Category Archives: History

Planes, Trains and Automobiles … and Airships?

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Helium Hokum: Why Airships Will Never Be Part of Our Transportation Infrastructure

[A]irships got left behind. Why? They have an Achilles’ heel. No, it’s not the weather, hydrogen, or the materials of the day—and it’s not some conspiracy or a crewman with a bomb on the Hindenburg ruining it for everybody. Like a lot of things, the facts are simple and scientific, and thus boring—unless you’re intrigued by simple scientific facts. Either way it’s this: airships are inefficient.

The purpose of transportation is to get a thing from one place to another. The measure of any vehicle’s efficiency—be it by land or by sea or even by air—is how much it carries vs. how hard you have to push it and how fast it goes. At the end of the day, we all want to get it there fast, and we all want to get it there cheap.

Like a Frightened Turtle

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Skulls in the Stars: It’s not shrinkage — it’s relativity! (1889)

Einstein’s revelations were preceded by some twenty years of gradual progress, during which time researchers put forth tantalizing hypotheses that came closer and closer to the truth.

One such discovery was made in 1889 by George FitzGerald. To explain a seemingly incomprehensible experimental result, he suggested that objects in motion shrink along their direction of travel. In this post, we will discuss what is now known as the FitzGerald-Lorentz length contraction and explain how FitzGerald fell short of the astonishing ideas that would be conceived by Einstein.

No, He's Not the Guy Who Wrote those Fairy Tales

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The birth of electromagnetism (1820)

It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle. In the year 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed the twitch of said compass needle in the presence of an electric current, providing the first definite evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism that would set the tone for much of modern physics.

The story of Oersted’s experiment is the stuff of physics legend, but like most legends it is often misremembered and exaggerated. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating piece of work and a piece of scientific history worth recounting.

The Non-Physics of Rockets

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Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.

The development of rockets — driven by war and the invention of nuclear weapons, and the relationship the story has with recent economics and innovation.

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.

Hägar the not-so-Horrible Physicist

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Did Vikings navigate by polarized light?

The saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd’s answer, Olaf “grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun”2. In 1967, Thorkild Ramskou, a Danish archaeologist, suggested that this stone could have been a polarizing crystal such as Icelandic spar, a transparent form of calcite, which is common in Scandinavia2.

Overheard in the Lab of the Day

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A colleague was whistling the marching tune one hears in The Bridge in on the River Kwai, and after I asked him if we were suddenly in the British Army, I wondered what the name of the song was. Luckily, there’s a way to find such things out, called the internet (which is apparently a series of tubes.) Turns out it’s called The Colonel Bogey March, and the Wikipedia entry implies it has some interesting (not G-rated) lyrics, which it does.