface area of the wire increases in the same proportion as the width of the dielectric barrier, so the capacitance (which is proportional to area divided by separation) doesn’t change. Thomson solved the problem more rigorously by calculating the capacitance (“electro-statical capacity”) per unit length of a cylindrical cable. His formula was correct, though we use different symbols and scalars today:

I is the “specific inductive capacity”, a constant based on the material, like the modern dielectric constant. This formula says that the capacitance depends on the ratio of the inner and outer radius. So changing the width of the cable – and keeping the insulation in proportion – has negligible effect on the capacitance. What does change is the resistance, which varies inversely as the square of the radius. Almost all engineers knew that.

Thomson’s big breakthrough was finding a formula for the retardation effect. As a modern engineer might intuitively expect, it involves an RC time constant; that is, the rise time is proportional to the product of the wire’s resistance and capacitance. But a telegraph has distributed resistance and capacitance, and they won’t know about Thévenin equivalence for another few years, so Thomson couldn’t just solve a first order circuit and be done with it. Instead, the thermodynamics expert took a heat diffusion equation and adapted it for circuits. He used the charge (“quantity”) passing through a differential length as a function of time to produce the differential equation:

where k is the resistance per unit length of the wire, c is the capacitance per unit length, and v is of course the potential. This is a classic diffusion equation, one I spent weeks studying in my entry-level differential equations course last semester. Thomson didn’t have the tools we have today (the other big player in transmission theory, Oliver Heaviside, would develop those tools later in the century), so he used Fourier analysis to solve it. Fourier mathematics was relatively new at the time, but it’s widely used today, especially by electrical engineers doing signal and system analysis. I’ve taken two courses devoted almost entirely to it! He found that, under certain assumptions, the cable signal decays with a time constant:

This is all to say that the retardation effect, as measured by the time constant of the signals, varies:

• Directly as k, the resistance per unit length of the copper wire. But k itself varies:
• Inversely as R², where R is the radius of the wire.
• Directly as c, but c is a function of materials and of geometry. They could improve it by making thicker gutta-percha.
• Directly as l², which is the law of squares itself.

Therefore, of the parameters that telegraph engineers can conveniently change:

To maintain the same time constant, therefore, the telegraph cable’s width would need to be increased in proportion to its length. That is Thomson’s law of squares. Thomson’s math was as correct as it was beautiful. He didn’t have experimental data to corroborate his claims, though, so no one was convinced until many years later.

Dr. Bruce’s Apparatus Medical Electricity Presentation

It’s hosted on prezi, a cool nonlinear presentation platform.

Male anti-masturbation device, late 19th century. From the Wellcome collection.

I thought of doing a research project on this device. Unfortunately, it’s on loan to Japan at the moment. And as it turns out, these belts weren’t really used that much by the average Victorian teenager. Nevertheless, the Victorian reformers did consider “onanism” a serious problem. Many believed that the practice led to illness, and even to the degeneration of the species. This belief has its origins in part in ancient humoral theory. Semen was believed to be the most refined of bodily fluids, and any loss of it would be detrimental to health. The image below, published in London in 1845, shows the results of self-pollution.

Male displaying the effects of onanism, 1845. From the Wellcome collection.

The social purity movement was also active in America. Two Americans doctors advocated a strictly regulated diet as the best way to avoid unchaste urges. Those doctors were John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham, namesakes of the cereal giant and the cracker, respectively. Graham explained the virtues of plain foods in his 1838 book, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity.

All kinds of stimulating and heating substances, high-seasoned food, rich dishes, the free use of flesh, and even the excess of aliment, all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs, and augment their influence on the functions of organic life, and on the intellectual and moral faculties.

Graham emphasized that the digestive and reproductive systems are closely linked. This whole-body approach to medicine was common in early Victorian medical thought. The theory of self-pollution causing general illness also fits in perfectly with the whole-body model, which emphasizes generalized ailments with generalized treatments. By the end of the Victorian period, new understandings in anatomy and germ theory would give rise to specific medicine, focused on individual organs and tissues. Eventually, medicine no longer advocated a bland diet to promote chastity, but the crackers and cereals live on.

1880s double-deck horse tram at the Transport Museum

Of course, the Tube wasn’t the first thing they tried. Last week I visited the London Transport Museum, which traces public transportation from the early nineteenth century to today. In 1829, Londoners could ride around in the new omnibuses, the horse-drawn precursors to today’s bus network. By the late nineteenth century, there were even horse-drawn double deck buses and track-based trams. The horses generated one million tons of dung each year.

Victorian engineers tried several schemes for train-based transport within the city. Traditional railways were banned in central London, so they had to build their railways either high above or underneath street level. In 1936, the London & Greenwich railway ran along elevated viaducts – and was quickly shut down due to the terrible noise. The atmospheric railway, a scheme to propel cars in vacuum tubes, was foiled by rats chewing on the seals.

1922 Metropolitan Line locomotive

The eventual winner was Charles Pearson, whose tireless lobbying led to the creation of the world’s first underground line, the Metropolitan, which opened in 1863, just a few months after his death. The line was built with the “cut-and-cover” method, which required workers to dig up existing streets and properties to build the tunnel, then bury it again. All subsequent lines took advantage of Brunel’s tunneling shield system. The District Line, which opened in 1868, ran in Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s monumental Thames embankment, along with the new sewer line. The early trains were steam powered, and filled the tunnel with toxic fumes that made Tube travel nearly unbearable. By the turn of the century, the railways had transitioned to clean electric trains.

Early Metropolitan railway map

The Tube is a classic story of Victorian engineering. A rapidly growing modern city gave rise to new problems to be solved. Optimistic Londoners eagerly attacked the challenge with cutting-edge technology, failing several times and spending colossal sums of money before building a massive, beautiful, revolutionary system. Today the London Underground still runs in Pearson and Bazalgette’s tunnels, and is a model for efficient public transit worldwide.

The Tube has always been known for its clear signage.

We arrived in Bristol on the Great Western, Brunel’s own rail line. When he first built it, the railway used a larger seven foot rail gauge, which supported larger, faster, and more comfortable cars. Unfortunately, we experienced the railway on the slower, shakier, but more economical narrow gauge used by all modern trains. When we arrived in Bristol, a ferry took us up the river to see Brunel’s great steamship, the SS Great Britain. When it was launched in 1843, the propeller-driven iron ship was the largest ever built. We got to explore the interior of the ship, including the engine room and living quarters (even in first class the beds were tiny – and I thought my dorm bed was cramped!). Most important, I bought a Brunel-style stovepipe hat.

After a break for ice cream, we climbed up to see the Clifton Suspension Bridge, another Brunel creation. The bridge’s 700-foot span, between two colossal towers, was a brilliant triumph of engineering. The bridge and gorge are stunningly beautiful at sunset. We crossed the bridge twice to take in the view, and of course take pictures.

At the end of the day, we went to dinner at The Clifton Sausage, where I learned that my mother and Melissa had plotted an elaborate surprise party. It was a fantastic end to a great birthday!

]]> http://ryanlondon.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/a-brunel-birthday/feed/ 1 ryanmcorey IMG_5604 IMG_5606 IMG_5622 IMG_5697 http://ryanlondon.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/a-fair-chance-for-girls/ http://ryanlondon.wordpress.com/2010/07/31/a-fair-chance-for-girls/#comments Sat, 31 Jul 2010 13:44:06 +0000 ryanmcorey http://ryanlondon.wordpress.com/?p=116 Continue reading →]]> In class on Wednesday, we discussed the Victorian conception of nervousness; that is, a condition of malaise caused by weakness of the nerves. In the days before psychology, most Victorian doctors attributed mental problems to physiological ones. Women were believed to be particularly susceptible to nervousness, since their delicate reproductive systems tax their energy. In the discussion, I mentioned an American writer who discussed the co-education of women in relation to this perceived weakness. The writer was Edward Clarke, and the book was Sex in Education, or, a fair chance for girls (1873).

I find this document fascinating because it’s hard to determine whether it’s admirably progressive or revoltingly sexist – of course, it’s meaningless to apply such modern ideas to a historical text. Clarke argues that women are equal to men, and deserve to receive a full education. But there’s a catch: since girls’ bodies are so different from boys’ bodies, they have different strengths and weaknesses, and different educational needs.

The principle or condition peculiar to the female sex is the management of the catamenial function, which, from the age of fourteen to nineteen, includes the building of the reproductive apparatus. …. This lends to her development and to all her work a rhythmical or periodical order, which must be recognized and obeyed.

He argues that in their teenage years, girls must be careful to attend to their reproductive development. The proper development of those bodily systems takes a great deal of energy which boys would spend on physical and mental growth. Girls, therefore, should not be subjected to as rigorous an educational program as boys. In later life, women can excel at work in textile factories, since their bodies are already developed and healthy, but

The female student, on the contrary, has got these tasks before her, and must perform them while getting her education; for the period of female sexual development coincides with the educational period. The same five years of life must be given to both tasks. After the function is normally established, and the apparatus made, woman can labor mentally or physically, or both, with very much greater persistence and intensity, than during the age of development.

The identical education of women would lead to “sterilizing influences” and ultimately to the deterioration of the human race. He recommends that girls spend fewer hours studying – no more than four or five a day, including assigned work in the evenings. He also emphasizes the importance of recess, and advocates a policy where girls and women are given a few days of vacation once per month.

Humorous quotes aside, this text shows that late nineteenth century thinkers were paying close attention to the needs of women. They wanted girls to be educated, and women to work, but they had to make sure that women wouldn’t suffer as a result. Doctors were concerned about the psychological toll the modern world was taking on everyone, but especially on women.

William Rosen on Daily Show July 26 2010

The other photos above are from Arthur’s Seat, a large hill near Edinburgh. It’s not hard to see why this region was the birthplace of geology. The majestic mountains and cliffs would make anyone wonder what they’re made of and how they got there. Our guide explained the different ways that Edinburgh’s rock formations came to be: some were dug out by icebergs, some were layers of sediment flipped on their sides, and some came from a volcano. It was these rocks that led James Hutton to his revolutionary ideas about how the earth evolves over time. The rich geological history only adds to the stunning beauty of the region.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, several British researchers worked on the magnetic deviation issue. There were two approaches to the problem: one could either take a reading and use arithmetic to calculate the true heading, or install compensating hardware to correct the problem. Either way, the correction was difficult: the magnetic deviation depended on the geographical location of the ship, its orientation in the earth’s magnetic field, the shape of the ship and everything on it, and even the age of the iron.

Astronomer Royal George Airy devised his own relatively simple method for adjusting the compass with small magnets placed around the compass. The system didn’t work very well, especially in some parts of the world, and was blamed for several high-profile navigational disasters, including that of the Great Britain. A solution came from the gifted mathematician Archibald Smith, who worked out detailed formulas for magnetic deviation. Here is one of his Royal Society papers from 1861, co-authored with Frederick Evans, the compass guru of the Navy. The mathematics is quite complex, but it worked. Years later, William Thomson (Baron Kelvin) used Smith’s results to design his own very successful compass.

The marine compass uses several sets of magnets of magnets to solve the problem: permanent magnets to offset the ship’s permanent field, rotating spherical magnets that correct for latitude (nicknamed “Kelvin’s balls”), and a vertical Flinders bar. Today, ships can bypass the magnetic compass problem by using a special gyroscope which uses the earth’s rotation to point to true north.

For a thorough summary of the technical details of compass deviation, see Magnetic Deviation: Comprehension, Compensation and Computation.

Other source: Barber, G.W. “History and magnetics of compass adjusting”. IEEE Transactions on Magnetics 26, no. 6 (1988): 2883.