Category Archives: History

That's not a Gun. This is a Gun.

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Modern MechaniX: Secrets of the Mystery Gun that Shelled Paris (Jun, 1930)

A scan/reprint of an article describing the “Paris Gun” used during WWI, firing from 75 miles away. (The text appears to have been scanned/OCR-ed, from some of the typos in it)

Now that the rest of the story can be told, consider the guns themselves: There was a barrel 120 feet in length, approximately twice as long as the biggest guns built to that time—so long, in fact, that the end had to be supported in the air to keep it from bending down and being shot off by its own shell. In fact, that very thing happened to the first of the guns tested at the German proving ground, for the barrel bent a full inch under its own weight.

Next they fired a shell 75 to 80 miles or more, over a total trajectory ranging from 90 to nearly 100 miles.

To do that the shell was shot 24 miles above the earth, higher than any man-made thing, save possibly a small sounding balloon, had ever penetrated. At that extreme height the shell traveled through what was almost a vacuum, at a temperature of far more than 100 degrees below zero.The shell, traveling at an average speed of 30 miles a minute—or sixty times as fast as the usual legal rate for automobiles — took three minutes to complete its aerial flight of 90 miles. It remained away from the earth so long, in fact, that the old world revolved on in space while the projectile was away, so the gunners had to aim a half mile east of the target in order that the target might be there when the shell arrived to hit it.

Surely You're Doodling, Mr. Feynman

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Landmarks: Powerful Pictures

Every popular explanation of particle physics is liberally illustrated with cartoon-like pictures of straight and wiggly lines representing electrons, photons, and quarks, interacting with one another. These so-called Feynman diagrams were introduced by Richard Feynman in the Physical Review in 1949, and they quickly became an essential tool for particle physicists. Early on, Feynman struggled to explain the meaning of the diagrams to his fellow physicists. But using them, he came up with easy answers to difficult problems in quantum mechanics and ultimately won a share of the Nobel Prize.

Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago

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Kottke has set up a way to watch the Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago

For a more authentic feel,

This is just like real TV…if you miss the appointed time, there’s no rewind or anything…the video is playing “live”. I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser.

Yes, that’s right. In 1969 there was no Tivo, or even VHS/beta for the masses. And there may be technical difficulties.

On the Case

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Cocktail Party Physics: NEW VOICES: georgie boy

Dr. Cheadle has never heard of vitamins. Their discovery is decades in the future. But he understands that diet is the issue here, although many colleagues disagree. Dr. Cheadle argues in his 1878 paper against the various other theories about scurvy, including that it is caused by humid and/or cold climates, excess salt in the diet, lack of exercise, and ptomaine poisoning. “There is, however, an invariable factor, without the presence of which all other casual and irregular factors are powerless to set up the disease. This essential factor, it has been proved over and over again, is the absence of certain elements in food. If the body is deprived of these elements, [scurvy] is produced. What these elements are has not yet been absolutely settled with scientific precision, but we know positively that they exist in fresh vegetables, in lime-juice, in milk, and in less considerable degree, perhaps, in some other fresh animal foods.”

This Just In: We Went to the Moon

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LRO Sees Apollo Landing Sites

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions’ lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon’s surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules’ locations evident.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks.

That’s gonna shut the conspiracy nutjobs up. Oh, wait. No, it probably won’t.

Found at a Yard Sale?

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Someone asks, What is it?

I surmise this was found at Freddy Roentgen’s yard sale, selling his grandfather’s dusty lab equipment. It’s an x-ray tube — boil off electrons, accelerate them and have them slam into the copper target, where they emit bremsstrahlung and also ionize the target, which will give some x-rays during the recombination if it involves inner-shell electrons. It’s unshielded, so it’s probably pretty old and/or taken out of a shielded device. I’d imagine a newer device to be more compact and with more recognizable connectors.

Brought to You via Gliese 581

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ApolloPlus40 – Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission

Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened — 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.

(Gliese 581 being a system, with a planet, about 20 light-years away, which would account for the 40-year delay)

Healthy Graphing Technique

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An interesting graph of life expectancy vs per-capita income, for a bunch of different countries around the world. What is so trés cool is that you can animate it to run it from 1800 to the present. France does a meteoric rise very early on with no change in income, war participants take hits in life expectancy, and basically the whole world does the Time Warp (it’s just a jump to the left) in 1929.

CSI Utah

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Mysterious disappearance of explorer Everett Ruess solved after 75 years

The mysterious disappearance of Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old artist, writer and footloose explorer who wandered the Southwest in the early 1930s on a burro and who has become a folk hero to many, has been solved with the help of University of Colorado at Boulder researchers and the National Geographic Society. The short, compelling life of Ruess, who went missing in 1934 after leaving the town of Escalante, Utah, has been the subject of much speculation.