Breakthroughs in Science:

Break-

Breakthroughs in Science Isaac Illustrated by

Asimov Karoly and Szanto

Isaac Asimov here describes the astonishing achievements of that small group of scientists who have broken through to new worlds for mankind. Working for the most part alone in their laboratories, they were the first to venture into uncharted and awe-inspiring areas of thought. But the results of their leaps into the unknown affect our lives

There

everyday.

Archimedes who showed how one man could drag a heavy ship and whose in ventions are even today saving men from backis

there are Copernicus and laid the foundations of modern astronomy; Jenner, the first man to use vac cination; Marie and Pierre Curie who paved the way for the Atomic Age; and Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry. And there are many others from every field of science.

breaking work; Galileo

who

As with anything Professor Asimov writes, book is unfailingly entertaining as well as informative. "When this material was first the

serialized in Scholastic Magazine, the response was so favorable that it is now being made available in permanent form. The original half-tone illustrations prepared by Karoly and Szanto have been retained and provide a lively visual

counterpart to the

text.

The breath-taking advances that science has made in recent years tend to obscure the im portant and dramatic work of earlier pioneers, yet it is their discoveries that have made our present knowledge possible. This book will restore the perspective for younger readers, giving them a wealth of historical information

and providing an inspiration for those plan ning a career in science.

Ajges

10

up

KANSAS

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MO. PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Breakbhrougb.s in science

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Breakthroughs

-Scie: ice

Breakthroughs

t?

These essays

Thanks

are

first

appeared in Senior Scholastic

due the following individuals

as consultants in the

preparation of the

who

acted

series:

DR. JOHN R. DUNNING Dean, School of Engineering Columbia University, New York

EWING Lamont Geological Observatory New York

DR. MAURICE Director, Palisades,

DR. JOHN E. NAFE Lamont Geological Observatory Palisades,

New York

DR. ALFRED E. MIRSKY Professor and

Member

Rockefeller Institute

New York, New York DR. HERBERT C.

BROWN

Professor of Chemistry

Purdue University Lafayette, Indiana

COPYRIGHT 1959 BY SCHOLASTIC MAGAZINES, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS

BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 60-9092

PRINTED IN THE

U.S.A.

By

the same author

Fiction

Pebble in the Sky I,

Robot

The

Stars Like Dust Foundation Foundation and Empire The Currents of Space Second Foundation The Caves of Steel The Martian Way and Other Stories

The End of Eternity The Naked Sun Earth is Room Enough The Death Dealers Nine Tomorrows Non-Fiction Biochemistry and Human Metabolism* The Chemicals of Life Races and People* Chemistry and Human Health* Inside the

Atom

Building Blocks of the Universe

Only

a Trillion

The World of Carbon The "World of Nitrogen Words of Science Realm of Numbers Realm

of Measure Breakthroughs in Science * in collaboration

CONTENTS 1

Archimedes "7

2

Can Move the World"

9

Johann Gutenberg Words

3

1

for the Millions

Nicolaus Copernicus The Challenge

17

of Infinity

4

William Harvey Nature Was His Book

26

5

Galileo Galilei

31

"But

It

Does Move"

6

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek He Discovered an Invisible World

1

Isaac "All

8

9

Newton Was

10

45

Light"

James Watt He Started Two

54 Revolutions

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier Father of

67

Michael Faraday

Joseph

12

76

becomes Power

Henry Bessemer The

13

Electricity

Henry

Electricity

Steel

85

Age Opens

Edward Jenner He Found

58

Modern Chemistry

Magnetism "Becomes 11

41

a

Way

90 to Prevent Disease

14

Louis Pasteur

He 1

5

Tracked

6

Down

William Henry Perkin

8

07

1 1 1

a Chemical

Wonderland

Roentgen and Becquerel They Discovered

1

1

of Heredity

He Opened Wide 17

the Killers

Gregor Johann Mendel The Mystery

1

99

Invisible

120

Rays

Thomas Alva Edison

128

Bringer of Light

19

PaulEhrlich

He Fired 20

137

Magic

Marie and Pierre Curie

Charted a

154 Atomic Age

New

163 World

George Washington Carver World

24

Way

for the

Albert Einstein

He 23

145

Explored the Beginnings of Life

They Paved the

22

Bullet

Darwin and Wallace They

21

a

in a

172

Peanut

Irving Langmuir He Made Rain

177

25

Rutherford and Lawrence They Tore Apart the Atom

181

26

Robert Hutchings Goddard He Launched the Space Age

190

Index

194

Breakthroughs in

Science

Archimedes Can Move

"7

ONE

MAN,

it

might be

World"

the

once fought an army.

said,

Ancient

historians tell us that the

seventy.

The army was

the

Rome

world

man was

that of the strongest

Greek, fought the

a

to a standstill for nearly three years

old

man was Archimedes

scientist of the ancient

up

rors

were

to

it

set

fully.

it

in

Roman army

and almost won.

of Syracuse, the greatest

his reputation well,

Legend

says that

Roman

and he

when curved mir

up on the walls of Syracuse,

in Sicily, the besieging

sorcery;

power

world.

The Roman army knew lived

over

itself.

But the old man,

The

old,

a

Greek

city

ships caught fire. It wasn't

was Archimedes.

When

huge claws were

extended outward on beams, ships were caught, raised,

and overturned. It is said that

It

wasn't magic;

when

glimpse of rope or

and mathematicians

Romans caught

a

being raised above the walls of

sail

For Archimedes was tists

was Archimedes.

the besieging

wood

Syracuse, they hoisted

it

and

ran.

different

who had

from the Greek scien preceded him, great

as

they were.

Archimedes went beyond them

in

imagina

tion.

For instance, to work out the areas enclosed by certain curves, he adapted existing

came up with

methods of computation and

a system that

resembled integral calculus.

This was nearly two thousand years before Isaac devised the

modern

calculus.

Newton

Suppose Archimedes had

had Arabic numerals to work with instead of the clumsy

Greek numbers.

He

punch by 2,000

years.

might have beaten Newton to the

Archimedes went beyond

He

his predecessors in daring,

denied that the sands of the sea were too

many

to be

ARCHIMEDES

3

only them, but the grains of sand the earth.

Not only

take to

the universe. In doing

way

Not

So he devised a method to count them.

counted.

fill

that,

it

but the grains of sand this,

would

it

he invented a

new

Our modern methods

of expressing large numbers.

are similar in

would take to cover

some ways to the one he

devised.

Most important, Archimedes did what no man before him had done: he applied science to the problems of practical,

everyday

before Archimedes clid

way

all

The

life.

Greek mathematicians

great

Thales, Pythagoras, Eudoxus,

considered mathematics to be abstract.

It

Eu

was

a

of studying the majestic order of the universe

nothing more. intellectual

They slaves.

It

had no practical applications.

snobs

who

despised

considered such things

Archimedes shared

this

fit

practical

They were applications.

only for merchants

and

snobbery to a great extent,

but he was willing to apply

his

knowledge of mathe

matics to practical problems.

Archimedes was born year of his birth

287 B.C.

At

is

at Syracuse, Sicily.

in doubt, but

that time, Sicily

it is

was

a

The

believed to have been

Greek

king of Syracuse from 270 to 216 B.C.

Archi

land.

medes was the son of an astronomer and related II,

exact

He

to

Hiero

studied at

Alexandria, Egypt, the intellectual center of the Mediter

ranean world, then returned to Syracuse and immortality.

He

had been taught

at

Alexandria that a scientist was

Can Move the World"

"7

4

above practical

affairs

and everyday problems.

At

the

same time, these everyday problems fascinated Archi

He

medes.

ashamed of

this interest

Long

Today

fame

his

before the

Syracuse and the

was

and refused to keep any records

of his mechanical devices. But he kept on devices.

He

could not keep his mind off them.

rests

making the

upon them.

Roman ships Roman army

sailed into the set

up

its

harbor

siege,

at

Archi

medes had become renowned.

One

of Archimedes' early achievements was setting up

the abstract theory that explains the basic mechanics of the lever.

Imagine

balanced on a pivot with the

a shaft

length of the shaft on one side of the pivot ten times the length on the other. Pushing

down

the shaft at the long

end moved the short end up only one-tenth the distance.

However, the force pushing the long end down was multiplied ten times in the push of the short end up. a

In

way, distance was being exchanged for force.

Using exchange.

his

theory,

A

his disposal,

Archimedes saw no

man had only

a limited

and any weight could be

move

me

this

amount of force

at

but distance was unlimited. Therefore, make

the lever long enough, push the long

"Give

limit to

end down

far enough,

lifted at the short end.

a place to stand on," he cried,

"and

I

can

the world."

King Hiero

called

what he thought was

a bluff.

He

ARCHIMEDES demanded

that

5

Archimedes move something heavy. Not

the world, perhaps, but something heavy. So

chose a ship at the dock and had

and passengers.

Even empty,

it

it

Archimedes

loaded with freight

could not have been

dragged out of the dock and into the sea without

men

pulling at

many

But Archimedes

many

ropes.

tied the ropes together

and arranged

a pulley device (a kind of lever, using ropes to take the

place of the shafts)

.

He

then pulled

at the rope.

handed, he drew the ship slowly into the

sea.

Single-

"/

<5

Hiero was

now

quite content to believe that his great

kinsman could move the earth

enough

faith

in

Can Move the World"

him

to

set

if

he wanted

to.

He

had

him seemingly impossible

problems.

A

goldsmith had

made

a gold

crown

The

for Hiero.

been honest. king wondered whether the smith had

He

him and sub might have kept some of the gold given stituted silver or copper. So Hiero ordered Archimedes to determine

whether the crown was pure gold

with

out damaging the crown.

Archimedes was puzzled. Copper and silver were had been added to the crown lighter than gold. If they an equal they would take up more space than would the weight of gold. If he knew the space taken up by crown (that is, its volume) he could give Hiero the answer.

But

how was

he to determine the volume of the

without beating

it

crown

into a solid mass.

problem to the public baths. a Probably he sighed wearily as he lowered himself into full tub and watched the water overflow. And then he Archimedes took

sat up,

his

thunderstruck.

For

it

suddenly occurred to him

body was pushing water out of the tub. The volume of water pushed out must be equal to the volume

that his

of his

body pushing

in.

To

find the

volume of anything,

you merely measured the volume of the water

He

it

displaced.

had discovered the principle of displacement in one

ARCHIMEDES flash

of intuition!

ancy and

7

From

this

he deduced the laws of buoy

specific gravity.

Archimedes could not wait.

and ran home through the

As he have

street,

sprang out of the bath

naked and dripping wet.

he cried over and over again, "I have

ran,

it."

He

He

cried

it

Eureka!" and the word

in Greek, is still

of course,

I

it.

"Eureka!

used today to announce a

glad discovery.

He

filled

a vessel

with water, placed the crown

in,

and measured the volume of the water displaced. Then he did the same thing with an equal weight of pure gold.

The volume the

of water displaced was smaller.

crown had been mixed with

The

Even

gold in

a lighter metal, giving

greater bulk (volume), and causing flow.

The

more water to over

king ordered the smith executed.

in his old age,

Archimedes could not

resist

challenge of a problem. In 218 B.C., Carthage (in

Africa) and

it

Rome went

to

war with each

other,

Carthaginian general, Hannibal, invaded Italy.

He

the

North

and the seemed

on the verge of destroying Rome. While King Hiero lived,

he kept Syracuse neutral, though in a dangerous

position between

two

fighting giants.

After Bang Hiero's death, however, a group that favored Carthage came into power. In 213 B.C.,

Rome

laid siege

to the city.

For three

years,

the aged Archimedes held off the

"7

8

Roman last,

army. But one

in 2

1 1

man

B.C., the city

could do only so much.

fell.

affect the restless brain of

Can Move the World"

At

But even defeat could not

Archimedes. As the soldiers

was working out a problem from a diagram. A soldier ordered him to surrender, but Archimedes paid no attention. The problem was more

swarmed

into the city, he

important to him than a city.

"Don't disturb

So the

The

thing like the sack of a

circles," said

Archimedes.

soldier killed him.

achievements of Archimedes have become part of

He showed

mankind's heritage. apply

my

little

a scientific

He showed

mind

that

it

was

possible to

to the problems of everyday

that an abstract theory in pure science

principle that explains the lever

life.

the

could save the strain

ing muscles of man.

He showed practical

gold

the reverse, too.

problem

beginning with a

that of the possible adulteration of

he discovered a

Today we

By

scientific principle.

believe that the great

duty of science

is

not

only to understand the universe, but also to better the lot of

mankind

in every corner of the earth.

Johann Gutenberg Words

THE

first

for the Millions

printed edition of the world's all-time best seller

was being prepared for publication

in 1454.

The

place

was Germany; the publisher was Johann Gutenberg. But rewards are unpredictable in

this

world.

In 1455, the

publisher was bankrupt for his pains.

Johann Gutenberg had been toiling oblongs of metal. All had to be exactly the

For twenty over

little

years,

same width and height, so they would

The

fit

together snugly.

top of each was molded delicately into the shape of

a letter of the alphabet, carved in reverse.

Imagine those metal oblongs arranged in ranks and tightly,

with ink spread lightly and evenly over them.

Imagine a sheet of paper pressed inked

down

firmly over those

letters.

The

paper

is

lifted.

As

with ink in the shape of letters

files

in a conjuring trick, letters, all

it is

covered

facing forward.

make up words, and the words make up

The

the page

of a book.

Men

Europe and Asia had done this before, carving words or characters in a block of wood. But such blocks in

wood were

of

often crudely carved and

good for only

one "woodcut." Gutenberg's idea was to make each

letter

elegantly of individual metal "type."

com

With

a

page

pleted and printed, the same type could be rearranged to

produce a different page. able type could

A small collection of such mov

be used for any book in the world. That

was Gutenberg's

vision.

We

might

technology rather than science, but

call it a it

triumph of

was an important

breakthrough. Scraps of Gutenberg's printed pages dating back to the 1440's exist

- part of a

calendar, a religious tract. In 1454,

GUTENBERG

11

though, Gutenberg set up for the greatest of

all

six presses

sheets

a sheet of paper

Three hundred

the inked type.

were the

result.

The

Gutenberg's pages made 300

all,

were

there

Bound

together,

identical copies of the Bible. all

editions of the

book

in the western

Gutenberg Bible

are in existence

This became the most important of

was the

was pressed

type was rearranged to yield

1,282 different pages; 300 copies of each.

it

type

identical printed

another page, then another, and so on. In

Bible, for

set

books, the Bible.

Three hundred times

down on

and began to

first

printed

world.

Only 45 today.

copies of the

Each

is

priceless.

To

Gutenberg they brought

nothing.

Gutenberg was dogged by bad luck all his life. He was born about 1398 in the city of Mainz in Germany. His parents were well-to-do. fully,

If things

Gutenberg might have been

had gone on peace able to carry

on

there were experiments without trouble. However,

his

civil

the Gutenberg family squabbles in Mainz at that time, and side. They had to leave hurriedly for was on the losing

Strasbourg, 100 miles to the south.

This was, perhaps,

in 1430.

By

1435, Gutenberg was involved in business.

rians are not sure of the nature of the business,

was mixed up

in a lawsuit over

it.

Histo

but he

In the course of the

Words

12

mention was made of "drucken," the German

lawsuit,

word

for "printing."

Mainz and

1450, he was back in

By

in printing.

from

for the Millions

We

know

man named Johann

a

definitely

engaged

because he borrowed 800 guilders Fust to

buy

tools.

All told,

there must have been vesting,

twenty years of experimenting, in and of printing scraps laboring, and waiting

of material that brought no return and created no interest.

Then,

in 1454,

in double columns,

Gutenberg began with 42

lines in

to put out his Bible,

Latin to the page, and

covering various pages with beautiful hand-drawn de signs. It

was

for his

Nothing was omitted to

in this great final gamble.

be the climax of Gutenberg's

life.

But Fust sued

money.

Gutenberg lost the suit. and his presses to Fust. It

He is

had to hand over

his tools

probable that he didn't

man

was completed under a publish ing partnership of Fust and a man named Peter Schoeffer. Fust and SchoefFer went on to become successful age to finish the Bible.

printers.

It

Gutenberg sank into obscurity.

Gutenberg managed on printing somehow.

borrow more money, to keep He never gave up. But neither

to

did he ever get out of debt.

He

died in

Mainz about 1468,

a business failure.

But printing ricane force.

itself

By

was no

failure.

It

spread with hur

1470, there were presses in Italy, Switz-

GUTENBERG erland,

13

and France. In 1476, William Caxton established

England's

first

printing press. In

1

5 3 5, printing

had crossed

the Atlantic and there was a press in Mexico City.

And by

was

that time, there

religious revolution in

Europe. In 1517, Martin Luther began his dispute with the Catholic Church, a dispute that ended in the establish

ment of

many been ing,

to

There had been church reformers

Protestantism.

times before Luther, but their influence had always

small.

They could reach people

only by their preach

and the superior organization of the Church was able

stamp them out. Luther, however, lived in a world that had the printing

press.

He

Dozens of

not

only

preached,

he wrote

constantly.

pamphlets and manifestoes were caught up by the printing press and spread thickly over Germany. his

In a few years,

all

Europe rang with the

clash of different

religious viewpoints. Bibles,

printing,

becoming cheaper and more plentiful, thanks to were put out in the languages spoken by the

people, not in Latin.

Many

directly for inspiration.

It

people turned to the Bible

became

universal literacy. Before then,

how

to read?

would be

There were

a useless talent for

why

possible to think of

teach any but a

so

few books

all

but a few scholars.

In short, printing created public opinion.

few

that reading

A

book

like

Words

14

Thomas

Common

Paine's

for the Millions

Sense could reach every farm

house in the American colonies and spur on our Revolu tionary

War

as

nothing

Printing helped to

else could.

make modern democracy

possible.

In ancient Greece, democracy could exist only in small

where

cities

ideas could

be spread by word of mouth.

and hurl them

ideas Printing, however, could multiply

into every eye and mind. It could sufficiently well

make

informed to participate in government.

Printing could be misused, too.

more

Wars

could be made

and dictatorships more powerful by the

terrible

skillful use of

millions of people

propaganda through the printed word.

The

spread of literacy did not guarantee that what people read

would be wise or good. Yet the benefits have been greater than the evils. Printing has made our knowledge available to future generations.

Before Gutenberg devised his

books had been written by hand.

all

took

was

many weeks

a rare thing.

a rich

man.

To

To own

The

prepare one book

a dozen books

destroy just a

In the ancient world,

ies.

To

of painstaking work.

wipe out forever the record of

of Greece and

oblongs of metal,

little

all

To own

a

book

was the mark of

few books might be

to

a great thinker.

the vast learning and literature

Rome was compressed

into a

greatest of these, in Alexandria,

few

librar

Egypt, was

GUTENBERG destroyed by

15

during political upheavals in the

fire

century.

Others disappeared

war and

conquest.

as various cities fell

Finally, only the libraries of Constantinople

Greece and Rome.

to preserve the legacy of

1204, Constantinople west. it

And

in 1453

fifth

prey to

were

left

Then, in

was sacked by Crusaders from the the year before Gutenberg's Bible

was captured by the Turks. Crusaders and Turks smashed the great city, stole

treasures, destroyed

Fleeing scholars could, but these

One

most of

carried

were

its

books and works of

pitiful

remnants. all

time, the

Greek

dramatist Sophocles, wrote about a hundred plays.

have only seven of these.

We

are

bits

art.

away what manuscripts they

of the greatest playwrights of

Sappho's poetry,

its

We

have

We

few scraps of

a

and pieces of various philosophers.

fortunate to

have nearly

all

of

Homer and

Herodotus, most of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides but

that's just luck.

A large part of ancient culture died with Constantinople. Such

a disaster could probably never

happen

again,

Any man can own hundreds of differ inexpensive editions. Any small town can

thanks to printing. ent books in

have a library that could compare in the number of

volumes to those in Alexandria and Constantinople.

its

Words

16

Man's knowledge

is

as

immortal

as

man

for only the complete destruction of the

wipe

it

for the Millions

himself now,

human

race can

out.

Gutenberg may have died an apparent

failure,

Gutenberg's work was one of man's great successes.

but

Nicolaus Copernicus The Challenge

of Infinity

3 THE

man

old

on

lay

his deathbed.

In 1543, Nicolaus

Copernicus was seventy years old and dying.

His great

book was being published in a race against time. Finally, on May 24, the first printed copy of the book was laid in his nerveless hand.

book, but

His glazing eyes

may

have seen the

memory and mind were gone. He died that He could not know that he had finally moved

his

very day. the Earth.

Seventeen hundred years to

move

the Earth

if

earlier,

Archimedes had offered

he were given a place to stand on.

Copernicus had finally carried out that proud boast.

He

had found the Earth in the center of the universe, and by the

power

of thought he had hurled

vastness of space.

And

it far,

far into the

there Earth has stayed ever since.

Copernicus was born Nicolaus Koppernigk, in Thorn (Poland), on February 19, 1473. In his lifetime, learned

men wrote

in Latin

and adopted Latinized names, so

Koppernigk became Copernicus. The name has mained so through all the generations since. that

This most notable of

all

Polish scientists

down

re

to the

The Challenge

18

Madame

time of

of Infinity

Curie, like other great scholars of his

time, drank thirstily of

knowledge

at the

began by studying

all

He

over Europe.

University of Cracow, where

he was absorbed in mathematics and painting.

In 1496,

he traveled to Italy (then the very center of learning).

He

Padua and spent ten years there, studying medicine in

law in Bologna.

He

did well in every

field.

When he

finally

returned to

Poland in 1506, he practiced medicine professionally, and

was sought

after

rich

by

He

and poor.

was

a

member

the cathedral chapter in his diocese and administered

of the largest

But

it

of

two

districts.

was not

though he excelled but in astronomy.

law or medicine or statesmanship

in in

that Copernicus

all

And

that, too,

made

his

mark,

developed out of

his

Italian travels.

Italy

were

was

in an intellectual turmoil in 1500.

in the air.

New

ideas

Old notions were being questioned. For

instance, consider the theories

concerning the motions of

the heavenly bodies.

To

begin with,

moon, and the

all

the

stars,

as

well as the sun, the

planets circled the Earth

from

east to

west

every day. However, scholars were agreed that this was

only appearance. its axis

from west

The Earth was to east.

a globe rotating about

Therefore the daily movement

of the heavens was only an illusion.

COPERNICUS If

19

the Earth did not rotate, the stars

fixed in place.

The moon, however,

compared with the "fixed

as

would remain

changes

its

position

In the space of 29

stars."

moon makes a com from west to east. The sun

days (ignoring Earth's rotation), the plete circuit of the heavens

does the same, but

more

slowly, taking 365 days for a

circuit.

Obviously, the

So

moon and sun

so good, but

far,

it

rotated about the Earth.

was the planets that made the

trouble.

In Copernicus's time, five planets were known:

Mer

cury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. All changed their position with respect to the stars, but in an

odd and

Mercury and Venus appeared some

complicated way.

times in the morning, sometimes in the evening.

They

never appeared high in the sky, but always near the hori

zon (Mercury more so than Venus). Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, on the other hand, did appear

overhead on occasion. the sky

from west

Once

Each made

to east.

However,

a

complete circle of

their

motions weren't

Mars slowed up, turned, and drifted for a while from east to west. This back

steady.

ward

drift

in each revolution,

was

called "retrograde motion."

through the same backward its

drift

Jupiter

went

twelve times in each of

longer revolutions, and Saturn thirty times in each of

its still

longer ones.

The Challenge

20

ancient Greeks tried to account for this strange

The motion.

by

of Infinity

they believed the universe to be governed

First,

Therefore, they couldn't rest until they

natural law.

had worked out the natural law behind planetary motion. Second, they believed the motion of the planets influenced

human

fate.

So they thought that by understanding the

sky thoroughly, they could understand past and future.

About 150 A.D.,

the

Greek mathematician and astron

omer, Claudius Ptolemy, wrote a book in which he pre sented formulas for calculating the motions of the planets.

These were based on the assumption that

all

the planets

traveled in circular paths about the Earth.

To

account for retrograde motion, he supposed that

each planet traveled in

a

small circle and that the center

of this small circle traveled west to east in a larger circle

about the Earth. east to

west in

its

movements would

As

Occasionally, the planet smaller circle

would

travel

and the combination of

result in retrograde

motion.

observations of the heavens increased, circles had to

be piled on

The

circles.

necessary mathematics grew

more and more complicated.

By

1500, the Ptolemaic

system had grown so top-heavy that scholars began to grow

uncomfortable about Copernicus

knew

it

that a

Copernicus particularly.

Greek mathematician,

Aristar-

chus of Samos, had believed the Earth traveled about the

sun rather than vice versa.

But Aristarchus simply had

COPERNICUS a theory

21

and had been howled down.

lieved Aristarchus

was

but he

right,

Copernicus be

knew

that he

would

be howled down, too, unless he could show the theory

made

sense.

Copernicus had no instruments keen enough for the purpose.

It

would be three

the telescope

quarters of a century before

would be invented. But there

still

remained

the force of logic.

For one

thing, if the Earth traveled about the sun,

retrograde motion was at once explained.

were on the same

side of the

sun

as

If the

Mars, but

Earth

moved

the

would gain on Mars. Mars would seem to lag behind and move backward. Every year, Earth would faster, it

gain a lap on the outer planets

At some time each

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

year, each of these planets

would ex

hibit retrograde motion. If

Mercury and Venus were

closer to the sun than

Earth, their behavior could also be explained. Copernicus

drew diagrams

to

to follow the sun.

seen at

more than

quently,

show

that the inner planets

From

would have

the Earth, they could never be

a certain distance

from the

sun.

Venus and Mercury could appear only

Conse in the

morning and evening, when the drowning

light of the

sun was hidden by the horizon.

course, they

And, of

could only appear near the horizon behind which the

sun lurked.

And

finally,

the mathematics representing planetary

motions proved to be

much

system than in the Ptolemaic.

simpler in the Copernican

What more

could any one

"scholars."

However, he wrote up about 1530 and

want?

But Copernicus was cautious.

dogmatic old diehards were often found among academic

He knew

that the

most

siastic followers,

his

theory in manuscript form

this circulated freely.

He

found enthu

but also determined enemies.

One was

The Challenge

24

Martin Luther, the Bible.

who

called

Copernicus

But in 1540,

a

Copernicus a fool caution to be

felt his

of Infinity

who

denied

justified.

devoted disciple of Copernicus, George

Joachim Rheticus, published

a

summary

of the Coperni-

can theory.

Pope Clement VII approved the popular

summary and

requested full publication of the great

script.

Copernicus agreed.

He

dedicated

with a spirited attack on people

it

manu

to the Pope,

who would

use Biblical

quotations to deny mathematical demonstrations.

The book, De Revohitionibus Orbium on Europe

He

like a thunderbolt.

Caelestium, broke

But not on Copernicus.

1542 and died on the day of

suffered a stroke in

publication.

He

was spared the humiliation of knowing that the book had been weakened by a cowardly preface. In this preface, the truth of the Copernican theory It is

presented

as

just a

is

denied.

kind of trick, or mathematical

hocus-pocus to simplify calculations of planetary motions. It

seems that Rheticus got into trouble (perhaps because

of his Copernican views) and had to leave town.

the publication of Copernicus's

Andreas Osiander,

who was

was anxious, perhaps, Bible. It was he who

to

a

book

He

left

to a friend of his,

Lutheran pastor. Osiander

avoid seeming to

inserted the preface,

deny the

unknown

to

Copernicus.

Copernicus did more than invent a theory.

He

changed

COPERNICUS the relationship of

the Earth

was

25

man

all.

to the universe.

Now

Before his time,

Earth was only a body among

other bodies in a tremendous universe.

Science stood face to face for the challenge of infinity.

It

met

first

time with the

that challenge squarely, en

larging the universe constantly ever since.

With one

sort

of infinity nobly met, another kind could be conceived,

and the world of the

Time

infinitely small could

enlarged and stretched out so that

sible to

it

be breached.

became pos

think of Earth's history in billions of years, not

thousands.

In

out

all

directions, the

And

he

who

led the

Nicolaus Copernicus, great triumph.

mind of man reached out

who

way toward

out

the infinite

was

died on the very day of his

William Harvey Was His Book

Nature

4 PATIENTLY, William Harvey had observed the action of the heart and blood.

pumped

With every

a certain quantity of

the end of one hour,

much

three times as

it

arteries.

At

did

man. Where did it

go?

Did

it

all

that blood

come from no

vanish into nothingness?

Harvey could left the heart

blood into the

had pumped a quantity weighing

as a

come from? Where where? Did

it

contraction, the heart

see

had

The blood

only one answer.

to return to the heart.

that

The blood had

to circulate about the body.

William Harvey was born on April

He

stone, England. Italy, at that

1,

1578, in Folke

studied at Cambridge, then in Padua,

time the center of medical learning.

He

obtained his medical degree in 1602 and became court physician to James

His private

life

I

and

later to Charles

was uneventful.

when England was undergoing a civil war, but politics.

He

I.

lived at a time

the political upheaval of

Harvey was never much

interested in

His consuming interest was medical research.

HARVEY

27

Galen, the great Greek physician of the third century

A.D., had thought that blood sloshed gently back and forth along the arteries, passing through invisible holes in the wall that divided the heart into it

sloshed this way, then that way.

two

halves.

First

This idea held sway

for 1400 years.

doctors of Harvey's time speculated about the

Many

movement itself

of blood. But

for clues that

Harvey sought within the body would explain the mystery. Here he

followed in the footsteps of Andreas Vesalius, a great Belgian physician

who had

taught at Padua only a genera

Harvey had studied there. Vesalius, the first human bodies, was the father of the science of

tion before to dissect

anatomy.

Harvey

studied the beating hearts of living animals and

noted that the two halves did not contract simultaneously.

He

studied the valves between the ventricles and the

auricles, those small

were one-way

which

also

chambers of the

valves.

He

were one-way.

heart,

and noted they

studied the valves in veins,

These had been discovered by

Harvey's teacher in Padua, a physician named Fabricius, but he did not understand their function. in Obviously, blood could flow away from the heart arteries

and toward the heart in

vented any flow in reverse.

veins.

The

valves pre

Nature Was His Book

28

He

tied off arteries

pressure only

same with the heart.

on the

veins.

By

The

and noticed that they bulged with side

toward the

pressure

1616, he

was

There was only one flaw no

visible

He

heart.

was on the

side

did the

away from

certain the blood circulated. in the theory.

There were

connections between arteries and veins.

did the blood pass from one to the other?

system was

like a tree in

The

How

arterial

which the branches divide

into

HARVEY

29

smaller and smaller twigs. arteries

seemed to come

grew larger and tion

the point

where the

to an end, tiny veins arose.

They

larger, but there was no actual connec

between them and the

By

Near

arteries.

Harvey was convinced of his theory He published a 52-page book with a

1628, however,

despite the flaw.

long Latin

commonly known

It is

title.

as

De Motus

Cordis ("Concerning the Motion of the Heart").

It

was

printed on thin, cheap paper and was full of typographical errors,

At

but

first,

overthrew Galen's theory.

it

the results

standpoint.

were not

His practice

from Harvey's was jeered by his

so desirable,

fell off.

He

opponents, and patients did not wish to trust themselves to a crackpot.

He was

called "Circulator," not because

he believed in the circulation of the blood, but because that

was Latin slang for "quack," the name given to peddlers

who hawked his

He pighi,

the circus.

was.

it all,

The

final

Harvey's death.

after

at

Harvey maintained silence and kept on work. He knew he would be proved right.

Through with

medicines

examined living

found tiny blood

proof came in 1661, four years

An

tissue

vessels

in the lungs of a frog.

Italian doctor,

through a microscope.

was complete.

He

connecting the arteries and veins

He

called

like") because of their smallness.

tion

Marcello Mal-

them

The

capillaries ("hair-

theory of circula

Nature

30

The importance he used.

He

of Harvey's

work

lies

Was His Book

in the

methods

substituted observation for "authority"

and

looked at nature instead of at dusty ancient manuscripts.

From

that beginning

of today.

grew the monumental

life-sciences

Galileo Galilei "But

It

Does Move"

5 SLOWLY,

the old

man

got

judges of the Inquisition.

down on

his

With

his

head bent,

He

denied the sun was

voice said what had to be said.

knees before the his tired

the center of the universe, and admitted he had been to teach that

wrong

turned on

its

axis or

it

He

was.

revolved about the sun, and admitted

he had been wrong to teach that

On

denied that the Earth

it

that day, June 22, 1633, the

a tribunal for the Inquisition at

did.

Churchmen

Rome

felt

they had

a victory.

Galileo Galilei, at 69, was the most

scientist in

Europe.

which gave

his

He

was

also

sitting as

famous for

won

renowned

his writings,

views so clearly, and so effectively

ridi

culed his opponents.

Now

he had been forced to admit he was wrong.

Inquisition,

and

now

spent the

mindful of

his

fame, had treated him gently

allowed him to return to Florence. last

eight years of his

controversial problems.

He

life,

There he

working on non-

never disturbed the Church

with heretical opinions again. died.

The

On

January

8,

1642, he

It

Does Move"

his first

name only)

"But

32

Galileo (he

was born

is

universally

in Pisa

known by

on February

15, 1564.

From

the very

beginning, he showed the wide range of his creative in terests.

As

a boy, he

As he grew

toys.

showed unusual

designing

up, he played the organ and the lute,

wrote songs, poems, and

literary criticism.

He was

tracted attention as a painter.

with

skill in

his first years of

schooling

at a

He

even

at

vaguely unhappy in Florence.

monastery

His father wanted him to be a physician, but Galileo was even

less

happy when he went

to the University of Pisa

in 1581 to study medicine.

In Pisa his

mind began moving

Attending services

at the

in other

directions.

Cathedral of Pisa, he found

himself watching a chandelier swinging in the air currents.

Sometimes in a

it

narrow

swung arc.

in a

wide

arc.

Sometimes

it

swung

There was nothing unusual about

this,

but 17-year-old Galileo noticed something others had not seen.

He

felt

for his pulse and began counting.

pulse beats for a wide quick swing; so

many

So

many

for a nar

rower slow swing. But always the same number of pulse beats whether the swing was wide or narrow. Galileo had discovered the law of the pendulum. But if a pendulum swung constantly, biting little

fragments of time, so to speak, this offered a

revolutionary method for measuring time.

off equal

new and

Galileo had

GALILEO

33

used his pulse to time a pendulum. But the pendulum could also

be used to time the human pulse. Galileo passed on

this

information to his professors.

Galileo never got his degree in medicine.

have enough

money

reason, however,

he overheard a

was

He

to continue his studies.

did not

The

real

was probably lack of interest. By chance, lecture on geometry, and discovered he

really interested in mathematics

and physics

not

medicine.

He went

found

to Florence,

a patron,

and studied the

behavior of objects floating in water. His essay describing his conclusions

vious

was

so well

"young hopeful"

When

done that

it

made him an ob

in the scholarly

he returned to Pisa in 1588,

matical lecturer at the University.

it

world of

was

as a

Italy.

mathe

There, he proceeded

to study falling bodies. Aristotle had believed

speed with which a

(2,000 years before)

body

fell

was

in ratio to its weight.

Scholars ever since had agreed. After fall

Why

very slowly?

that the

all,

do not feathers

argue with the evidence of your

eyes?

Galileo thought that air resistance might be playing a part, area.

slowing up light objects that had a large surface To demonstrate this (the story goes), he climbed

to the top of the balls

of equal

Leaning

size,

Tower

of Pisa with

two cannon

one of cast iron and one of wood.

The

"But

34

was ten times heavier than the wood

cast iron ball

(and the professors

If Aristotle

iron ball should

Would

ball.

watching to

fall

it?

A

at Pisa)

were

right, the

ten times faster than the

crowd

large

ball.

wooden was

(says the story)

see the answer.

Galileo dropped

them carefully over the

Thwack! They

taneously.

Does Move"

It

hit the

railing simul

ground with a

single

clap of sound. Aristotle could not have

wrong. At

27, Galileo

been proved more thoroughly

had destroyed authority (and

the dignity of his fellow professors).

had to leave

but he had a better job waiting for him

Pisa,

University of Padua.

was

He

And

the

at

there the real glory of his

life

come.

to

Rumors from Holland made

also

told of a tube with lenses that

far objects appear near at hand.

ment had clamped

The Dutch govern

the lid of military secrecy

vention, but Galileo got to thinking about

on the

how

in

such a

device might work.

In

months, he had designed and constructed a

six

scope (later he constructed tributed over Europe).

where

it

stairs to

was

many

He

a sensation.

others

which were

demonstrated

it

tele dis

in Venice,

Portly gentlemen puffed up

the tops of the highest buildings to look through

Galileo's tube at ships so distant they in the harbor for hours.

would not

arrive

GALILEO

35

But Galileo thought neither of war nor of commerce.

He

new

mountains and craters on the moon; the naked eye, in Orion. like It

There he found

pointed his telescope at the sky.

our

moon and

He

7,

looked

"stars" near

little

He found Venus

to

showed phases

the sun had spots.

was on January

discovery.

stars, invisible

it.

at Jupiter

He

made

1610, that he

and

at

the crucial

once found four

followed them night after night.

There could be no mistake. They were four moons cling Jupiter, each in

its

own

orbit.

They were

cir

the final

disproof of the old notion that everything in the heavens rotated about the Earth. that

were rotating about

Here

certainly

were four objects

Jupiter.

Galileo brought his telescope to

Rome

in 1611.

Many

at the

Papal court were impressed, but some were angered.

Was

this

man,

who had

already destroyed Aristotle's

notions about falling bodies,

now

to destroy Aristotle's

were perfect? How could there be rough mountains on the heavenly face of the moon and spots on the perfect sun? doctrines that the heavens

"See for yourself," said Galileo.

"Look through

my

instrument."

Many

refused.

Some

said that the

moons of

Jupiter

could not be seen by the naked eye, were therefore of no use to humanity, and could not have been created. the instrument

If

showed them, the instrument was wrong.

was flawed, said some, a device of the devil Galileo was supported by one faction of the Church, and attacked It

by

another.

Galileo wrote articles about his discoveries.

anger.

He

began to take up a bolder and bolder position

in favor of the theories of Copernicus.

Galileo had a knack for

In them,

he defended himself against his attackers with sarcastic

making his opponents look ridiculous, and they rarely forgave him for it. This time his opponents were powerful men in the Church. As a

"But

38

It

Does Move"

from these men, the Church

result of pressure

finally

declared, in 1616, that belief in the Copernican system

was

Pope Pius

a heresy.

V

then instructed Galileo to

abandon Copernicanism.

For

at least in public.

fifteen years, Galileo did

He

kept quiet, worked on other things, and waited for the

Church

to ease

its

position.

Church

to think the

had.

For some reason, he seemed

Without apparently

anticipat

ing trouble, in 1632 he published his great defense of the

Copernican system. In opponents.

Then

And

he poked merciless fun

There

his knees,

is

a story that

after swearing the

something softly under

when

his breath.

do

we honor

What

a versatile

those "firsts" a

number of

we

Europe

scientist.

at his time.

In addition to

have already discussed, Galileo scored

other achievements.

clock to measure time.

Yet

he said

His discoveries and

He

thermometer to measure temperature.

first

still,

from

did he mutter?

found

measure the weight of bodies in water.

the

of the aged

does move."

it

Galileo today?

and original

at his

Rome.

Galileo rose

inventions staggered the imagination of

He was

to

trial

Earth stood

story goes that he said: "But

Why

him

the Inquisition called

followed the long and wearying

scientist.

The

it,

He

proved

He

He

air has

a

way

to

devised a

built a

water

weight, was

to use the telescope in astronomy.

it is

not for these alone that Galileo holds so lofty

GALILEO

39

a place in the hierarchy of science.

Why,

then, do

we

honor him? First, Galileo discovered the laws that govern force and motion and the speed of moving objects. And then he stated these laws of dynamics in mathematical formulas, rather than in words. Yet Galileo was no amateur with words. He was the first scientist to abandon Latin and write in his native tongue. And his style and wit brought

his

work

to the attention of

traveled to Italy to

sit

all

Europe.

Even

princes

in his classes.

Second, Galileo demolished the pedantic approach to It was not only that he observed things for him-

science.

"But

40 self

and based

Does Move"

deductions on actual experiments and

That had been done before Galileo by other

tests. tists

his

It

who

scien

sought truth in nature, not in dusty old

manu

was

by

scripts.

Galileo

modern logic. clear,

the

scientific

And

first

to arrive at his conclusions

the

method of combining observation with

he expressed his logic in mathematics

unmistakable picture language of science.

the

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek He Discovered an Invisible World

ANTON VAN LEEUWENHOEK few years

schooling.

was

a draper with only a

But he discovered

a

new world more

amazing than the one discovered by Columbus. His hobby was making little glass lenses. One day he studied a drop of stagnant water through one of his lenses. There he

saw what no one before him had ever seen or imagined. Tiny animals, too small to be seen by the naked eye, were

moving and feeding and being born and dying of water that was a whole universe to them.

Van Leeuwenhoek was born

He

Holland, on October 24, 1632.

90 years.

became

He

left

school at 16,

at the

tion for the rest of his

But he had

his

city

when

Delft City Hall.

all his

his father died,

and

Later he was ap

He

held this posi

life.

lenses.

hobby, grinding tiny, perfect

of these were only one eighth of an inch across.

But they magnified objects 200 times without

Of

drop

of Delft,

lived in Delft

a clerk in a dry-goods store.

pointed janitor

Some

the

in

in a

course, everyone

appear larger.

But most

knew

that lenses

scientists

distortion.

made

objects

had only mediocre

lenses.

He

42

Van Leeuwenhoek ground

Discovered an Invisible World

the lenses in oblongs of copper, silver, or fix

at

an object on one side of the it

He mounted gold. He would

excellent lenses.

lens.

Then

he would stare

for hours. Often, he left the object there for

or even permanently. object, he

a total of

He

If

ground another 419 lenses.

looked

he wanted to look lens.

at

months another

In his lifetime he ground

at everything: insects,

drops of water, tooth-

scrapings, bits of meat, hair, seeds.

Whatever he saw, he

drew and described with painstaking accuracy. In 1665, van Leeuwenhoek looked at living capillaries. These tiny

vessels

connecting arteries and veins had been

discovered four years earlier

wenhoek was

And

the

first

by an

to see blood

Italian.

But van Leeu

moving through them.

in 1674, he discovered the red corpuscles that give

blood

its

color.

In 1683, he

made perhaps

his

most important discovery:

LEEUWENHOEK

43

They were too tiny for his lenses to magnify nor did he know the significance of his discovery.

bacteria. clearly,

These discoveries were not kept

number

1660, a

of Englishmen interested in science had been en

couraged by King Charles has a long

It

In

secret.

name but

II

form an

to

official society.

usually called simply the

is

Royal

Society.

Van Leeuwenhoek wrote Society,

describing in detail his lenses and

The

through them.

society

unwilling to believe him

Hooke

Leeuwenhoek

at first.

instructions.

he would

said

after that, particularly after

microscopes

could

was

astonished,

all

Royal he saw

and probably

In 1677, however, Robert

of the society built microscopes according to van

Leeuwenhoek's

his

to the

letters

long

all

as a gift to

found exactly what van

find.

There was no question

van Leeuwenhoek sent 26 of

the society, so that the

members

see for themselves.

In 1680, van

Royal Society.

Leeuwenhoek was

A

elected a Fellow of the

poorly schooled draper was

famous foreign member. In

wenhoek

He

his

its

most

long lifetime, van Leeu

sent a total of 375 scientific papers to the

Royal

Society and 27 papers to the French Academy of Science.

Though he

never

left Delft, his

work made him world

famous.

The Dutch

East India

Company

sent

Asia to put under his marvelous lenses.

him

insects

from

The Queen

of

He

44

Discovered an Invisible World

England paid him a visit. When Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, visited Holland to learn ship-building, he took time out to pay his respects to van Leeuwenhoek.

Did van Leeuwenhoek through

his lenses?

anyone finger

He

let

did,

microscope, nor the

first

He

was the

first

to use one.

to construct a

However, he was

most of modern biology. see cells and to study them, the

ability to

physiologist

ability to see bacteria

their life cycles,

first

basis for

modern anatomist and Without the

not the

to use one so well that single-handedly

he established the

Without the

disliked having

what could be done with one.

to demonstrate

first

though he

beloved microscopes.

his

Van Leeuwenhoek was the

the queen or the czar look

would be

helpless.

and to study them and

modern medicine probably would

still

be in the dark ages. All the discoveries of the great biologists since 1700 stem, in one

way

or another,

painstakingly ground

by

from the tiny

glass lenses

the janitor of Delft City Hall.

Newton

Isaac

Was

"All

Light"

1 IN

1666, so the story goes,

Isaac

Newton was

23

from

a tree.

He

had seen

happen before. So had countless

others.

But

this

years old, he saw an apple this

when

Newton

fall

A

looked upward.

pale half-moon

was

in the daytime sky over the English countryside.

asked himself:

Why

Earth, as the apple

Newton

does not the moon, too,

fell,

reasoned as follows:

Perhaps the

pulled to the Earth, but the speed of the moon's

visible

Newton

fall

drawn by the force of

time

to the

gravity?

moon

is

movement

through space cancels out the pull of the Earth's gravity.

He

reasoned further:

If the force that pulls the apple to

the Earth also pulls the

would have

moon

to the Earth, that force

to extend far out into space.

tended into space,

this force

of gravity

And

as it

ex

would become

weaker and weaker.

Newton

calculated the distance of the

Earth's center.

would have

Then he

to travel in

calculated its

how

moon from fast the

the

moon

orbit to balance the pull of

Earth's gravity at that distance

from the Earth.

The

answer he found checked pretty nearly with the figures

46

"All

Was

Light"

given by astronomers for the speed of the moon. But it did not check exactly. The theory must be wrong, thought

Newton.

He

put

Newton was though

as a

it aside.

already making his

mark

youngster he had shown

in

little

promise.

young

a dull student until (the story goes) he

tired of being beaten

By

47

the time he was 18,

Newton's

matics was arousing attention.

interest in

He would make

mathe a poor

farmer, said his uncle, and he talked Newton's mother

mathematics,

He

was born on Christmas Day of 1642 (the year Galileo in died) Woolsthorpe, England. His father, a farmer, had died the day before Isaac was born. As a

Newton was

NEWTON

boy,

grew

up by the bright boy of the class. Newton applied himself until he was first in the class.

into sending the

young man

Nine years

Newton was

at

Cambridge University.

professor of mathematics

Cambridge. But what years these were for Newton!

beams of a

later,

to

light, for instance.

He

He

allowed sunlight to enter

darkened room through a hole in a curtain.

beam of prism.

light then

The

light

studied

The

tiny

was passed through a triangular glass fell on a screen as a rainbow band

mn&mm^.^

Was

"All

48

not

as a spot

of white light.

Newton was

discover that white light was actually

the same time, he blazed

He worked

matics.

to

various

discovered a

new

new way

Much more

called his

important, he

bounded by the German mathema

Wilhelm Leibniz discovered

Newton

mathe

for calculating areas

(At almost the same time,

curves.

frontiers in

out the binomial theorem for express

ing certain algebraic quantities.

tician

made up of

first

which could be separated and recombined.

colors

At

the

Light"

new

this

independently.)

We

technique "fluxions."

call it

"calculus."

Even Newton's

mistakes were fruitful in their results.

Newton had developed

theory to explain his discovery

a

that white light could be bent

The theory was wrong, seemed to explain constructed

of

why

lenses

by

glass into a

as scientists

found

the early telescopes, that

bent

or

rainbow.

later.

But

it

which were

"refracted"

light,

formed images surrounded by small colored blurs. This was called "chromatic aberration." Newton's wrong theory led him to believe that this chromatic aberration could never be corrected.

For lenses.

this reason,

He

to gather

he decided to

make

telescopes without

designed telescopes that used parabolic mirrors

and concentrate

his first in 1668.

light

by

reflection.

He

built

These "reflecting telescopes" had no

chromatic aberration.

NEWTON

49

Shortly after

Newton

died, telescopes

special lenses that did not

However, the reflecting

best

and

principle.

is

show chromatic

largest telescopes

The

Palomar in California

were

built using

aberration.

use the

still

200-inch telescope atop Mt.

a reflecting telescope.

But Newton's attempt to apply Earth's gravity to the

moon remained

a failure.

The

years passed, and

it

seemed

dead for good,

As

it

happened, one of Newton's faults was that he

couldn't take criticism, and he kept

and

his followers, for instance,

and

his followers

both deserved

over

who

up

feuds.

Newton

fought a battle with Leibniz

first

invented calculus,

when

credit.

In the Royal Society of

London

(of

which Newton

Newton's great enemy was Robert Hooke. Hooke was a capable scientist, but he had a grass

was

a

member),

He

hopper mind.

started things

and dropped them.

He

many things that no matter what anyone else did, Hooke could always claim he had thought of it first. in the company of Edmund Halley, In 1684, Hooke

started so

a very

good friend of Newton's

worked out the laws

boasted that he had

explaining the force that controlled

the motions of the heavenly bodies.

seem

satisfactory,

Halley went to

would move

if

His theory didn't

and arguments began.

Newton and

there

asked him

were a force of

how

the planets

attraction

between

"All

50

bodies that

weakened

as

Was

Light"

the square of the distance.

Newton said at once, "In ellipses." "But how do you know?"

"Why,

I

have calculated

friend the story of his attempt it

had

Now

8

1

told his

years earlier, and

how

Halley, in a frenzy of excitement, urged

failed.

Newton

And Newton

it."

to try again.

things

were

In

different.

1666,

Newton had

supposed that the force of attraction acted from Earth's center, but he hadn't been able to prove it. Now he had calculus as a tool.

With

his

new

mathematical techniques,

he could prove that the force acted from the center. Also, during the

last

18 years,

new and

better measurements

had been made of the radius of the Earth, and of the

moon's

size

and

its

from the Earth.

distance

This time, Newton's theory checked the facts

The moon was by

exactly.

pulled to the Earth, held in Earth's grip

gravity, just as the apple.

In

1687,

Newton expounded

Philosophiae Naturalls Principia also

his

theory in a book,

Mathematics In

it,

he

announced the "Three Laws of Motion." The third

of these states that for every action there

opposite reaction.

It is this

principle

is

which

an equal and explains

how

rocket engines work.

The Royal there

Society intended to publish the book, but

was not enough money

in the treasury. Also,

Hooke

NEWTON was

raising

idea

first.

the

book

51

the trouble he could, insisting he had the

all

who was well-to-do, own expense.

Halley, at his

therefore published

But the great days of Newton were over. In 1692, that

mind tottered. Newton had a nervous break

all-embracing

down and had

To

burn up

two

to spend nearly

boundless mental energies, he turned

his

toward theology and alchemy,

He

not enough.

years in retirement.

wasted

his

though science were

as

powers on

a search for

ways

to manufacture gold.

He

was never the same at times

though

for

1696,

after his nervous

he showed flashes of his old genius.

example,

a

The day

The

Swiss mathematician penetrated the

disguise at once. "I recognize the

Newton was

appointed

ship to attend to his

He

lion,"

he

said.

of the Mint in 1696,

He resigned his professor

duties.

These he did so well

a virtual terror to counterfeiters.

even served in Parliament for two terms, elected

a representative of a speech. silent to

the

new

claw of the

Warden

and placed in charge of coinage.

was

after

the problems he forwarded the solutions

anonymously.

that he

In

Swiss mathematician challenged

Europe's scholars to solve two problems.

Newton saw

breakdown,

On

one occasion he

hear the great man. All

window be

He

Cambridge University. rose,

closed because there

never made

and the House

Newton

as

fell

did was ask that

was a

draft.

"All

52

In 1705,

March

To

is

important for more than his great discov

be sure,

his

Galileo.

begun by

plained the

work

movement of the

laws of motion completed the

And

of Copernicus and Kepler, as well as the tides.

which enabled

These great concepts

He

us to learn as

about the composition of matter.

branch of science

Yet Newton's

is

much

we have about we have learned

value of calculus

estimate.

greatest importance to the

may be

ancient

Greek philosophers and

psychological.

The

advance of

reputation of the

scholars

had been badly

shaken by the discoveries of such moderns

Harvey. But Europe's

today

as

all

The

beyond

science

live

founded the science of

the composition of the stars and almost

in every

work

laws of universal gravity ex

his

branch of mechanics.

in every optics,

Queen Anne. On

died.

Newton eries.

knighted by

Light*'

1727, forty years after his great discoveries,

20,

Newton

Newton was

Was

as Galileo

and

scientists still suffered a sense of

inferiority.

Then came Newton. His

gravitational theories

a vision of the universe greater Aristotle had

dreamed

of.

opened

and grander than anything

His elegant system of

celestial

mechanics brought the heavens within the reach of man's

most remote heavenly bodies were subject to precisely the same laws as the smallest intelligence,

mundane

showing

object.

that the

NEWTON

53

His theories became models of what a should be. In

philosophy

scientific

writers and thinkers since

also,

Newton have

attempted to emulate his elegant simplicity. rigorous formulae and a

Here was

a

mind

his

own

minster

Abbey

who was

it.

When

lifetime.

few

They

used

ancients.

His

basic principles.

as great as

knew

contemporaries

theory

other sciences, and in political and moral

all

any of the

Newton was

almost idolized in

he died, he was buried in

West

with England's heroes. Voltaire of France,

visiting

England

at the time,

commented with

admiration that England honored a mathematician as other nations honor a king.

From Newton's

day, science has been filled with a self-

confidence that never again faltered.

Newton's glory

is

perhaps best expressed in a couplet

by Alexander Pope. Nature and Nature's laws lay hid

God

said,

Let

Newton

be!

and

all

in night.

was

light.

Watt

James He

Started

Two

Revolutions

8 JAMES WATT studied the steam engine before him carefully. It was a model of an engine first built by Thomas Newcomen about 1705, sixty years before. The engine was used

pump water

to

out of mines.

The model

be

longed to the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where

Watt worked "This

isn't

as a

mathematical-instrument maker.

working well," the professor

said.

"Fix

it!"

In the engine, steam from boiling water was allowed to enter a

chamber topped by

a

movable

pressure pushed the piston upward.

run into the chamber to cool the piston sank.

cold water;

More

it.

steam;

down went

piston.

Then

The

The steam

cold water was

steam condensed and

up went the

the piston.

piston.

More

The up and down

motion of the piston worked the pump.

The

process took immense quantities of steam, thought

Watt, and yet the engine worked so

was more power Watt,

with an analytical mind, began

to study steam scientifically. first

There

to steam than that.

a trained engineer

steam must

inefficiently.

be

as

hot

To

exert

as possible.

maximum power, Then it must be

WATT

55

converted to water

as

cold as possible.

what Newcomen's engine

One Sunday,

early in the year 1765,

walk, thinking.

He came

Watt took

sudden

to a

Steam was being wasted because

course!

But wasn't that

did?

Why,

halt.

at

a solitary

of

each step the

chamber was being cooled down. The next gush of steam had to heat up the chamber before

Watt rushed back together a

new kind

to his

through water.

As

move the

moved

After the steam

the piston,

it

the steam escaped, the piston sank.

since that

Watt had

piston.

workshop and began putting

escaped

second chamber cooled by running

rush of steam into the

power

could

of steam engine.

entered the chamber and a valve into a

it

first

A

new

chamber wasted none of

chamber was

still

a steam engine that

its

hot.

worked

efficiently.

His

achievement was a triumph of technology, not of science.

But that Sunday walk helped to change the future of the world.

The new

steam engine replaced the old

Newcomen

He

56

machine almost

at

ways

For

improvement.

steam enter the chamber piston both

Watt

once in the mines.

after

improvement

Started Tixo Revolutions

kept making

instance,

he

let

at

each end, thus pushing the

alternately.

This increased the efficiency

more.

still

Watt's invention meant power!

Before Watt, there

had been the muscles of man and of animals. There had been wind and

practical use of a

first

unit of

(The

honor.)

Many

But Watt made

falling water.

power

power

possible the

greater than any of them.

"watt"

called the

is

named

in his

of these uses he conceived himself.

Steam engines could be used to drive heavy machinery.

For the

first

time, large

amounts of power could be con

centrated in a small area.

became

Factories and mass production

possible.

Furthermore, England was then short of charcoal for fuel. left

She had exhausted her

The

forests.

timber that was

had to be reserved for the Navy. The alternative was

coal.

But coal mines were

water seepage.

difficult to

The Watt steam

engine

water

efficiently

able.

Burning coal produced steam.

power.

The

Today, we

and

a flood of

pumped out

cheap coal became

Industrial Revolution

the

avail

Steam produced

are in a second Industrial Revolution.

keep the flow of steam into

of

had begun!

one, too, dates back to an invention

To

work because

This

by James Watt. his engines constant,

WATT

57

Watt made

the steam whirl

rods to a vertical shaft.

down, centrifugal force kept them up.

too

If

two weights held by hinged

Gravity pulled those weights (as the

much

the rotation of the weights

weights whirled about)

steam entered the chamber,

became

forced up. This motion partially closed

As

off the steam.

rotated

more

the steam pressure

slowly,

More steam could

They were

faster.

a valve, fell,

choking

the weights

dropped, and opened the valve.

enter.

Thus, the amount of steam was kept within narrow

The

limits.

steam engine was equipped with a "brain" that

could correct

This

is

its

failures automatically

and continuously.

what is meant by "automation." Today, the science

of automation has reached the point where whole factories

can be made to run without man's interference, correct ing their

own

errors

by

devices using the basic principle

of James Watt's "centrifugal governor."

Watt was

an able and respected

also

civil

engineer

who

had much to do with the planning of bridges, canals and facilities.

He

and peaceful old

age.

harbor

tion well begun.

died on August 19, 1819, after a ripe

He lived to see the Industrial Revolu

But he never dreamed

that he also

started a second Industrial Revolution that

come

into

its

own

for nearly

two

centuries.

had

would not

Antome^Laurent Lavoisier Father of

Modern Chemistry

FRANCE was in turmoil. The Revolution, which had begun 1789 with the storming of the

in

more

violent.

The

extremists

By

1792, the

was growing

Bastille,

"Reign of Terror" had begun.

were bent on revenge against those

had participated in

injustices

during the days of the kings.

For instance there was the Ferme generate, organization that had collected taxes

government

that

sum was

a fixed

kept.

In

classes

salt,

tobacco, and

organization paid

Anything

Most of the

a private

collected over

collectors

gouged every

Naturally, the peasants, laborers and

cent they could.

middle

sum.

on

The

other items for the government. the

who

hated them.

November

1792, the order

went out

former members of the organization.

One

to arrest

all

of these

was

He

had

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, a renowned chemist.

not only been a member, he had even married the daughter of the head of the firm.

When

they came to arrest him, he protested that he

was involved

in

no

politics, that

the

money he had made

LAVOISIER

59

as a tax-collector

ments. "I

The

am

had gone to pay for

a scientist," he exclaimed.

arresting officer said roughly,

no need of

scientific experi

scientists."

"The Republic

(He was wrong,

has

The

of course.

Republic did need them and encouraged them, except

when mob

passions

On May 2, under the loss of as

were aroused.)

1794, France's foremost scientist lost his head

guillotine.

the Revolution.

It

was probably the

The

greatest single

execution of a mere king was

nothing in comparison.

Count Lagrange, the great French astronomer, mourned afterward: "A moment was all that was necessary to strike and probably a hundred years will not be

off his head, sufficient to

produce another

Ten weeks

after the

like it."

execution, the extremists

were

themselves executed and the Reign of Terror was over. It

was ten weeks too

late.

Lavoisier, until that sad end, lived a successful

was born

in Paris,

well-to-do lawyer.

on August

Young

26, 1743.

He

took

He

His father was

Lavoisier had

taining an excellent education.

life.

a

a

no trouble ob degree in law,

but studied various sciences and decided he liked science better.

He

Ferme generate and used the funds he money he inherited from his mother, to equip

joined the

earned, plus

60

Father of

an excellent laboratory for 1771.

His wife,

his books,

From

his

own

a skilled artist,

Modern Chemistry

use.

He

married in

prepared drawings for

and helped take notes on

his experiments.

the beginning, Lavoisier realized the importance

of accuracy. His experiments were characterized ful weighings, meticulous

They made enough

measurement, and

by

care

detailed notes.

of an impression to admit him to the

Academic Roy ale des Sciences in 1768, when he was 25. It was in the next year, though, that he first showed the importance of accuracy.

who air,

There were

still

chemists

believed in the old doctrine of "four elements":

water, and earth.

heated long enough,

They it

thought that

would turn

if

fire,

water were

to earth.

As proof

LAVOISIER

61

they pointed to the sediment that appeared in water that

had been boiling for a long time. Lavoisier was not content merely to look.

water for 101 days.

But he weighed the

heated

Sure enough, a sediment appeared.

glass vessel

before and after the heating.

he showed, was

He

which held the water, both

The weight

just equal to the

The sediment came from

lost

by

the glass,

weight of the sediment.

changes in the

glass,

not from

the water.

Lavoisier

was

a public-spirited

man.

number of commissions and boards

He

joined any

that investigated the

miserable conditions of the peasants.

with the government worked against him

This connection at his trial.

Even

Father of

62

Modern Chemistry

though the Revolutionary judges blinded themselves

so

to

one of Lavoisier's government services had im

it

portant consequences for

He

all

humanity.

had been asked to make

for lighting cities at night.

a

study of practical methods

In making this study, he had

to consider various fuels for

burning in lamps. This got

him

problem of burning or com

interested in the general

bustion.

At

was explained by means of the "phlogiston theory," which had been first announced that time, combustion

about 70 years

composed of

earlier.

a "calx"

The theory (what

held that metals were

we would

call a "rust"

or an

"oxide") plus a mysterious substance called phlogiston.

When

a metal

was

heated, the phlogiston escaped, leaving

the calx behind.

The theory was into even

way

wrong, of course, and

worse confusion.

that the calx

only

all

For

instance,

it

led chemists

it

was shown

weighed more than the original metal. The

to explain that

was to suppose that phlogiston

had negative weight! In 1772, Lavoisier opened his attack on the problem.

He

and other chemists pooled money to buy a diamond. Heat was concentrated upon it by means of a large mag nifying lens, and the diamond burnt

away

completely.

Lavoisier also burned sulfur and phosphorus, and heated tin

and lead to form a

calx.

He

concluded that burning and

LAVOISIER

63

calx-formation involved the same natural process. Sulfur, phosphorus, tin,

and lead

all

gained weight

Some

heated to burning or to calx.

scientists

when

had sug

gested that the weight increased because the materials

Was

gained "fire particles." of

it

loss of

phlogiston or gain

fire?

Lavoisier settled the matter neatly. a closed vessel. Part of

no gain

at all in

in.

Then

Apparently, the metal, out of the

air,

The weight

changed to

a calx, but there

by

vessel,

was

how

there was a gain in weight.

when

heated, absorbed something

forming a heavier calx and a

gained

heated tin in

After he opened the

weight!

rushed

air

ever,

it

He

the calx

Lavoisier's experiments led

was

him

lost

partial

by the

vacuum. air.

to believe that in

any

chemical reaction in a closed system there was neither gain nor loss of weight.

him

that.

Law

This was the

His careful measurements told first

statement of the important

of Conservation of Mass.

This means that matter

can neither be created nor destroyed. Through chemical

can only be changed from one form into another.

action

it

From

this point

it

was only

a step to the

working out of

chemical equations. These show that the mass of materials before any chemical change must equal the mass of the

products created

by

the change.

In 1774, Joseph Priestley, the British clergyman

had discovered oxygen,

visited

Paris

who

and talked with

Lavoisier.

once.

saw the importance of oxygen at experiments! He showed that when

Lavoisier

Back

to his

charcoal burnt in

air, or metal formed a calx, only part was consumed, and the air left over would not support combustion. If, however, pure oxygen were used, substances burnt or formed calxes much more easily and quickly than in ordinary air, and all the oxygen was

of the air

used up. Lavoisier recognized that both

oxygen and nitrogen

LAVOISIER

65

(he called the latter azote, meaning "no life") were present in

air,

and

that

combustion (and

too) depended

life,

upon

combination with oxygen.

By

1786, Lavoisier published a paper he had prepared

three years earlier,

He

which summarized

his

experiments.

gave the interpretation of combustion which

still

Phlogiston was killed dead as a doornail once

use today.

and for

we

all.

In 1787, Lavoisier, together with three other chemists, published a book called

Methode de nomenclature

mlque^ in which were laid

logical rules for

naming

Until then, names had been

made

of the individual chemist. Today,

when

chemical compounds.

whim

down

chi-

up

at the

we

speak of sodium chloride or of potassium chlorate,

are using

names that

fit

we

Lavoisier's scheme.

Finally, in 1789, Lavoisier

crowned

his

work by pub

elementaire lishing a textbook of chemistry called Traite

de chimie. In It

developed.

At

it

he incorporated the

was the

first

new

notions he had

modern chemistry textbook.

the very climax of his work, in the same year his

textbook was published, the French Revolution broke out. In early 1792 he was forced out of his laboratory.

months

he was arrested.

later

His useful

life

A few

ended in

when he was only 51. of Modern Chemistry."

tragedy for himself and the world Lavoisier

The name

is

is

called the "Father

a deserved one.

With

boundless energy and

Father of

66 insight,

on the

Modern Chemistry

he lifted chemistry out of a dead-end and put

it

right road.

Undoubtedly,

if

he had not lived, some other chemist

or a group of chemists might have conclusions.

But

it is

come

to Lavoisier's

how

one individual

difficult to see

could have done more in a shorter time than did Lavoisier.

His idea that chemists must measure and weigh accu

was perhaps

most important single contribution. Chemists have never forgotten the lesson, and have labored

rately

to

be "quantitative" ever

istry

today

and so on its

his

new

new all

since.

The

miracles of

alloys, fuels, explosives, fibers, plastics

date back to the

man who

gave chemistry

outlook and taught chemists the proper

experiment.

chem

way

to

Michael Faraday Magnetism Becomes

Electricity

10 AN ENGLISH physicist was lecturing before an audience in London about 120

years ago on some of the tricks that

He had a coil

could be performed with magnets and wires. of wire hooked

ment used

to a galvanometer.

up

to measure electricity.

It

This

is

an instru

which

has a needle

moves when current flows through the instrument. Of course, since the galvanometer was not connected to any battery, there could be no current flowing through it. The needle was motionless.

The

But watch! the

coil.

The

lecturer lowered a bar

needle jerked to the right.

From nowhere,

He removed

apparently, an electric current had appeared.

the magnet. left.

Very

The

magnet into

needle kicked again, this time to the

curious!

After the lecture, one story goes, an earnest out of the audience approached the lecturer. Faraday, of what use split-second

Very "Madam,

by

that

politely,

of

is

the electricity set

woman

"But, Mr.

up for

just a

magnet?" Michael

what use

is

a

Faraday

asked

new-born baby?"

in

return,

Magnetism Becomes

68

Another version of the story

him the question and twenty years you

that

is

Electricity

that a politician asked

Faraday had retorted,

"Sir, in

will be taxing that electricity/'

Michael Faraday was born near London on September

His

22, 1791.

children,

father, a

moved

his

hard-working blacksmith with ten

family to

London when Faraday was

a lad.

There, young Faraday was apprenticed to a book binder.

This was

books.

Officially,

a stroke of luck, for it

he was concerned only with the out

side of books, but he could not help

and dipping into the

becoming

exposed him to

inside as well.

opening the pages

Nor

could he help

interested in science.

Faraday had a second stroke of luck.

His employer

encouraged young Faraday to read the books and allowed

him to attend

scientific lectures as well.

Faraday attended the lectures with great enthusiasm.

He

took extensive notes, and

when he came home

he

would write them up carefully, adding his own diagrams to make them clearer. The lectures he enjoyed most were of the Royal Institution.

those given

by Humphrey Davy

Davy was

England's most famous chemist and a very

popular lecturer. Faraday sent him a copy of the notes he had taken of the lectures, and asked for a job

as

Davy's

laboratory assistant.

Davy

read the notes with pleasure and amazement.

At

FARADAY the

first

69

opportunity he gave Faraday the job he requested.

when

Faraday was 22

he took the job

Institution, at a salary that

had been earning

Davy had carbon

arc.

as a

at

the Royal

was smaller than the one he

bookbinder.

invented the miners' safety lamp and the

He

had discovered numerous chemical sub

stances, including eight

new

elements.

Yet

it is

usually

was Michael Faraday.

said that his greatest discovery

Faraday virtually lived in the laboratory and showed himself

worthy of his master

in every respect. After

died in 1829, Faraday took his place.

Davy

In 1833, he was

appointed professor of chemistry.

Faraday carried on Davy's most famous work. Davy had isolated

arating

most of the elements he had discovered by sep

them out of chemical compounds by means

electric current.

Faraday discovered that the

of an

electricity

required to liberate the unit equivalent mass of any element is

precisely the same.

That

is,

the same electricity lib

erates the

same number of atoms.

led to the

modern concept of

Faraday's researches

the electron.

But Faraday was fascinated by magnets.

He

sprinkled

iron filings on paper held over the poles of magnets and

how

up between the poles in definite patterns. Magnets, he said, were surrounded by invisible "fields of force." The filings made "lines of

noticed

force" visible.

the filings lined

Magnetism Becomes

70

Thus,

it

was only natural for Faraday between

ested in the connection

electricity

Hans

In 1820, a Danish scientist,

found that wires through which

showed magnetic

become

a

up

and magnetism.

Christian Oersted, had electricity

magnetic

should not a magnetic

worked out an experiment

was flowing

field,

field set

thought Faraday,

up

He wound

to test this.

and closed by a key.

would be

field

and

Then ment

set

would be

it

If

up

to a galvanometer.

up

August

didn't work!

magnetic

If

This

coil

was connected

a current in the

29, 18.31,

At

least,

by

coil.

the

first coil

This current

the galvanometer.

Faraday tried the experiment. not

first coil,

the second coil kicked

ring

second

as

he thought

its

it

would.

no current. But

breaking the field set up a current. the circuit in the

directly

Faraday's theory was right, the

field itself created

circuit, the

Oersted had shown,

was wrapped around another seg

would be indicated by

On

opened

he closed the circuit a magnetic

field created in the iron

set

coil

carried through the iron.

of the iron ring.

would

a coil

This

circuit could be

in the coil, as

a second coil

magnetic

The

to a battery.

He

electricity?

of wire around one segment of an iron ring.

was attached

inter

properties.

If electricity set

why

to

Electricity

When

It

The

starting or

Faraday closed

the galvanometer attached to needle.

When

he broke the

needle kicked again, in the opposite direction.

FARADAY

71

Faraday decided that

it

was not the magnetic

force in themselves that set

motion of these started in the

into being.

magnetic

up

lines across a wire.

first coil

coil.

field died.

audiences

by

lines

of

was the

the current

lines of force cut across the

When The

this fact

inserting a

wire

the current was broken, the

collapsing lines of force again

cut across the wire of the second

He showed

When

It

of wire, the magnetic field sprang

Expanding

of the second

the current.

more

coil.

plainly to himself

magnet

and to

into a coil of wire.

Only

while the magnet was being placed in the coil or taken out did current flow in the

coil.

It

would

also

flow

if

the

magnet were motionless and the coil were being placed over it or removed. But if both magnet and coil were motionless, there

was no current.

Faraday had discovered

how to make magnetism induce

Magnetism Becomes

72

He

an electric current to flow.

Electricity

had discovered "electro

magnetic induction."

Two

months

Faraday took the next

later,

How

step.

could he produce a continuous current out of magnetism in

some convenient way?

He

which could be turned on between the poles of

As

it

set

up

a shaft.

a strong

a thin Its

magnet

copper wheel

outer rim passed

as it turned.

turned between the poles, the wheel cut lines of

magnetic force constantly, so that a current of electricity

was constantly flowing through the wheel. ending in gadget. it

two

One

turned.

sliding

contacts,

Two

wires,

were attached to

this

contact brushed against the copper wheel as

The

A

other brushed against the shaft.

vanometer in the

circuit

showed

gal

that as long as the copper

wheel turned, a continuous current was generated. In this way, Faraday generated electricity out of chanical

motion.

He

had invented the

first

me

electric

"generator." Electrical induction can play interesting tricks. trical

power

is

Elec

determined by two things: the quantity of

electricity passing

through a conductor per second (am

perage), and the force driving the electricity (voltage).

When coil,

a current in one coil induces a current in a second

the

details

power

in both coils

can vary. For instance,

must be the same, but the if

the second coil has twice

FARADAY many

as

73

loops of wire as the

doubled, but

its

first coil

Thus, a current can have

its

is

voltage

is

characteristics transformed

in the process of induction. Faraday's

ring

its

cut in half.

is

amperage

does,

the simplest version of our

two

coils

on an iron

modern "transformers,"

Faraday lived on for 35 years, working and lecturing.

At

Christmas time he gave

young

collected in a book,

The Chemical History

which may be found

in

most

Experimental Researches

These

are recorded.

its

many

of the Candle,

His three-volume

be found in

also

which

many

his discoveries

interesting reading.

contributions to science.

modern

starting point in his 25,

may

They make

scarcely an area of

August

libraries.

are the notebooks in

Faraday made is

series of lectures for

His lectures on the candle have been

people.

libraries.

many

There

physics that does not have

work. However, when he died on

1867, there

was no doubt

that his greatest

discovery was that of electrical induction.

His greatest

inventions were the generator and the transformer.

The importance of his the

first

practical

discovery was just

method

this:

It

offered

of turning mechanical energy

into electrical energy.

Before Faraday's time, there had been steam engines

and waterwheels. They produced mechanical energy in large

amounts out of burning coal and

falling water.

How-

ever, these

were

the spot, but not

large in size.

homes and

There were sources of the

form of chemical

could serve mills on

offices.

electricity before Faraday, in

batteries.

small amounts of current.

They

These could supply only

FARADAY Faraday's

pointed the

of

discovery

way

erators turned

ing water.

75

by

electromagnetic

to the production of electricity in

the mechanical energy of steam or

He made

it

possible for the Industrial

tion to flow out of the factory and, electricity, into the

The

politician

sumer

fall

Revolu

form of

supposedly questioned the value

would indeed be

taxes collected

as a result

in the

gen

home.

who

of electromagnetism

amount of

induction

astonished at the

today from company and con

of the use of this current.

Joseph Henry Electricity

Becomes Power

11 ONE

of the most dramatic

moments

American invention came on

May

in the history of

24, 1844.

Wires had been strung from Baltimore a distance of

an

artist

44

miles.

At one

to

Washington,

end, Samuel F. B. Morse,

turned inventor, pressed and released a key that

closed and opened an electric circuit.

He

pressed

it

in a

pattern of dots and dashes that represented the letters of the alphabet.

and

fell in

and

released.

a message:

The

Forty-four miles away, a small iron bar rose

which the key was pressed The pattern of long and short clicks framed

the exact pattern in

"What

hath

God wrought?"

telegraph was born.

He worked for years trying to make the telegraph practical. He traveled over Europe trying to get patents. He endured discouragement and Morse

is

to be given credit.

disappointment while trying to get Congress to appropriate

money

for experiments.

But he does not telegraph.

really deserve credit for inventing the

Years before, Joseph

the same instrument.

Henry had

constructed

HENRY

77

Joseph Henry was born in Albany,

December

17,

This was

1797.

six

of Michael Faraday in England.

New

York, on

years after the birth life

Henry's

paralleled

that of Faraday closely.

Like Faraday, Faraday, he had

work

Henry was born little

while young.

a bookbinder,

maker. In

this,

of a poor family. Like

schooling and was forced to go to

Where Faraday was

Henry,

at 13,

Henry was

apprenticed to

was apprenticed

the

less

watch

to a

fortunate, for he didn't

have Faraday's association with books. At

least,

he might

not have had, except for an odd happening.

The

story goes that at 16, while

at a relative's

building.

Some

Henry was on

vacation

farm, he chased a rabbit under a church of the floorboards were missing and

Henry

abandoned the rabbit to explore the church. Henry found a shelf of books. One was on natural history. It

took

In curiosity, he began leafing through the book. as little as that to fire

him with ambition.

He

returned to school.

He

entered the

Albany Academy, graduated, taught at country schools, and tutored on the side to support himself. He was all set to study medicine when an offer of a job as a surveyor turned

him toward engineering. By

1826, he was teaching mathematics and science at

Albany

Academy.

He

began to work on

electricity

and magnetism, and

78

Electricity

there his

Henry

life

began to

parallel Faraday's

He

probably discovered

self-induction, too, ahead of Faraday.

voltage induced in a

coil,

current in that wire

is

by

first,

vestigation.

Hans

is

or a straight wire, just after the

shut

off.

This

electrical

"drag"

However, Faraday published

is

accom his dis

so he gets the credit.

Then Henry branched formed by

(Self-induction

the collapse of the magnetic field that

panies the current.)

covery

even more closely.

discovered the principle of electromagnetic induc

tion independently of Faraday.

caused

Becomes Power

He

from Faraday's

off

line of in

began to specialize in the magnetism In 1820, the Danish physicist,

electric currents.

shown

Christian Oersted, had

that a coil of wire

through which a current was flowing developed the prop erties of a

magnet. In 1825, a British shoemaker named

William Sturgeon, with an

interest in

electricity as

a

hobby, wrapped eighteen turns of bare copper wire around a bar of soft iron bent into a horseshoe.

flowed through the wire the iron acted

When as

current

a magnet.

Sturgeon invented the name "electromagnet" for

this

device.

Sturgeon's device was only a toy.

Joseph

Henry heard

important.

of

it.

He wrapped

wire around the iron bar.

He made

In 1829, however, the toy extremely

turn upon turn upon turn of

To

force the current to flow

HENRY

79

through the

full

length of the wire and not skip from one

turn of wire to the next, he wrapped the entire length of the wire in

insulating

silk,

Each turn

of wire strengthened the magnet.

at Princeton, using

was

able to

The same

it.

In 1831,

current from an ordinary battery, he

750 pounds of iron with an electromagnet!

lift

year he lifted over a ton of iron at Yale.

But electromagnets were more than a matter of brute strength.

built small delicate ones that could

Henry

used for fine control.

be

Suppose you connected such an

electromagnet to a mile of wire, which was also connected to a battery.

Suppose you could send

a current

wire by pressing a key and closing the

through the

With

circuit.

the

current flowing, the electromagnet, a mile away, could

be made to attract a small iron bar. the

If

you then

released

key and broke the current, the electromagnet would

no longer be

a

magnet.

By opening and

closing the

you could make the same pattern.

But

By

iron bar

key

would be

released.

in a particular pattern,

distant iron bar rise

and

in the

fall

Henry was doing just this. weak when it flows through a long

1831,

electricity gets

length of wire.

The

So Henry invented the "relay."

A

rent just strong enough to activate an electromagnet

have just enough power to

when

lifted,

would

lift

cur

would

a small iron key. This key,

close a second circuit

with a

much

80

Electricity

Becomes Power

HENRY 81

stronger current flowing through

it.

The second

current

could then activate a second electromagnet that could do

work

the

the

first

couldn't have done.

But Henry did not patent lieved the laws of science

his electromagnets.

individual. his

That made

it

be

and their benefits belonged to

humanity and should not be used for the

all

He

profit of an

possible for inventors to use

electromagnet freely to construct gadgets which they

patented.

Morse, for instance, patented graph, did.

his

which worked on the same

In fact,

when

electromagnet

tele

principles that Henry's

saying that

Henry had invented

without permission from him, they

justified

themselves

by

anyway, not Morse.

However, the courts

finally ruled for Morse. Alexander Graham Bell used a small electromagnet in his telephone. Bell's invention would have been impossible without Henry's discoveries.

In

1829,

Henry used

his

electromagnets to cause a

disc to rotate rapidly

between magnetic poles when the current was turned on, and in 1831 he described this de vice. This was the opposite of a generator such as Faraday had invented. In a generator, a turning wheel converted mechanical force into In electricity.

others tried to use Morse's telegraph

it

turning wheel was used to convert cal force.

Henry had invented

Henry's device, a

electricity into

the

first

mechani

"motor."

82

Electricity

Becomes Power

Both Henry's electromagnets and Henry's motor used to this day with very In December, 1846,

little real

with funds a

new

left

change.

Henry became the

the Smithsonian Institution, just

are

formed

first

secretary of

in

Washington

by Smithson, an Englishman. This opened

phase of Henry's

administrator.

He

was

life,

for he

first-class

became

a scientific

too.

He made

here,

the institution a clearing house of scientific knowledge,

encouraging

scientific

to world's end.

communication from world's end

Henry was an American man

with an international reputation, the

first

of science

of his type since

Benjamin Franklin.

He

also

encouraged the growth of

the United States.

new

sciences within

For instance, he was interested

in

meteorology, the science of weather and weather predic tion.

to set

He used the resources up

of the Smithsonian Institution

a system for obtaining weather reports

(He was the first to which he himself had made possible over the nation.

As

a result of his example, the

from

all

use the telegraph for this purpose,)

United

States

Weather

Bureau was founded.

Most of us think of

scientific

warfare

as a

development

However, even during the Civil War, the government was aware of the importance of science. It was Joseph Henry who headed the scientific of the twentieth century.

mobilization of the Civil

War.

HENRY Henry seems

83

to have spent

most of

his life

others get credit: Faraday for induction, telegraph, Bell for the telephone.

Weather Bureau, someone

else,

Even

watching

Morse for the

in the case of the

Cleveland Abbe, was

eventually given the credit as the "father of the

Weather

Bureau."

But he was not

entirely unappreciated.

When Henry

84

Electricity

died in Washington, on

attended

May

by high government

When

Rutherford B. Hayes.

1878, his funeral was

13,

officials,

"henry" in

It

was

his

honor. This

is still

this day.

Faraday's discoveries

tion

officially

the discoverer of self-induction.

as

in a unit to be called a

cheap

Henry was

decided then to measure amounts of inductance

officially

done to

including President

the International Electrical

Congress met in Chicago in 1893, recognized

Becomes Power

electricity,

made

possible the production of

which transferred the

from the factory

to the

Industrial

Revolu

home.

However, even though electricity might be led into homes in all the amounts you could imagine, there would be

little

for

it

to do there without

Henry's electromagnets

and motors. The energy of the motor makes possible refrigerators, washers, dryers, mixers, electric typewriters, electric

sewing-machines, electric almost-anything-that-

involves-moving-parts.

Sometimes

it is

the electromagnet alone.

It

pulls a piece

of metal to control an electric circuit, to give us tele

phones, and so on. Faraday's breakthrough supplied us with electricity.

Henry's breakthrough supplied us with instruments and

by electricity. Both men were gadgets which fill our homes today to

tools that could be run

the fathers of the

make our

lives

and our

leisure

more meaningful.

Henry Bessemer The

Steel

Age Opens

12 HENRY It

BESSEMER had invented

a

new

kind of projectile.

could rotate in flight and would enable a cannon to

more accurately than had ever been

shoot farther and possible before.

Napoleon

III,

new emperor

ested in the invention.

He

of France, became inter

offered to finance further

experiments. Bessemer (an Englishman, but the son of a

Frenchman) was

willing, but the

new

projectile

would

need guns made out of better material than the cast iron then available. Cast iron guns would blow up under the great explosive pressure needed to

Bessemer

knew nothing about

to an end and a

new

the

new

projectile.

the manufacture of iron,

but he was determined to learn.

came

fire

Thus, in 1854 an age

age began.

who was born

England on January But 19, 1813, had already made a number of inventions. they were only gadgets compared to the job he was about

Henry

Bessemer,

in

to tackle.

For two thousand years and more, men had been using iron as the hardest and strongest of the

common

metals.

The

86

Steel

Age Opens

This metal was obtained by heating iron ores with coke

and limestone. The iron that resulted contained

amount of carbon (from the coke) and was iron."

was cheap and hard, but

It

blow could crack

with additional iron

ore.

combined with the carbon gas,

was

called "cast

brittle.

A sharp

it.

Carbon could be removed from

monoxide

it

a large

cast iron

The oxygen

by mixing

it

in the iron ore

in the cast iron to

form carbon

which bubbled out and burned

off.

Only

the almost pure iron, from the iron ore and the cast iron,

was

behind. This resulting iron was called "wrought

left

This form of iron was tough and could take

iron."

numerous blows and shocks without cracking. But quite soft, and it was expensive.

However, between

there

cast iron

was

a

form of iron

and wrought iron.

that

was

it

was half-way

This was

"steel."

made stronger than cast iron and harder than wrought iron, and it combined the virtues of both. Before Steel could be

Bessemer's time, cast iron had

wrought

iron.

Then

had to be added. doubly

so.

Steel

from

to be converted to

the right ingredients to

make

steel

wrought iron was expensive, steel was was a rather rare metal, therefore used

If

mainly for such things

The

first

as

swords.

task Bessemer gave himself

cast iron cheaply.

was to remove carbon

Well, what was the cheapest

BESSEMER and to

easiest

burn

way

87

of

adding oxygen to molten iron in order

off the carbon?

How

about a blast of

air,

rather

than the addition of iron ore? But wouldn't the air cool the molten iron and

solidify

it?

Bessemer began experimenting. the air blast

would work. The

air

He

soon proved that

burned out the carbon

and most of the other impurities, and the heat of the burning raised the temperature of the iron. the blast, Bessemer

was

able to

the cost of previous methods.

make

By controlling

steel at a fraction

of

The

88

Steel

Age Opens

In 1856, Bessemer announced the details of his method.

Iron-makers were enthusiastic. "blast

furnaces"

very poor grade.

manufacture

to

Imagine their horror

They

invested fortunes in

when they found

new way.

the

steel

their

product was

They heaped Bessemer with

abuse.

He

returned to his experimenting. It

turned out that iron ore which contained phosphorus

could not be used in

this

method. The phosphorus

mained behind and made the

steel brittle.

re

In his experi

ments, Bessemer had happened to use phosphorus-free iron ore.

He longer

announced listen.

this fact,

but the iron-makers would no

They had had enough

Bessemer borrowed

money and put up

in Sheffield, England, in 1860.

free iron ore steel for

of the "crackpot." So

He

his

own steel-works

imported phosphorus-

from Sweden and began to

$100

a ton less

than any of

sell

high-grade

his competitors.

No

arguing with that.

ways were found of dealing with the phos phorus problem. This made possible the use of America's vast iron ore resources. Bessemer was knighted in 1879.

By

He

1870,

died in London, rich and famous, in 1898.

Cheap steel made possible engineering achievements that were only dreams until that time, for steel beams could be used

as skeletons to

support almost anything.

Railroads began to span continents on steel

rails.

Great

BESSEMER steel

steamed across oceans.

ships

spanned

89

rivers.

Skyscrapers

Suspension bridges

began climbing upward.

Tractors could be made stronger, and soon automobiles arrived, and they could have too,

new and

frameworks of

steel.

stronger guns thundered while

In war,

new and

stronger armor-plate resisted.

The

Iron

Age came

Today, aluminum, lightness

is

strength

is

to an

glass,

and

end and the Steel Age began. plastic

more important than concerned, this

have taken over where

strength.

is still

the

But where sheer

Age

of Steel

Edward He Found

IN JULY

1796,

a

to Prevent Disease

Way

Europe was

Jenner

Napoleon Bona in Italy. Revolu

in turmoil.

was winning his first great victories tion was everywhere. Old ways were being overturned. parte

As

that weren't enough, an English doctor

if

Edward Jenner was doing what seemed

He

was

a

named

monstrous thing.

deliberately trying to give the horrible disease of

smallpox to an eight-year-old boy.

from the

blisters

Taking

clear fluid

of a victim of smallpox, he scratched the

fluid into the skin of the

boy. This should have made

it

boy would soon come down with smallpox. Jenner waited to see what would happen. With great

certain that the

relief

he realized that his expectations were correct.

boy did not at

get smallpox.

He showed no

The

signs of sickness

all.

Jenner was no monster, but a benefactor of mankind.

He

had proved he knew

doing, he influenced

how

human

than did Napoleon, with

all

to prevent smallpox.

In so

destiny to a far greater extent his victories.

Perhaps Napoleon realized

this.

In 1802 a number of

English civilians were held as prisoners, after

war between

JENNER

91

England and France had broken out following peace. Napoleon was petitioned to release them.

when he

about to refuse

one of the

learned that

a short

He was

Edward Jenner was

The would-be conqueror of Europe conqueror of smallpox. The English

petitioners.

dared not refuse the

men were

released.

Edward Jenner was born in Gloucestershire, England, on May 17, 1749. At the age of twenty he began to study medicine, but, as was true of so

he dabbled in

many

many

He

things.

pioneers in science,

studied geology, wrote

poetry, played musical instruments, was interested in birds, built a balloon.

turned

Fortunately for the world, though, he

down a chance

at a really

have gone with Captain

voyage into the South expedition.

He

glamorous job.

Cook on

He

could

that explorer's second

Seas, as official naturalist for the

chose to remain in England and practice

medicine.

One

of the great problems of medicine in those days

was smallpox, one of the most dreaded of the afflicted

diseases that

mankind. Every once in a while, an epidemic of

smallpox would strike.

Because there was very

knowledge of hygiene, the through the crowded, dirty

As many disease died.

as

little

disease spread like wildfire cities.

who caught the victims who survived were

ten per cent of the people

What's more, the

"pock-marked." That

is,

each

little blister

caused

by

the

He Found a Way

92

(and in severe cases the body was covered

disease

left a

them)

to Prevent Disease

puckered, pitted scar after

it

was gone.

by

Many

people dreaded the horrible disfigurement of the disease

more than they did the chance of death. Smallpox was no respecter of persons. In 1751 George Washington contracted smallpox. He recovered, but his face was permanently scarred as a result. In 1774 King Louis

XV

of France contracted smallpox.

He

In fact, an unscarred face was almost a rarity. a clear just

complexion was enough to make

by

To

contrast with

most others not

a

died.

To

have

woman beautiful

so fortunate.

be sure, one dose of smallpox was

all

anyone could

ever have.

A person who had never had the disease caught

it easily, if

he were exposed to an active case.

Once he had

caught smallpox and recovered, however, he did not catch it

again no matter

"immune.

how much

he was exposed.

He

was

5

In 1718 this fact gave rise to

what seemed

at the

time

An English

noblewoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, returned from a trip to Turkey and reported a wild story.

Turks had

that the

a habit of deliberately inoculating

themselves with fluid taken from mild versions of the disease.

The

person inoculated would then get a mild case

of smallpox and become

Mary had enough children.

immune

faith in this

at a

cheap price. Lady

notion to inoculate her

own

JENNER

93

a brilliant

Lady Mary, although social butterfly,

and doctors

didn't. at that

Englishmen all

that

however.

was worth

Once Jenner

It

woman, was

was hard it

Besides,

was

to take her seriously, difficult to

convince

imitating.

became

started practicing medicine, he

Perhaps he had heard of Lady

Mary's story, and perhaps he had not. of,

kind of

time that Turks could do anything at

interested in smallpox.

did hear

a

What

he certainly

however, was an old "superstition" wide

spread in his native Gloucestershire

"enmity" between cowpox

was an

that there

(a disease that affected cattle

and could be caught by humans) and smallpox. People

who

got one, said the Gloucestershire farmers with a wise

nod of

Was

this really superstition,

was

all, it

was

the head, did not get the other.

a

traditional for

vogue in France

Jenner wondered.

milkmaids to be beautiful. There

at that

time for plays that featured

beautiful milkmaids and shepherdesses.

milkmaids, rarely scarred plexions?

Was

After

by

Was

this

because

smallpox, had clear

that because in their association with

com cows

they caught cowpox instead?

Jenner began to observe domestic animals closely.

There was

a disease of horses called "the grease," in

which there was leg.

a swelling

and

blistering in part of the

People working in stables and barnyards treated the

blisters,

then went on to milk cows. Pretty soon, the

cow

He Found a Way

94

had cowpox. After that the

few

man

(or

to Prevent Disease

woman) might have

These were usually on the hands which handled the cow and never on the face, where dis a

JENNER

smallpox.

a

months

He

reasoned that

by

passing through an

right.

A

few

blisters

of

cowpox on

The

farmers

the hands, and

one need never worry about death or disfigurement from

Of It

Jenner had enough confidence in his

ill.

it

into a boy.

Two

he inoculated the boy again, not with cowsmallpox!

The boy

did not

He was immune!

course, Jenner

wanted

to try

it

again, to

make

pox. During that time he must have gone nearly impatience.

However, he did not publish

maturely, but waited. last,

14, 1796,

Jenner took the fluid from

on her hand and injected

later

found

sure.

took him two years to find someone with active cow-

smallpox.

On May

who had cowpox.

pox, but with the real thing

become

animal the disease became greatly weakened.

were

milkmaid

a blister

Jenner decided that the grease and cowpox were a form of smallpox.

He

theory to undertake a frightful responsibility.

blisters.

figurement was most feared. Furthermore, people handling domestic animals as a profession did, indeed, seem to escape

95

mad with

his results pre

In 1798 he found his

cowpox

at

repeated the experiment with another patient, and

again

it

worked.

Now

Jenner could publish his results

He Found

96

and

tell

The

the

world there was

Latin

word

is

'Vaccinia.'

"vacca"; the Latin for

is

Jenner coined the word "vac

cination" to describe his use of create

immunity

to defeat smallpox.

way

"cow"

for

7

"cowpox"

a

to Prevent Disease

Way

a

cowpox

inoculation to

to smallpox.

So careful was Jenner's work that only tive doctors objected.

Harm was

a

few conserva

done by eager ones

who

had began to inoculate carelessly and spread severe infec Vaccination spread to

tions.

The

British royal

all

parts of Europe.

A

family was vaccinated.

Royal

by Jenner) was founded in 1803 to encourage vaccination. In 18 months, the number of deaths from smallpox was reduced by two thirds.

Jennerian Society (headed

In

Germany, where Jenner's birthday

a holiday, the state of Bavaria

made

cinated there was

The

first

celebrated as

vaccination

com

Even backward

pulsory in 1807. Other nations followed. Russia adopted the practice.

is

child to be vac

named Vaccinov and was educated

at the

expense of the nation.

England was slowest instance, he

him

rates

honor Jenner.

In 1813, for

was proposed for election to the College of

Physicians in London. test

to

The

in the "classics"; that

college, is,

however, wanted to

in the theories of

and Galen. Jenner refused.

He

thought

over smallpox was enough to qualify him.

Hippoc

his victory

The gentlemen

JENNER

97

of the college did not agree with Jenner.

He was

not

elected.

He

died on January 24, 1823, without the membership,

but with

the glory a doctor could have.

all

Smallpox

is

now

a rare disease, thanks to vaccination.

In most countries every child age. If there

is

vaccinated at an early

even a single case of smallpox in some city

is

(brought in usually by ship from some backward region), there

is

once

at

a drive to vaccinate

again, so that an epidemic has

But that a

way to first man

is

to start.

Jenner had discovered

it.

prevent a disease, rather than to cure one to

science of

He

the

by using the body's own develop immunity. Thus he founded the

do

this.

did

it

immunology.

since, doctors

of encouraging the

ous

no chance

only a small part of

machinery to

Ever

everyone in the city

diseases,

by

have been tracking

body

getting

to develop it

down new ways

immunity

to danger

to manufacture chemical de

fenses ("antibodies") against mild versions of the disease.

The

fluids that cause the

recent example

Dr. Jonas Salk. killed

still

called "vac

though they have nothing to do with cows.

cines,"

A

mild disease are

by

disease.

The

is

the Salk vaccine, developed

by

virus that causes infantile paralysis

chemicals, so that It still retains

it

is

can no longer cause the

enough of

its

original properties,

He Found

98

a

Way

to Prevent Disease

however, to cause the body to produce antibodies which will be effective against the living virus.

Injection of the

Salk vaccine increases immunity to infantile paralysis with

out putting you through the disease

itself.

Vaccination also helps fight such diseases as yellow fever, typhoid fever, influenza, tuberculosis,

Mountain spotted

The importance

fever.

of Jenner's

wiped out smallpox.

It

work

is

not just that

diseases.

in time,

it

pointed out a pathway to wipe

out other of man's most dreaded diseases

which may,

and Rocky

be used to ward

a

pathway

off all infectious

Louis Pasteur He Tracked Down the Killers

Louis PASTEUR was born on December not shine

27, 1822.

after graduation,

ambition.

when

a great

Dumas,

It

did

student in his early school days. In college

as a

he did only moderately well in chemistry.

B.

He

was only

It

he attended the lectures of Jean

French chemist, that he was

was not

until

fired

with

then that he decided to devote

his life to science.

Pasteur began his research tartaric acid

and racemic

by studying two chemicals

acid.

These chemicals seemed

to be alike in every respect but one: tartaric acid had an

odd, twisting effect on certain kinds of light; racemic acid did not have this effect. Pasteur's friends laughed at him. little

Why

worry about

thing like that? But Pasteur did worry.

crystals of

scope.

He

a

obtained

both acids and studied them under a micro

The

crystals of tartaric acid

were

all

identical.

Those of racemic acid were of two types. One type looked like crystals

of tartaric acid; crystals of the other type

were mirror images of the pile of gloves,

first.

(It

was

like

looking at a

some right-hand gloves and some

left-hand.)

He

100

With

infinite patience,

two

acid crystals into

Tracked

Down

the Killers

Pasteur separated the racemic

piles.

The

crystals that

looked

like

tartaric acid crystals twisted light just as tartaric acid did.

The

other crystals also twisted light, but in the opposite

direction.

Pasteur had discovered that molecules could be "right-

handed" or 'left-handed." Eventually a revolutionary

new

this

discovery led to

understanding concerning the struc

ture of the important chemicals that

make up

living tissue.

Pasteur's achievement received immediate recognition,

although he was only 26

at

the time.

He was

elected to

membership in France's distinguished Legion of Honor. In 1854 Pasteur became dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the

University of

Lille, in

the heart of the vineyard

country. There he became interested in the problems of France's important wine industry.

went sour result.

as it aged.

Wine and

Millions of francs

beer often

were

lost as a

Wasn't there some chemical that could be added

to prevent this?

The wine and

famous young chemist

now

beer people turned to the

in their midst.

Again Pasteur used the microscope. He looked at the dregs of good wine under the microscope, then compared

them with cells,

the dregs of soured wine.

but the shape of the

cells

was

Both contained yeast different.

There was

a special kind of yeast that soured wine.

This souring-yeast must be

killed,

explained Pasteur.

PASTEUR Once 120

101

the wine or beer F.

That

will kill

is

formed, heat

any yeast

still

it

gently at about

left,

including the

souring-yeast that might have gotten in during the wine-

making. After

that, stopper

The wine-makers were ing wine.

it

and there will be no souring.

horrified at the thought of heat

Pasteur set out to convince them.

some samples,

left others

soured in a number of

heated

unheated, and told the wine-

makers to wait a few months.

were opened they were

He

When

all fine.

cases.

the heated samples

The unheated

ones had

The wine-makers stopped

objecting.

Ever

since,

gentle heating to

kill

undesirable micro

scopic organisms has been termed "pasteurization."

It is

He

102

we

for this reason that

Dovm

Tracked

pasteurize the milk

we

the Killers

drink.

Pasteur, in the process of this research, decided that

fermentation and decay were the

work

of living organisms.

People objected to this theory. After is

boiled to

kill

bacteria,

it

will

all,

even

spoil if

still

all

if

meat

allowed to

stand.

But, said Pasteur, there are germs everywhere, and fall

germs

meat from the

into the

Pasteur boiled meat extract and

air.

left it

exposed to

Dust

neck.

bottom of the germs germs.

in

The meat

S.

cooked meat.

Once and

for

all,

settled

(and germs)

particles

at the

There were no

did not spoil.

No

but

narrow S-shaped

the air could get in only through a long, flask

air,

decay took place without

Pasteur had disproved the theory

of "spontaneous generation" (the belief that living organ

from non-living material) In 1865 Pasteur went to southern France to study a silk-worm disease that was threatening the entire hundredisms could originate

.

million-franc-a-year industry.

Using

his

microscope again, Pasteur located a tiny para

site infesting

silkworms and the mulberry leaves that were

fed to them. Pasteur said: destroy the infested

Begin

leaves

and they will stay that way.

all

worms and

over again with healthy

leaves.

worms and

It

worked.

clean

The

industry was saved.

Pasteur himself almost was not.

He

had a paralytic

PASTEUR

103

stroke in 1868, and for a while thought he die.

was going

to

Fortunately he recovered.

war with

In 1870 France was tricked into fighting a Prussia.

The

steadily developing

under

The French were caught mediately tried to

a policy of

"blood and iron."

unprepared. Louis Pasteur im

enlist.

His offer was firmly refused.

"Monsieur Pasteur," the army are 48

had been

military might of the Prussians

officers told

and you have had a paralytic stroke.

him, "you

You

can serve

France better outside the army." France was

defeated.

disastrously

The conquering

Prussians imposed an indemnity of five billion francs

The Prussians thought this would keep France

the French.

helpless for years to

come. France astounded the world

the indemnity in full within a year.

by paying

Where

upon

money? From the work of who had saved France's industries and made

did France get the

Louis Pasteur,

her prosperous.

By now

the discoveries of Pasteur were beginning to

make sound

sense to

about certain

human

some

doctors.

ailments?

were caused by microscopic

They

Was

it

asked:

What

possible that they

parasites?

In England, Joseph Lister, a surgeon, was heartsick over the fact that half his patients died of infection after surgery

was

successfully completed.

In some other hospitals, 80

per cent of the patients died.

Suppose, Lister reasoned,

tie Tracked

104

he were to "pasteurize"

Suppose he

killed the

wounds and in

germs

them

as

Down

the Killers

surgical incisions.

Pasteur killed yeast

in wine.

In 1865 Lister began to use carbolic acid

on wounds.

In three years he cut the death rate after surgery thirds.

He had invented

"antiseptic surgery."

by two

You imitate

you put iodine on a cut. the war, Pasteur came to Lister's conclu

Lister every time

In 1871, after

He was appalled He forced doctors

death rate in

sion independently.

at the

military hospitals.

(often against their

will) to boil their instruments

and steam

Kill the germs, he insisted, kill them.

their bandages.

And

the death rate

fell.

(About 25 years Semmelweis, had

Semmelweis

an Austrian physician, Ignaz

earlier,

tried to force disinfection

cried out that doctors

He

ing disease on their hands. their hands with bleaching

on doctors.

were murderers, carry

tried to get

powder

them

wash

to

solutions before ap

proaching a patient. Semmelweis got nowhere and died a failure in 1865 after accidentally infecting himself.

did not live to see Lister and Pasteur prove

him

what we now

call

Pasteur gradually adopted

He

right.)

the "germ"

theory of disease." Every infectious disease, he decided,

was caused by germs.

It

was

infectious because

germs

could be carried from one person to another. Locate the

PASTEUR germ, he

said, find

quered the

grow

out

how

to fight

it,

and you've con

disease.

A German to

105

doctor, Robert

disease

Koch, developed techniques

germs outside the body. Together he and

Pasteur learned to control disease after disease.

man and German

united to serve humanity.

French

The

1880's

He

learned

to inoculate against the animal diseases of anthrax

(which

were the most dramatic years of

killed cattle

protect

Pasteur's

life.

and sheep) and chicken cholera, and

man

hydrophobia.

against the

dread disease of

how

to

mad dogs-

He

106

Dramatic

as these

Tracked

Down

were, they were only the natural con

sequence of the germ theory of disease, and early

work which

September

led to that.

1895,

28,

the Killers

When

it

was

Pasteur's

Pasteur died on

modern medicine had become

a

reality.

The germ

theory of disease was probably the greatest

single medical discovery in history.

was adopted,

disease

could be

Once

the

germ theory

fought systematically.

Drinking water could be boiled or chemically treated; sewage-disposal became a science; sterile procedures were

developed in hospitals and in the commercial preparation of food; disinfectants and germ-killers were developed; germ-carriers such as mosquitoes and rats were fought relentlessly.

In country after country, as these things were done, the

death rate

fell

and

life

expectancy rose. In 1850 the

expectancy of the American male was 38 years; is

68.

Thank

life

now

it

Louis Pasteur and his fellow scientists for

some of those 30

years.

Gregor Johann Mendel The Mystery

IN 1900 three

strangers

met

of Heredity

at a crossroads of research.

Each, without knowledge of the other two, had worked out the rules that govern inheritance of physical character istics

by

The

living things.

three were

Hugo

de Vries of

Holland, Carl Correns of Germany, and Erich Tschermak of Austria-Hungary.

Each made ready

to

announce

his

discovery to the

world. In preparation, each looked through previous issues of various scientific journals, to check earlier field.

Each, to

his astonishment,

in a

copy of an obscure publication. Mendel,

observed

all

the

phenomena

in the

found an amazing paper

by someone named Gregor Johann Mendel old

work

3 5 -year-

in 1865,

that the three scientists

had

were

preparing to report in 1900.

Each made the same one of the

own

decision.

With an honesty

glories of scientific history, each

that

abandoned

his

claims and called attention to Mendel's discovery.

Each man advanced

his

own work

only

as

confirmation.

Gregor Johann Mendel was born of peasant parents 1822.

is

He

lived his life quietly

and uneventfully

in

except

The Mystery of Heredity

108 as a

for his great discovery

monk, and

later

an abbott, in

an Augustinian monastery in Bruenn, Austria. is

now

called

Brno and

is

(The

city

part of Czechoslovakia.)

Mendel had two hobbies,

and gardening, a

statistics

combination he put to good use. For eight years, starting in 1857,

he raised peas. Carefully, Mendel self-pollinated

various plants, making sure that the seeds

produced would parent.

Carefully, he saved the seeds produced

studied the

new

generation.

found that if he planted seeds from dwarf pea

second generation

The dwarf

his

also

tall

seeds

produced by

produced only dwarf pea

plants.

way. Some

pea plants did not always behave in quite tall

pea plants (about a third of those in

garden) did breed true, producing

eration after generation.

Of

The

plants,

pea plants "bred true."

Seeds from this

by each

planted them separately, and

only dwarf pea plants sprouted. this

from only one

characteristics

inherit

self-pollinated pea plant,

He

which were thus

The

tall

pea plants gen

majority, however, did not.

some produced tall plants, and the of others produced dwarf plants. There were always

these, the seeds of

seeds

about three times seeds as

dwarf

as

many

tall

plants

produced by these

plants.

Apparently, then, there were two kinds of plants, the true-breeders

Mendel then went

tall

pea

and the non-true-breeders.

a step further.

He

cross-bred dwarf

MENDEL plants

109

with true-breeding

tall plants.

Now the seeds would

be the product of two unlike parents.

happen?

Would

What would

the offspring be some dwarf and

some

tall?

No,

indeed.

Every

The

a tall plant!

resulting "hybrid" seed

characteristic of

produced

dwarf ness seemed to

have disappeared.

Next Mendel studied the results. type.

One

ing dwarf

self-pollinated

each hybrid plant and

They were

of the non-true-breeding

all

quarter of the seeds developed into true-breed

plants.

ing

tall plants.

tall

plants.

One

One

quarter developed into true-breed

half developed into non-true-breeding

Apparently, non-true-breeding

tall

plants contain within

themselves the characteristics of both tallness and dwarfness.

only

When tallness

the

two

showed;

it

characteristics

was "dominant." Dwarfness, how

ever, although "recessive" It

showed up

were both present,

and not

visible,

in the next generation.

was

still

there.

The Mystery

110

Mendel thus had

his "first

law of inheritance."

studied the inheritance of other characteristics

oped further

He

also

and devel

rules.

But he was only an amateur and could not important

of Heredity

scientists in his

in a small local journal

He

work.

interest

any

published his paper

and no one paid

attention.

It lay

unnoticed for 35 years.

Mendel died in 1884 without continuing his work, which had ended in 1865, or living to see his work recognized.

The ics."

now called "genet young science, and much remains to be Careful studies of how certain physical

science founded

It is still a

learned about

it.

by Mendel

is

abnormalities are inherited will help doctors, someday, in advising for or against certain marriages.

It will

help them

to be prepared for the likely occurrence of a disease such as diabetes in a particular individual.

Genetics points to the past

as

well as the future. Study

of the patterns of inherited blood groups gives hints of the routes taken in the migrations of primitive man.

The

genetics of micro-organisms has also developed a

unique importance. ability to

molds and

The manner

of inheritance of the

perform certain chemical syntheses in various bacteria, has enlightened biochemists as to the

by which certain body chemicals are formed. work of this sort that Drs. G. M. Beadle and E. L.

exact routes It is

for

Tatum

recently received a

Nobel

Prize.

William Henry Perkin He Opened Wide

a

Chemical Wonderland

16 IN 1856, when William Henry Perkin was only eighteen, a casual

on an impossible task. Out he snatched fame for himself and

remark sent him

of his failure at that task,

off

gave the world an Aladdin's lamp of chemical wonders.

At

that time,

W.

chemist, A.

young Perkin was assistant to a German von Hofmann. Hofmann had been invited

England eleven years earlier to establish a center for teaching chemistry and carrying on research. Hofmann

to

was then fascinated

chiefly interested in

by

air.

Coal

tar

stances out of

pounds.

things.

the chemicals in coal

substance one could obtain of

two

was

by heating

a mixture of

tar,

First,

he was

a sticky black

coal in the absence

complex organic sub

which the chemist could build new com

Second,

Hofmann was

interested in applying

chemistry to medicine.

After

all,

Hofmann wondered aloud one

day,

why

could

not quinine, the medicine used to battle malaria, be formed from the chemicals in coal tar. There would then be no

need to import quinine from South America. Perkin's interest

lit

up.

He

obtained coal tar chemicals

He Opened Wide

112

a Chemical

Wonderland

and began to experiment with them in the laboratory he had

set

up

in his home. Perkin did not

know

that to pre

pare quinine from coal tar chemicals was impossible with the chemical

knowledge

he got nowhere in

One

available at that time.

Of

course,

his impossible task.

day, after he

tar

chemicals) and potassium dichromate, and was about to

that a purplish glint at the

his beaker,

he stopped.

Was

He

added

bottom of the gunk?

alcohol to see whether he could dissolve anything out of the mess.

The

The

first

alcohol turned a beautiful purple.

artificial

12, 1838.

113

His father,

who was

own

footsteps.

to follow in his

William watched istry.

That was

a friend

it.

History repeated

had mixed aniline (one of the coal

pour out the usual mess in

PERKIN

dye had been discovered.

Perkin,

purely by accident, had opened a world of color.

William Henry Perkin was born in London on March

a builder,

At

14,

wanted

his

son

however, young

perform experiments

in

chem

He knew what his life work would be. itself.

Once

the great scientist Michael

the Faraday had found youthful inspiration in attending lectures of Humphrey Davy. Now William Perkin found the same kind of inspiration in attending the lectures of

Michael Faraday. In those days English educators had a low opinion of the chemistry. City schools taught the subject only during

lunch

recess,

The Royal

not expecting

many

students to be interested.

course College of Science had a fairly good

in chemistry only because

it

had imported Hofmann.

He Opened Wide

114

a Chemical

Wonderland

shown

the time Perkin was 17, however, he had

By

himself so capable at the Royal College that

took him on

an

as

assistant.

The

Hofmann

next year Perkin dis

covered his purple substance. Perkin's sharp

mind saw

a possible use as a dye.

from the indigo the

madder

tically

at

once that the substance had

In 1856 blue indigo (obtained

plant) and red alizarin

plant)

(from the root of

were the chief dyes. There were prac

no others that would hold firmly

to textiles without

being washed out or faded by exposure to sun and weather.

A

friend suggested to Perkin that he send a sample of

his material to a firm in this stuff

Yes,

Scotland interested in dyes.

Would

do? he asked.

came back the excited answer, provided

it

could

be produced cheaply.

Perkin faith.

He

now

reached

a decision that

took courage and

patented his process for making the dye, which

he called Aniline Purple. a businessman.

Hofmann

Then he

left

school and became

objected, but Perkin

went

his

own way stubbornly. What Perkin needed most was money. He could raise none from bankers, for who would listen to a teen-ager who wanted to make color out of coal? However, Perkin's father and elder brother tossed their life savings into the

venture.

In 1857 the Perkin family started to build their

dye factory.

PERKIN

115

They had

to start

they had to get It

from scratch

aniline, for there

First

way.

was scarcely any available.

had few uses in 1857. So Perkin had to buy benzene

from coal

(also derived

an exorbitant price and make aniline out of

tar) at

do

in every

this,

it.

To

He couldn't get any had to make his own from Chile salt

he needed strong nitric acid.

strong enough, so he

At every

peter and sulfuric acid.

step of the

game, Perkin

needed special equipment to carry out the necessary chemi cal reactions.

Some today

None

existed

and he had

to design his

own.

of the equipment used in the manufacture of dyes still

follows Perkin's original designs.

Finally he began producing Aniline Purple.

Fortune then smiled. English dyers were conservative, as

Englishmen usually

it

in a big

are,

but the French dyers went for

way. The color resembled the color of the

petals of a flower

whose

official

name

is

"Malva

so the French called the color "mauve."

color in their

new

fashions.

Paris,

center of the fashion world. Perkin's factory sold

all

sylvestris,"

They

then as now, was the

Mauve became

the dye

it

used the

the rage.

could turn out.

The

young chemist found himself suddenly rich and famous. When he was still only 23, Perkin was the world au thority

on

dyes,

and he lectured on them before London's

Chemical Society. Michael Faraday himself was in the audience.

Teacher and student had changed

places.

He Opened Wide

116

Chemists in other countries

now

Wonderland

a Chemical

new

entered the

field

Hofmann, Perkin's teacher, returned to 1865 and became professor of organic chem

of synthetic dyes.

Germany

in

istry at the University of Berlin.

Hofmann,

investigate dyes (as Perkin's student, in a

England had been

first

too,

way)

.

began to

Although

in the field, she could not hold out

Germany's greater over-all achievements in organic chemistry. This is the branch of chemistry which deals

against

with compounds of carbon, which are typically found in living organisms.

While Perkin was the

two

chemists

countries

active in business, the race

was

worked out

fairly even.

For

way

of

German

the chemical structure of alizarin,

the most famous of the natural dyes. a race to find a

instance,

between

making

it

Now

there began

cheaply in the laboratory.

Perkin solved the problem in 1869 and applied for a patent.

The German same time.

chemists solved the problem at about the

They

applied for a patent one day sooner.

Nevertheless, Perkin manufactured alizarin in quantities

by arrangement with

the Germans.

Again

his

factory

prospered.

Ten

Germans synthesized indigo. This was no battle. The Germans were in control.

years later the

time there

They remained

War In

the dye-makers of the

world

until

World

I.

1874 Perkin, then only

35,

was independently

PERKIN

117

wealthy. He sold chemical research.

His career

his

factory and turned to his

in research

was

also fruitful.

first

love,

In 1875 he

synthesized coumarin, a substance that had a pleasant odor. This pointed the way to the synthetic perfume industry.

Honors of all sorts were showered on Perkin, but the climax came in 1906, the fiftieth anniversary of his dis covery of Aniline Purple. He was knighted, then honored at special gatherings in

Europe and America.

York the Perkin Medal was founded in given to those

who made

plied chemistry.

At

his

In

New

honor, to be

important contributions to ap

these dinners ties

were worn which

He Opened Wide

118

Chemical Wonderland

a

had been dyed with the original batch of Aniline Purple.

Some

of these

by winners of

treasured

ties still exist,

the

Perkin Medal.

Perkin died the next year, on July 14, 1907. Life before

him was been

largely colorless.

rare.

The

city of

Good

dyes in ancient times had

Tyre owed

its

prosperity to a

secret

method

snail.

This "Tyrian Purple" was so expensive that

for

making

a purple

used only by the very rich.

At

dye out of

a species of it

was

the time of the Byzantine

Empire, only the emperor could use

it.

From

this

comes

our expression "born to the purple." Perkin found the world drab; he

left it colorful.

Thou

sands of dyes of every shade and tint have been discovered

showed the way. Almost anyone today can colors so numerous and brilliant as to put a Roman

since Perkin dress in

emperor to shame.

More

important, Perkin's

a substance

work showed

manufactured in the

test

the

world

that

tube did not have to

be a mere imitation, a poor substitute for the real thing

found

on

in nature.

Synthetics, he showed, could improve

nature. Synthetic dyes put natural dyes out of business,

not just because the synthetics were cheaper, but because they were better. Success in the chemical synthesis of dyes led to renewed efforts in other fields.

from

fabrics

Today

synthetics range

all

the

way

and rubber to drugs and chemical additives to

PERKIN

119

make our food more wholesome and

World War

II

palatable.

During

chemists produced even a substitute for

quinine to treat malaria

as if finally to vindicate

Perkin

in his "impossible" task.

Today fidently.

the chemist redesigns nature

boldly and con

Roentgen and Becquerel They Discovered

Invisible

Rays

PROFESSOR WILHELM ROENTGEN was fascinated by the mysterious illumination that resulted discharged in a tube from which

when all

electricity

was

the air had been

pumped.

The

eerie illumination inside the

tube seemed to

the negative electrode, or "cathode," so the

was referred glass

to as "cathode rays."

start at

phenomenon

When the

rays hit the

of the tube, the glass glowed with a greenish

light.

Certain chemicals placed near the tube glowed (or "lu

minesced") even more brilliantly than did the

Roentgen was particularly interested

On November

cence.

5,

glass.

in the lumines

1895, he enclosed his cathode

ray tube in a box made of thin, black cardboard and dark

ened the room. Thus he would be able to observe the luminescence without the interference of outside

He

turned on the electricity. Almost

light that did not

come from

at

once a

light.

flash of

the tube caught his eye.

He

looked up. Quite a distance from the tube, he happened to have a sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide.

He used the

paper in his experiments because barium

ROENTGEN AND BECQUEREL

121

platinocyanide was one of the chemicals that glowed

when

placed near the cathode ray tube.

But

why

should

it

be glowing

now? The tube was

in

a cardboard box.

Roentgen turned

became

dark.

He

off the electricity.

The

coated paper

turned on the electricity again.

paper glowed once more.

He

walked into the next room

with the coated paper, closed the door, and pulled the blinds.

was

The

The paper continued

to

down

glow while the tube

in operation.

He

had discovered something

invisible that

was

"felt"

They Discovered

122

through cardboard and closed doors. Years scientist,

did

you think?" he wanted

Roentgen answered,

to

"I didn't think.

Roentgen was giving

course,

think

later

Rays

another

meeting Roentgen, asked about that experience.

"What Of

Invisible

know. I

experimented."

a flip answer.

He

did

very deeply.

Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was born on March 27, 1845, in Lennep, a small town in the Ruhr section of west ern Germany. For most of his early outside

Germany.

He

life,

however, he lived

received his primary education in

Holland, and went to college in Zurich, Switzerland. It

was only

covered

after

his life

he had finished college that he

work.

dis

In 1868 he was graduated from

college with a degree in mechanical engineering.

When he

decided to go on for advanced degrees in Zurich, he came

under the influence of

a

well-known

physicist,

August

Kundt. Under him, Roentgen became interested in physics

and received

his

after, teacher

Ph.D. in that subject. For

six

years there

and student worked together.

Kundt accepted

positions in

Germany. Roentgen ac

companied him. Soon he was teaching and doing research

on

his

own.

Roentgen

rose steadily in his profession. In 1888 a

institute of physics

was opened

at the

University of

burg in Bavaria. Roentgen was invited to head

it.

new

WurzIt

was

ROENTGEN AND BECQUEREL

123

there that he discovered his penetrating rays and

won world

fame.

The

mysterious rays that caused chemicals to luminesce

through cardboard and doors were called "Roentgen rays" in

honor of the discoverer. Roentgen

their

unknown

their

honor of

nature, gave his rays the mathematical

symbol for the unknown. is

himself, in

He

called

them "X

rays."

That

common name.

Roentgen experimented vigorously.

He

found what

thicknesses of various materials could be penetrated

by

X rays. He discovered that they would fog a photographic would.

plate, just as sunlight

December

28, 1895.

The

He

published his results on

scientific

world was amazed.

A number of scientists found that they had encountered these mysterious rays.

who had worked

William Crookes, a

with cathode

rays,

British scientist

had noticed several

times that photographic films nearby had become fogged.

He

had thought

it

accidental and paid

1890 an American physicist, A. ally

produced what

we now

call

W.

no

In

Goodspeed, had actu

an X-ray photograph, but

he was not sufficiently interested to follow the nature of the

attention.

it

up and prove

phenomenon.

Roentgen's work caught the imagination of a French scientist,

Henri Antoine Becquerel, seven years younger

than Roentgen. Becquerel was the son of an eminent scien-

They Discovered

124 tist.

Invisible

Rays

BecquerePs father had been interested in a type of

luminescence called "fluorescence." Fluorescent materials

glowed upon exposure

which contains

to ultra-violet light or to sunlight,

ultra-violet rays.

Becquerel wondered: Could mysterious

X

rays in

light,

and put

He

paper.

film in black paper, put

a crystal of a fluorescent

it

in sun

chemical upon the

used a chemical his father had been particularly

interested in, a

uranium compound.

when

was developed it was found be fogged. Ordinary sunlight would not have passed

Sure enough, to

have any

In February 1896, Becquerel

it?

wrapped photographic

this fluorescence

the film

through the black paper, but decided the uranium

salt

X

rays could.

was giving

off

X

Becquerel

rays as

it

fluo-

resced.

Then came not continue

a series of

cloudy days and Becquerel could

his experiments.

His wrapped photographic in the drawer.

He

anyway. Perhaps sisted.

he was

his crystals

restless.

remained

decided to develop some of the films little

of the original fluorescence per

crystals hadn't

been exposed to sunlight for

At least it was something to

Imagine as

and

plates

1

Perhaps there would be some faint fogging, even

though the days.

a

By March

his

do.

amazement when he found the

strongly as ever.

He

film fogged

quickly found that exposure to

sun was unnecessary. Uranium

salts

gave off a radiation

ROENTGEN AND BECQUEREL

125

more penetrating than X rays. nature of the cathode rays was established.

constantly, one even

By J. J.

1897 the

Thomson, an English

physicist,

showed

that the rays

consisted of tiny particles speeding at breakneck velocities.

What's more, these

They were

atoms.

discovered, and

When

first

were much smaller than

"sub-atomic particles" to be

called "electrons."

these electrons smashed into atoms, they re

except that

trating.

the

were

leased energy in a light,

particles

Thus,

form it

when

that did indeed resemble ordinary

was more energetic and more pene these speeding electrons (or cathode

rays) struck the anode in a cathode ray tube,

produced. These

X rays were part of the

spectrum, of which visible light

As sist

is

X rays were

electromagnetic

another part.

for Becquerel's uranium rays, these proved to con

of three parts.

The most

penetrating part, called

gamma radiation, was similar to X rays but more energetic. The rest of the radiation was made up of electrons and helium nuclei.

A

complete revolution took place in physics. Before

1896 the atom had been considered a tiny, unsplittable particle, the smallest portion of matter.

found to be made up of properties. ally

Some

still

Suddenly

it

was

smaller particles with strange

atoms, such as those of uranium, actu

broke up into simpler atoms,

all

by

themselves.

This proof that atoms disintegrate and emit electrons

126

opened a great new world to

They Discovered science.

Invisible

Rays

There followed 60

years of rapid advances that led to nuclear physics and ex ploration of the atom.

Roentgen's discovery, from the standpoint of pure

sci

was supremely important. But before that became apparent to the average man, there was an immediate ad

ence,

vance in medicine that affected almost everyone.

X rays penetrate the soft tissues

of the

body

easily,

but

by bone and entirely stopped by metal. rays, passing through the body to a photographic film behind, show light gray where bones stop most of them,

are largely stopped

X

gray and fogged in varying degree elsewhere.

ROENTGEN AND BECQUEREL Doctors found they had

body

quickly, easily and

a

127

way of looking into the human above

without cutting.

all

Small breaks in bones could be discovered; disorders in the joints; the beginnings of tuberculosis in lungs; foreign objects in the stomach

had

in short, the doctor

of magic eye at his disposal.

a

kind

Only four days

after

news

X

rays

were

of Roentgen's discovery reached America,

used to locate a bullet in a patient's

leg.

The

dentist, too,

had a magic eye. He could look for the beginnings of de cay in teeth with Roentgen's invisible radiation.

X

rays (and

gamma

rays) can

kill living tissue,

and

if

which the surgeon's knife cannot reach. Today, however, we know they must be used with caution, and only when necessary. f ocussed

properly can

In industry, too,

X

kill

cancer

cells

rays are used.

They can

ternal flaws in the structure of metals, flaws that invisible otherwise.

detect in

would be

In chemistry they are used to probe

the atomic structure of crystals and of complex protein

molecules.

In both cases, they open

what was previously hidden. Thanks to Roentgen, we can use the invisible to

make

new windows

odd though

the invisible visible.

it

into

sounds

Thomas Alva Edison Bringer of Light

18 As THE Industrial Revolution progressed in the nineteenth century, the houses and

cities

and more prosperous. Better

larger

ing the hours of darkness. gas,

but the flickering gas

The open

mean

one knew that

What

grew

was needed dur

Illumination was provided jets

by

did not give enough light. fire,

and gas

death.

course, there

passed.

light

flames also increased the danger of

leaks could

Of

of the western world

was the power of

Every

electricity.

electricity heated wires through which if

glow? Wouldn't

a

it

wire could be heated to a white-hot

that serve as illumination?

Beginning about 1800, for three quarters of a century inventors tried to use electricity to produce light. thirty inventors or failed.

The

would-be inventors came,

theory was plain and simple, but

impossible to overcome the practical

In 1878

Some

tried, it

and

seemed

difficulties.

Thomas Alva Edison, then

31,

announced that

he would tackle the problem. Instantly, the news spread

around the world. So absolute was the

faith in his ability,

EDISON

129

that illuminating gas stocks

tumbled in value in

and London. For Edison had

He was

man whose

the

just

made

New York

a machine talk.

achievements had convinced peo

ple he could invent anything.

Thomas A. Edison was born ruary 11, 1847.

He showed

fact, his curious

way

in Milan, Ohio,

no early

on Feb

signs of genius.

In

of asking questions was taken for

"queerness" by the neighbors. His teacher at school told

him he was "addled." Edison's mother, a former was

furious.

She took young

Tom

teacher,

out of the school at

once.

Tom hands. subject,

Edison found

He

his real

school in books and in his

read everything he could find on almost every

and

his

unusual mind began to show

remembered almost everything he

read,

itself.

He

and he gradually

learned to read almost as quickly as he could turn the pages.

When

he began to read books on science, he began to

experiment, too.

He

set

up

a chemical laboratory in his

house, to his mother's despair. cals

The

cost of

buying chemi

and equipment drove him to earning money.

First,

he tried raising vegetables for

sale.

Then,

at the

age of 14, he got a job as a newsboy on a train between

Port

Huron and

Detroit,

Mich.

(During the stop

at

Detroit, he spent his time in the library.)

His regular earnings were not enough. So he bought

130

Bringer of Light

second-hand printing equipment and began to publish a

weekly newspaper. Soon he was

selling

400 copies of each

issue to the train travelers.

With

the

money he

earned, he set

up

a chemical lab

oratory in the baggage car. There he could experiment to his heart's content.

a section of

But things did not go

rough track, a

jar of

well.

Once, on fell

phosphorus

and

was put out, but the furious con ductor boxed Edison's ears and put him and his equipment

broke, causing a

off the train.

fire.

It

That ended

that.

Edison had another misfortune in those days. trying to board a

He hung

make

it.

being

killed.

Edison's

life

Once,

moving train, he found he couldn't quite on wildly,

in danger of falling off

and

A trainman pulled him up and in by his ears. was saved, but the

inner ear was damaged.

He

delicate

mechanism of the

was partly deaf the

rest of

his life.

In 1862 another phase of Edison's year-old

life

began.

Fifteen-

Tom spied a small boy on the train tracks,

freight car rolling

toward him.

He

dashed for the boy and

him out of harm's way. The money with which to reward Tom, pulled

him telegraphy.

with a

grateful father

had no

so he offered to teach

That was worth more

to Edison, of

any amount of money. Edison became one of the fastest telegraph operators of his time. So automatically did he work, the story goes, course, than almost

EDISON

131

when

he received the telegraphed flash that Lincoln

that

had been cally,

assassinated,

he took

down

the message mechani

without being aware of what had happened.

In 1868 Edison went to Boston, where he got a job as a telegrapher.

The

the country

boy by

from

New

other

York's

men

setting

in the office tried to joke with

him down

fastest dot-dasher.

to receive messages

down

Edison took

with ease everything that came over the wire. cheered him

when

They

he finished.

That year Edison patented

his first invention.

It

was a

device to record votes mechanically in Congress.

would speed the business of lawmaking. How Congressman told him that there was no desire to

thought ever, a

He

it

speed proceedings. Sometimes a slow vote was a political necessity. After that,

Edison decided never to invent any

thing unless he was sure

In 1869 he went to

While he was

it

was needed.

New York City to find employment.

in a broker's office, waiting to be inter

was

viewed, a telegraph machine broke down.

It

that reported the price of gold. Fortunes

depended upon

it.

Now

it

had suddenly stopped for no

a device

known

reason.

pandemonium. None of the operators or mechanics could find the trouble. Edison had a look at

The

office

was

in

the machine, and calmly

announced he knew what was

wrong. "Fix

it.

Fix

it,"

shouted the boss wildly. Edison re-

132

Bringer of Light

few minutes and was offered

a job

a better-

paying one than he had ever had before.

He

didn't stay

paired

in a

it

long. In a

few months he decided to become

a professional

inventor, beginning with a stock-ticker he

during his stay in Wall Street.

It

was

had devised

a device to

keep

brokers up to date on stock prices.

Edison offered to of a large

Wall

mind whether

the invention to the president

sell

But he couldn't make up

Street firm.

to ask $3,000, or take a daring chance

ask for $5,000. Losing his courage, he said, offer."

The Wall

Street

man

said,

his

and

"Make me an

"How about $40,000?"

Edison, only 23, was in business. For the next six years

Edison worked ventions, naps,

how

in

Newark,

New

Jersey, turning out in

working about 20 hours

a day, sleeping in cat

and developing a group of capable

assistants.

Some

he found time to get married.

Lots of

money came

in,

but to Edison

money was only

something to invest in more experiments. In 1876 Edison set up a laboratory in Jersey.

It

was

to be an "invention factory."

to be able to produce a

The "Wizard

Menlo Park,

of

new

Menlo Park"

He

New

hoped

invention every ten days. (as

he came to be called)

patented well over a thousand inventions before he died, a

record no other inventor has ever approached.

Menlo Park, Edison improved the telephone and made it workable. There he invented what proved to be In

EDISON his

own

133

the phonograph.

favorite accomplishment

He

put tinfoil on a cylinder, set a free-floating needle skim

ming over

and connected a receiver to carry sound

it,

waves to and from the needle. nounced, will

talk.

chanic

own who

tions.

But Edison won.

His

This machine, he an

associates

laughed

him, including the

at

me

had built the machine to Edison's specifica

He

talked into the receiver while

the foil-covered cylinder revolved under the needle.

Then

he placed the needle at the beginning of the cylinder and his its

own words came fleece was white

out

as

at

him: "

"Mary had

a

little

lamb,

snow

"Gott im Himmel," cried the mechanic

who had

built

the machine.

A

machine that

ished.

The whole world was aston wizard, indeed. So when he next

talked!

Edison was a

announced he would invent an

electric light,

everyone

believed him.

This time, however, Edison had bitten than he could chew. For a while

would

fail.

It

it

off almost

looked

as

more

though he

took him a year and $50,000 to find that

platinum wires would not work.

After hundreds of experiments, Edison found what he

wanted: a wire that would melting or breaking. a

warm

to white heat without

No metal was needed after all

scorched cotton thread; a fragile carbon filament.

only

On

October

a filament.

It

electric light

21, 1879,

Edison

set

was

a reality!

On the

with such

next

New Year's Eve,

Menlo Park was illuminated by

tricity in a public demonstration. all

a bulb

burned for forty continuous hours. The

the main street of

from

up

Newspaper

elec

reporters

the world came to cover the event, and to marvel

at history's greatest inventor.

That was the climax of Edison's

life.

He

never again

reached this peak, although he worked on for more than half a century.

He

patented crucial inventions that

made

motion pictures and the whole electronics industry pos

A stream of inventions issued out of Edison's work

sible.

shop until he died on October

18, 1931, at the age of 84.

To be sure, Edison was no scientist. He discovered only one

new phenomenon

patented in 1883.

from

It

the "Edison effect."

This he

involved the passage of electricity

a filament to a metal plate inside an incandescent

heralded at lamp globe. The discovery was not widely the time. Edison himself did not pursue it. But it made possible the radio tube

and

all

the electronic marvels of

today.

Abstract knowledge did not concern Edison.

He

was

136

Bringer of Light

a practical man, interested in arranging abstract discoveries

of others into useful devices.

Nor

do the devices themselves represent Edison's great

contribution to our

life.

We

enjoy the phonograph,

tion pictures, the electric light, the telephone, and

made

other things he

admit that

if

possible or practical.

Still,

he had not invented them, someone

have, sooner or

later.

of inventions

as

might

air."

his time,

people thought

He showed

were not a matter of luck or

we must

put invention

being strokes of luck. Edison

inventions on order.

the

He

But Edison did more than invent.

on a mass-production basis. Before

all

else

These things were "in the

mo

worked out

people that inventions

a brainstorm.

Genius, he

was one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Inventions required hard working and hard said,

thinking.

People came to expect invention and improvement in their daily life as a matter of course.

material progress. engineers,

things.

difficult to

pinpoint any particular invention as

Edison's breakthrough.

was the whole

made

expect

to assume that scientists,

and inventors would always find new and better

ways of doing It is

They began

They began to

possible

Edison's contribution to science

idea of continuous, inevitable progress

by dedicated

researchers

working

or individually, to enlarge man's horizon.

as a

group

Paul Ehrlich He

"THE

antibodies," Paul Ehrlich

bullets,

He

Fired a Magic Bullet

which

find their target

would

by

say, "are

magic

themselves."

was speaking of the complicated protein molecules

developed by the body to neutralize the action of germs or their toxins. These "antibodies"

made

a person

immune

They attacked the germs, without body cells. The antibodies were selective,

to certain diseases.

harming the

hitting the bull's-eye of their target

anything

else.

Magic

bullets?

and not damaging

Certainly.

But the body could not manufacture antibodies for Certain tropical diseases caused

diseases.

(tiny one-celled animals) such ,

ness spread

by the

by trypanosomes

deadly sleeping sick

as the

tsetse fly in Africa,

could not be cured.

Ehrlich then took the next great step. the

body

can't

make

a magic bullet,

all

let's

He

thought: If

make one

for

it

in the test tube!

Paul Ehrlich was born on March 14, 1854, in a small

town

in

Germany. Even

in animals

at

and chemicals.

when he went

an early age, he was interested It is

not surprising, then, that

to medical school, he

began to explore the

He

138

effect of certain chemicals

on animal

Fired a Magic Bullet tissues.

In those days, only a few physicians thought of istry in association

chem

with medicine. Fortunately, Ehrlich's

tutor at the University of Strassburg, Professor Waldeyer,

was one who

did.

He

approved Ehrlich's detailed experi

own way. What interested Ehrlich most were various dyes. Chem ists (beginning with Perkin) had just learned how to make

ments and allowed the young

man

to go his

them. Ehrlich was fascinated by the fact that some dyes stained tissues and

some did

stained only certain cells

only certain parts of a

and not

cell

Moreover, some dyes

not.

others.

Some dyes stained

and not others.

This made dyes a useful tool for

biologists.

certain dyes enabled Ehrlich to discover a

He

cell.

wrote

on the

his thesis

Ehrlich's active

For instance,

new kind

staining of cells

mind passed on

by

to something

of

dyes.

else.

If

particular cells could be picked out

methods, perhaps bacteria this

by proper staining might be made more visible in more brightly actually found cases

way. Perhaps some bacteria might

than neighboring body

where some dyes did stain the

this.

cells.

He

Ehrlich also discovered

bacterium of tuberculosis.

interest of

stain

Thus he

Robert Koch, the great doctor

how

to

attracted the

who had

iden

While working with the germ, though, Ehrlich caught a light case of tuberculosis. He went to

tified

the germ.

Egypt

to be cured

by the dry

climate.

EHRLICH

139

Meanwhile, another German doctor, Emil von Behring, had discovered that animals produced chemicals that com bine with germs in some way and make them harmless.

found that these "antibodies" were produced

He first

attack of a

disease.

Thereafter,

after the

that animal

was

immune.

When of

Ehrlich returned from Egypt in 1889, he heard

At once he saw that these antibodies must work way his dyes did. They combined with some cells

this.

the

and not with

He

joined von Behring and

ssss^ss^

-rSfcefe^a^ X'^*.J9 *,

J

others.

j:

D

" -"

'

"=-

-".

aik*
'

-

)<SSg5*

:

-

'

: -*'

.

:

--,.**>: f?- V:

.

,

_

JQD^T *

'

^"J^:I:;

^

^

worked up

a

famous "side-

He

140

chain" theory. This theory explained

Fired a Magic Bullet

how antibodies were

formed and how they worked.

Though most it

of the credit at

first

went

to

von Behring,

was Ehrlich who learned how to induce animals to

produce antibodies by deliberately infecting them with certain germs.

Blood could then be drawn off and the

antibodies in the blood could be concentrated into a serum.

This serum could be injected into human beings to give

them immunity, without making them go through the disease

first.

In 1892 a diphtheria antitoxin (a serum containing anti bodies that neutralized the toxin produced

by

diphtheria

was developed by von Behring and Ehrlich. Ehrlich worked out the treatment for prevention of diph germs)

theria, using this antitoxin.

over the world ever

since.

His technique has been used This achievement

all

won him

a

professorship at the University of Berlin.

Ehrlich quarreled with von Behring, however, and

him

in anger.

Ehrlich always quarreled with his co-

workers. Although a kindly man, he had his

about

how

to run experiments.

him or with him had to

do or

leave.

left

to

own

notions

Anyone who worked

for

do exactly what Ehrlich told him

Most people endured

this treatment, for

Ehrlich was usually right. In 1896 the

German government, impressed by

the

diphtheria antitoxin, opened an institute for serum research

EHRLICH

141

and Ehrlich was put in charge. From then on, to the end of his

life,

The

he was on his own.

research organizations

he ran grew larger and more complicated.

He managed interested in story.

little

When

marry and have children, but he was but his work and an occasional detective

to

his

wife forced him to take a vacation, he

counted the days until

it

was

over.

Although he continued to develop serum treatments for a number of diseases, Ehrlich wasn't satisfied with "serum therapy" alone. that

would help

itself.

He

the

He

body

wanted

to discover chemicals

fight diseases

discovered a dye called

it

couldn't handle

Trypan Red, which

the science of helped destroy trypanosomes. Thus began chemicals (chemotherapy). killing disease germs with

Ehrlich kept looking for something better. that the action of

Trypan Red was caused by

atom combinations

it

He

decided

the nitrogen

contained. Arsenic atoms resembled

nitrogen atoms chemically.

What about arsenic chemicals?

Arsenic chemicals were poisonous, but the

least

poison

compound then known was one called "atoxyl." work (This word means "not toxic.") Ehrlich began by

ous arsenic

ing out the real form of

its

molecule, which chemists had

not yet worked out correctly.

Then

Ehrlich started testing

take? large a dose could they kill

germs?

it

on

animals.

Would it be

large

Just

how

enough to

He

142

He

tried

changing atoxyl a

atoms, shifting old atoms. a third.

He

Fired a Magic Bullet

new

introducing

little,

He tried one variation,

a second,

kept a small army of assistants working out

careful animal experiments, but he kept his

eyes on every step that

was

own

watchful

taken.

Ehrlich wanted a chemical that would

kill

the

germ

without any harmful effect on the animals themselves a chemical

magic

bullet.

Chemical number 50

- 51 - 52 -

122

-

123

- 389-

390Ehrlich simply wouldn't give up. Chemical number 418

"arsenophenylglycine" killer of

worked.

It

was

trypanosomes. But Ehrlich wasn't

a

powerful

satisfied.

He

had to work on. Chemical number 600

601

602

Chemical number

606 ("dihydroxydiamino arsenobenzene hydrochloride")

was

tested in 1907.

ported that

worked

it

But the

had no

working with it re Ehrlich and his institute

assistant

effect.

on.

In 1908, Paul Ehrlich received the Nobel Prize in Medi cine for his

work on serum therapy.

If the

award had been

postponed for two years, he would have received

it

for

something even more important. In 1909, a Japanese student, Dr. Hata, came to for Ehrlich.

To

learn the techniques,

work

Hata repeated some

of the experiments that had already been performed.

He

EHRLICH

143

happened to try chemical number 606 been discarded ment,

At

it

two years

This had

again.

before.

To

his

amaze

turned out to be a powerful germ-killer.

least

chete,"

as useless

it

killed a certain

type of germ called a "spiro-

which had been discovered to cause

a serious

disease, syphilis.

Ehrlich was thunderstruck. In 1910 after numerous

tests,

How

had

it

been missed?

Ehrlich announced the dis

covery to an astonished and enthusiastic world.

One

of

the most tragic diseases had been conquered.

Ehrlich

For the

named chemical 606 "Salvarsan"

rest of his life,

(safe arsenic).

he worked day and night to see to

He

144 it

Fired a Magic Bullet

that the medical profession used the chemical correctly.

On

August

20, 1915, Paul Ehrlich, 61

and worn out by

overwork, died. Salvarsan was the

For

a long time,

one.

The

it

first

major victory of chemotherapy.

looked

as

though

might be the only

medical profession, looking for chemicals to

fight other diseases,

was disappointed.

in 1935, the first of the "sulfa drugs"

Then, covered.

Chemotherapy came

by

British doctors

that,

substance before.

it

first

reported

to life again.

was

Encouraged

began to investigate

a curious

by Alexander Fleming

ten years

That turned out

to be penicillin, a nonpoisonous

chemical that killed or stopped the growth of bacteria.

It

chetes than

was found to be even

was

dis

many

a better killer of spiro-

Salvarsan.

In the next decade a host of antibiotics (bacteria-killing

chemicals produced

by one-celled organisms such as molds)

were discovered.

Now chemotherapy is on the verge of wiping out many types of infections.

The

majority of prescriptions written

today make use of chemicals are helping to lengthen

our

unknown 20 years ago. These life

span.

This modern advance in disease-fighting chemicals, and serums containing antibodies, goes back to one Paul Ehrlich.

man

In one busy lifetime, he developed both

serum therapy and chemotherapy.

Darwin and Wallace They Explored

the Beginnings of Life

2,0 ONE in

of the most astonishing books ever written appeared

1859

a century ago.

1,250 copies were printed,

Only

and every copy was snapped up on the very first day of publication. More printings were prepared, and they too

were swallowed up. The book kindled a raging denounced. is

It

a scientific

of argument.

It

was

was defended. Eventually, it won out. book and not easy to read. Some of it

now outmoded has never lost

fire

in the light of

its

popularity.

A

new knowledge.

Still,

It is it

paperback edition of the

book can be bought for fifty cents. The title of the book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Fa voured Races

in the Struggle for Life.

We know

it.

simply

The Origin of Species. The author was an English naturalist named Charles Robert Darwin. as

Charles Robert

Darwin was born

in

England on Febru

ary 12, 1809 (the very day on which in an obscure log cabin in the American wilderness,

born)

.

Abraham Lincoln was

Unlike Lincoln, Darwin was born in comfortable

146

They Explored

the Beginnings of Life

circumstances of a distinguished family. Darwin's father

and grandfather were physicians.

Erasmus Darwin, was

also a poet

Darwin's schooling was at

His grandfather, Dr.

and

a naturalist.

pointed toward medicine.

first

He even went to Edinburgh, Scotland, to begin his medical training. He quickly found he had no desire to study medicine.

During

this time,

however, he met and grew

Thus he discovered he

friendly with various scientists.

wanted to be

The

a naturalist, like his grandfather.

turning point in his

came

life

when

in 1831,

he

joined the crew of the Beagle. This was a ship making a five-year voyage about the lines

world to explore various coast

and increase man's knowledge of geography. Darwin

went along

as naturalist,

studying the animal and plant

life

of far places.

The Brazil

first

stop was: Tenerife, in the

was the next

and rheas

As they

(large birds

stop.

Canary

There Darwin hunted

which have

traveled southward,

lost the

Islands.

insects

power of flight)

Darwin noticed

.

that as the

climate changed, plant and animal types also changed.

Along the west is

different

coast of

from

that lived only

South America, where the climate

that of the east coast, he

on the west

coast.

skeletons of fossil animals that

animals then

alive.

He

were

saw many types also

dug up the

different

from the

DARWIN AND WALLACE Darwin noticed

a curious thing about "species."

breeds only

among

Darwin noted

that

on the Galapagos

islands off the coast of

had

finch.

day.)

Dogs and

itself.

foxes are separate

for instance, but collies and terriers are not.)

species,

island

(A

a special kind of plant or animal that inter

is

"species"

147

its

own

Ecuador

in

Islands (a

group of

South America) each

species of a bird resembling the English

(These are

still

called "Darwin's finches" to this

He

slightly

found no fewer than 14 types of finch each different from the other. Some had long beaks,

some short

beaks,

some thin

beaks, and

some had hooked

beaks.

Now why should each little island have its own species? Could

it

be there was only one species to begin with, but

that living species,

on separate

islands

had

split

them into

several

each with a beak especially suited for gathering

the food (seeds,

Could one

worms, or

species

insects) that type of finch ate?

change into another?

After leaving the Galapagos

Islands, the

Beagle crossed

the Pacific and stopped at ports in Australia and at islands

along

its coast.

Darwin wondered why

the kangaroo, the

wombat, and the wallaby lived in Australia but were found nowhere else. He reasoned that Australia is really a large island that

rose in

had once been part of Asia.

some

places

and cut

it

off

But the sea

from the mainland.

After it had been separated from the mainland, living things

on the

New

island changed,

came to the conclusion

species appeared.

that species change.

After Darwin returned home, he spent

many

sidering these changes in species. Until his time,

believed

it

was

Darwin

years con

few people

possible for a species to change, and no

one had worked out a good reason to account for the

Darwin needed

change,

About

by

this time,

a clergyman

a reason.

he came across a famous book written

named T. R. Malthus. Malthus held

that

population always increased faster than the food supply, so that

Of

some people would always be dying of

course! thought

Darwin.

starvation.

All animals bring forth

DARWIN AND WALLACE

149

many more young than can possibly supply available. Some would have to for the others.

weren't in

Which would

die?

live

die to

make room

Obviously, those that

as fit as the others for the particular

which they

on the food

surroundings

lived.

To illustrate what this means, suppose one group of dogs were taken

to Alaska to live,

The dogs

in Alaska

who happened

The

coats of hair

to have

somewhat

would survive the cold weather

heavier coats of hair better.

and another group to Mexico.

dogs in Mexico

who had

been born with light

would stand the hot weather

while, only shaggy dogs

would

better.

exist in Alaska,

After a

only sleek

ones in Mexico. There also would be other changes be cause of other differences in the surroundings. After

thousands of years, there might be so that the

two groups of dogs would have become too

different to interbreed. Instead of

now

many

many

differences

be two. This

is

one

species, there

would

an example of what Darwin called

"natural selection."

Darwin he was

started a

still

or someone

was not

book on

working else

at

it.

theory in 1844 and in 1858

His friends urged him to hurry

would get

to be hurried

his

there

first.

and someone

Darwin, however, else

did get there

first.

The man who got there

first

was Alfred Russel Wallace,

another Englishman, 14 years younger than Darwin.

150

They Explored

Wallace's

life

became early

was quite

the Beginnings of Life

like that of

interested in nature.

Darwin. He,

And

too,

he, too, joined

an

expedition to distant lands.

He

traveled to tropical South

America and

also to the

East Indies. In the East Indies he noticed that the plants

and animals

living in the eastern islands of that

(continuing on down different

up

from those

into Asia)

.

sharp, curving

The

into Australia)

in the line

group were completely

western islands (continuing on

between the two types of

between various

islands.

That

life

line

was

is still

called "Wallace's Line" to this day.

In 1855 while in Borneo, Wallace began to think that species

must change with time. Then in 1858 he too began

to think of Malthus' book, and decided changes took place

by

natural selection,

which he

called "the survival of the

fittest."

But there was Wallace. his

this

difference

After 14 years, Darwin was

book. Wallace was not that type.

down

to write,

And

to

and was finished

whom

in-

still

He

two

working on

got his idea, sat

days.

did Wallace send the manuscript for

consideration and criticism? ist,

between Darwin and

Why,

to the famous natural

Charles Darwin, of course.

When Darwin received the manuscript, struck.

It

even used

was exactly

like his

similar language.

own

he was thunder

thoughts.

Darwin was

Wallace

a true scientist.

DARWIN AND WALLACE

151

Although he had been working so long on the theory (and had witnesses to prove it), he did not try to keep all the credit. He passed on Wallace's work at once to

A

other important scientists.

paper signed by both

men

appeared in the Journal of the ~Linnaean Society that year.

The next The Origin

year,

Darwin

produced his great book, public was ready and wait

finally

of Species, and

his

ing for him.

The

biggest hole in Darwin's reasoning was his lack of knowledge as to exactly how parents passed on their characteristics to their descendants,

should vary

among

themselves.

and

why

descendants

Mendel answered

this

152

They Explored

the Beginnings of Life

question in 1865, only six years after Darwin's book was published, but Mendel's

work remained undiscovered until

1900 (see page 107). Darwin died on April never learned lived

much about

19, 1882,

the laws of heredity.

and

Wallace

on to 1913, and was aware of the work of Mendel

and other

geneticists.

Darwin

is

usually thought of as the originator of the

"theory of evolution," the theory that forms, slowly changed, and

modern

life

began in simple

grew more complex

until the

species resulted.

He was

not the originator, of course.

Many

thinkers

Frenchman named Jean

before Darwin, particularly a

Baptiste de Lamarck, had presented such theories earlier.

(Lamarck's theory came 50 years

earlier.)

Even Darwin's

grandfather had such a theory and wrote a long

about

poem

it.

The

great advance of

Darwin and Wallace was

work

to

out the theory of natural selection to explain changes in species.

More important

still,

Darwin presented

mendous amount of evidence and up the theory of

his evidence.

had been merely accepted

logical reasoning to

back

natural selection.

Once Darwin's book came but to accept

a tre

as a fact.

out, biologists

Until then, changes in species

a speculation.

They

had no choice

still

are.

After 1859 they were

DARWIN AND WALLACE The Darwin-Wallace of biologists.

Man,

It

made

idea revolutionized the outlook

the science of

himself, took his place in the

too, like other species,

simpler forms.

153

life

a single science.

scheme of

life.

He,

appeared to have developed from

Mane They Paved

and Pierre Curie the

Way

for the

Atomic Age

21 THE young

couple, Pierre and Marie Curie, began

by

obtaining a ton of waste material from the mines in St. Joachimsthal, Bohemia. give

The mine owners were

glad to

away, but they explained that the Curies would

it

have to pay for shipping

it

to Paris.

The

couple paid.

The

next step was to find a place to work. Marie taught

at a girls' school.

was

It

took almost

On the grounds was

practically falling

"Go

had.

an unused shed that

The

it?

ahead."

roof leaked, there was practically no heat, no

of using decent chemical equipment. pitched

money they

down. Could they use

director of the school shrugged.

The

the

all

Still

way

the couple

in.

The lumps

of black rock were samples of an ore called

contained small amounts of uranium.

Only two years before, Henri Antoine Becquerel had found that pitchblende.

It

uranium gave

off penetrating radiations (see

page 124).

But the Curies were after more than uranium.

They

dissolved batches of the pitchblende in acids, treated

with chemicals, separated some of

its

elements.

it

Thus they

CURIE

155

divided the pitchblende into fractions, then kept those fractions that contained the material they

They were after radiations uranium much stronger. They combined

were seeking.

stronger than those

from

the desired fractions from different

batches of pitchblende and divided the combined material into

new, smaller

fractions.

Weeks, months, years but the fractions became

was backbreaking work, smaller and the radiations they It

gave off grew stronger.

After four years, in 1902, the ton of pitchblende was

reduced to a three-hundredth of an ounce of pure white

powder.

man had

It

was

a

compound

ever seen before.

the glass container

of a

new

Its radiations

which held

it

element, one no

were

so

powerful

could be seen to glow

in the dark.

That glow made the four years of work well worthwhile to the Curies.

activity"

They had

on the

scientific

put the phenomenon of "radio

map,

in letters a mile high.

Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on November 7,

1867. Poland at that time

especially for a

young

girl

learn about the world.

nated

by

Tsarist Russia.

couraged. Polish

girls

was not

a

good place

to live,

with a devouring curiosity to

That part of Poland was domi Education for Poles was not en

were not allowed to go to

Marie was not to be stopped, though.

college.

When she finished

They Paved

156

the

Way

for the Atomic

Age

high school, she borrowed books and tried to teach herself chemistry.

Working

saved up enough

tutor and as a governess, she

as a

money

to send a sister to Paris.

In 1891

The French had

a history

she was able to go there herself.

of sympathy for the oppressed Poles that dated back to the

time of Napoleon.

Many

Poles found refuge in Paris.

Marie could be sure of friends.

But

was more than friends she needed.

it

She registered

tion.

at

It

was educa

France's most famous school, the

Sorbonne, and began absorbing whatever they could give her.

She

unheated

slept in

attics

that she fainted in the classroom.

and had But she

so little to eat

finished in

first

place.

In 1894 a second stroke of good fortune occurred. She

met

a

young man named

Pierre Curie and the

Pierre had already

love.

physics.

He

and

certain crystals

on one

side

and

his

made

name

fell in

for himself in

brother Jacques had discovered that

would develop a negative

The

put under pressure.

a

two

a positive electric charge

one on the other

if

they were

greater the pressure, the greater

the charge. This

"piezoelectricity"

(from the

plus electricity).

Use

is

ceivers, is

phenomenon is called Greek piezein, "to press,"

made

of

it

to this

day in microphones, radio re

and phonographs. Every large radio transmitter

held on frequency

by

a piezoelectric crystal.

In 1895 Marie and Pierre were married.

Marie (now

CURIE

157

studying for her doctor's degree) obtained permission to

work with domestic

her husband, and the

life.

Their

first

two combined work and

daughter, Irene, was born in

1897.

The world revolution.

of science was then at the beginning of a

The

had discovered

air

was charged with new

X rays.

ideas.

Roentgen

Becquerel had discovered that the

from uranium compounds could discharge an electroscope. He was able to show qualitatively that sev

radiation

compounds of uranium do available to him was too crude eral

this,

but the equipment

to enable

him

to

make

minute quantitative measurements. The electrometer de vised

by

Pierre Curie

piezoelectricity, could

and

his

brother Jacques, using

measure extremely small amounts

of current. Marie Curie decided to use this device to study

uranium radiation quantitatively. This was the principle involved: The rays from uranium knocked electrons from atoms in air. Left behind were "ions" which could carry an electric current.

Thus

the

strength of the uranium rays could be determined

by

measuring the amount of electric current they enabled

air

to carry.

against

At

The

current could be measured

by balancing

it

one of Pierre's crystals under different pressures.

a certain pressure, the crystal

would develop

a high

enough charge to stop the current. Marie Curie found that the amount of radiation

is

always

They Paved

158

how they

Way

for the

Atomic Age

number of uranium atoms,

the proportional to

of

the

are chemically

regardless

combined with other elements.

She discovered that another heavy metal, thorium,

also

She had scarcely passed her thirtieth birthday. It was had arrived in Paris, but she was only six years since she a name for herself. Pierre saw clearly that already making

big.

He

of something young wife was on the track

abandoned

own

his

research and joined her.

pitchblende.

would check the

it

from

a piece of ore.

Naturally, they

ore to see whether that particular piece

had enough uranium

they had to measure the radioactivity of the ore.

One day in that

was

1898 they stumbled on a piece of pitchblende

so radioactive

to

make

it

worth

their while.

To

The

it

would have had

Curies, astonished,

clusion.

do

came

There were elements

were known,

so

new and

in

in the pitchblende that

No

radiation, the

The

con

were

such elements

undiscovered elements must be

Well, then, they must be present in very

small quantities. But for small quantities to

It

it.

But no strange elements had ever been noted

in pitchblende.

indeed.

more

to contain

to the only possible

even more radioactive than uranium.

involved.

Uranium metal was obtained mostly from the mineral When the Curies wanted more uranium,

they would get

this

159

uranium atoms than could possibly be

gave off similar rays.

his brilliant

CURIE

new

show

that

much

elements must be very, very radioactive

worked out

as inevitably as

A, B, C.

Curies began fractionating the pitchblende, f ollow-

They Paved

160

the

Way

-for

They removed

ing the radioactivity.

Atomic Age

the

the uranium and,

sure enough, most of the radioactivity remained behind.

July of that year they had isolated a trace of black

By

powder 400

times

contained a

new

more

radioactive than uranium.

element which behaved

(an element that was not radioactive) call

new

the

.

like tellurium

They

fractionation followed, and

By December still

of the

radioactive than polonium.

new

element.

What

the element to be seen and so

element "radium."

their best preparations

new

little

of

it

still

contained only a trace

they needed was enough of

weighed and

tested.

There was

however, that the Curies

in pitchblende,

would have

to start with a great deal of ore.

their ton of

mine wastes and labored four more

So they got years.

In 1903, Marie Sklodowska Curie presented her

on radioactivity Ph.D. history.

It

It

This

known, nonradioactive element barium.

Curies called their

But

more painstaking work.

another element, which had properties like

those of the well

The

radioactivity.

of that same year they had a preparation

which was even more contained

decided to

element "polonium" after Marie's native land.

But that accounted for only part of the

More

This

as

work

her doctor's thesis and received her

was probably the

greatest

doctor's thesis in

earned her not one, but two Nobel Prizes. In

1903 she and Pierre, along with Henri Becquerel, were

awarded the Physics Prize for

their studies of

uranium

CURIE radiations.

161

In 1911, Marie Curie received the Chemistry

Prize for the discovery of polonium and radium.

The second

prize,

Marie received alone, for in 1906

Pierre Curie had died tragically in a traffic accident.

Marie worked on. She took over the professorship the Sorbonne Pierre had held, and

became the

woman

She worked cease

professor in the Sorbonne's history. lessly,

first

ar

studying the properties and dangers of her wonder

She deliberately exposed herself to radia

ful elements.

tions to study the burns caused

In July 1934, revered greatest

women

a disease that

on her

skin.

the whole world as one of the

by

of history, Marie Curie died of leukemia,

was probably brought on by her contin

uous exposure to radioactive radiations.

Had third

she lived a year longer, she

Nobel

Prize

would have seen

awarded to Curies

this

daughter Irene and her son-in-law Frederic.

a

time to her

They had

created brand-new radioactive atoms and were the dis

coverers of "artificial radioactivity." In

1946 element number 96 was discovered

University of California. eternal

honor

It

at the

was named "curium"

as

an

to the Curies.

Roentgen and Becquerel, with terious radiations,

began a

new

their discoveries of

mys

scientific revolution, equal

begun by Copernicus in 1500. That first revolution had been dramatized by Galileo

to that

They Paved

162

and

his telescope.

dramatist,

the

Way

This second revolution

someone who could

lift

Atomic Age

the

-for

also

needed

the radiations out of

the scientific journals and onto the front page of

The

papers.

a

news

Curies and their radium did that.

Their work was important too, for small pinches of

used to fight cancer)

.

scientifically

radium and

it

so intimately involved; partly difficulties that

similar elements

But more than

supremely dramatic. Partly

(and medically,

that, their

was because it

work was

woman was

a

was because of the

had to be overcome; partly

it

were

great

was because

of the results.

The

Curies did not single-handedly hurl

the age of the atom.

Indeed, the

work

mankind

into

of Roentgen,

Becquerel, Einstein and other scientists was of even greater

importance.

But the heroic immigrant

girl

and her husband helped to give the world tation of

still

greater things to come.

from Poland

a sense of

expec

Albert Einstein He

Charted a

New

World

22 ON MARCH 29,

1919, an eclipse of the sun took place that

was destined to be one of the most important of mankind.

in the history

For years astronomers of London's Royal

Astronomical Society had been waiting eagerly for eclipse.

It

would enable them

new theory

to check a revolutionary

in physics proposed four years earlier

German-born

scientist

named Albert

On the day of the eclipse,

by

a

Einstein.

one group of astronomers was

stationed in northern Brazil, another

on an

island off

West

up and waiting. When not occurred, photographs would be taken

Africa. Delicate cameras

the eclipse

this

were

set

of the eclipsed sun, but of the stars that suddenly appeared in the

darkened sky around the sun.

Einstein had said the stars their apparent position.

the sun

The

rays of starlight passing near

would be bent by the

impossible.

affected

would be found to have shifted

by

How

could

gravity?

light,

sun's mass.

which was immaterial, be

If Einstein

of the universe built up

by

This sounded

were

correct, the picture

the great Isaac

Newton more

He

164

Charted a

New

World

than two hundred years earlier would have to be corrected in

some of

The

its details.

The

eclipse came.

The

veloped.

pictures

were taken and de

distances of the star images

from the sun

and from each other were painstakingly measured. These measurements were compared with measurements on a of that region of the sky taken at night, with

map

star

the sun

nowhere

near.

There could be no doubt. The astronomers announced the results:

path

by

The

light rays

were bent out of

their straight

One

the attraction of the sun. Einstein was right.

of the predictions of his theory was verified.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879.

As

a child he

had

Germany on March

14,

difficulty in learning to speak.

His parents suspected he might be mentally retarded. He was not a brilliant student in secondary school. He chafed under the monotonous

German

drill

methods of teaching used

schools at that time.

his studies.

Nor was

moved

grown

interested in science,

to Milan, Italy.

Young

went

Einstein,

who had

to Zurich, Switzerland,

to enter a famous technical school.

There

his

unusual

mathematics and physics began to show

However, when Einstein was graduated was unable to get a teaching appointment at

He

finish

In 1894 his father's business failed and the

family

ability in

he able to

in

was lucky

in

itself.

1900 he

a university.

to get a clerical job in the patent office

EINSTEIN at

165

Bern, Switzerland.

was not what he wanted, but

It

it

would give him leisure for studying and thinking. There was much to think about. The old structure of physics, built light of

For the

up over

was being restudied

centuries,

in the

new knowledge.

instance,

it

was believed

vacuum of space. Since

that light traveled through

light consisted of waves,

some

thing had to exist in space to form those waves. Physicists

decided that space was It

of something called "ether."

was the vibration of this "ether" It

was assumed

measured against

how

compared with

as

you can

how

formed

light waves.

motion of Earth could be

that the true this ether.

that

This could be done by noting

quickly light traveled along the line of Earth's motion

as

is

full

tell

its

velocity across Earth's motion.

the speed of a river's current

quickly you can

cross-stream,

when

by measuring

row downstream when

helping you, as compared with your speed the current

is

(Just

the current

when rowing

not helping you.)

In 1887 this experiment was carried out very delicately

by Albert A. Michelson and E. scientists.

ence in

To

their

W. Morley, two American

amazement, they could find no

light's velocity.

Was

diff er-

something wrong?

The

discovery and study of radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies created another explosion. Elements such as

uranium, thorium, and radium were giving off vast

quantities of energy.

Where

did this energy

come from?

He

166

The whole

structure of physics

Charted a

New World

was based on the

fact that

neither matter nor energy could be created or destroyed.

Must the whole

structure of physics be torn

down?

these questions.

He

said, suppose light traveled at

constant velocity regardless of the motion of origin,

as

place of

the Michelson-Morley experiment seemed to

show. In that

He

its

case,

clear, straight

forward mathematics. There could be no such thing

as

absolute motion, said Einstein, or absolute lack of motion.

Earth moved in one fashion

if

you compared

in space with that of the sun. It if

you compared

its

moved

its

position

in another fashion

position with that of Mars;

Furthermore, in measuring length, mass, or even time the relative motion between the object measured and the meas

Matter and energy, Einstein

said, were different aspects of the same thing. Matter could be converted into energy, and energy into matter. In a radioactivity tiny bit of matter was converted to energy. So little matter \vas con

verted that

what would the consequences be?

demonstrated those consequences in

167

uring observer affected the results of the comparison.

In 1905 Albert Einstein, then 26, published his thoughts

on

EINSTEIN

and so on.

weighing.

was

large

It all

hung

its

loss

could not be measured by ordinary

The energy produced enough

out of this bit of matter

to be detected, however.

seemed to go against "common

together.

And

it

sense," but

it all

explained things that scientists

could not explain any other way. In 1909 the fame that resulted from

his theories

got

He

168

Charted a

New

World

Einstein a job at the University of Prague, and in 1913 he

was appointed

director of a

in Berlin, the Kaiser

In 1915, during

Wilhelm Physics

World War

paper that extended

on the nature of

new research institution opened Einstein published a

I,

He

his theories.

Institute.

put forth

Newton's

gravitation.

new

theories,

views

he

said,

were not accurate enough. The inaccuracy showed up most glaringly in the close neighborhood of large masses such

as the sun.

Einstein's theories

seemed to explain the slow rotation

of the entire orbit of the planet to the sun),

Mercury

(closest planet

which Newton's theories could not

explain.

Einstein's theories also predicted that light rays passing

near the sun would be bent out of a straight

was

this

line.

verified at the eclipse of 1919, Einstein

When was

in

stantly accepted as the greatest scientific thinker since

Newton. In 1921 Einstein received the

not for

relativity,

the application of light

come out of his

This solved the riddle of

was able

certain materials.

theories dealing with

movement

Prize in Physics

but for presenting a logical explanation

of the "photoelectric effect."

how

Nobel

u

He

to

was

make

also

electrons

honored for

Brownian movement"

of tiny particles suspended in liquid or

the air.

This phenomenon had puzzled physicists for nearly 80 years.

EINSTEIN Then Germany his

fell

upon

Nazis began to grow stronger.

anti-Semitism in a

new and

Einstein was Jewish.

Adolf Hitler and

evil days.

brutal

The Nazis preached form

when

In January 1933,

came to power, Einstein happened

instead.

sessions, publicly

from

German

all

The Nazis burned

the Nazis

to be in California.

Prudently, he did not return to Germany.

Belgium

and Albert

He went

to

confiscated Einstein's pos

his writings,

and expelled him

scientific societies.

Einstein emigrated to the United States.

America was

glad to have him (he became an American citizen in 1940

by

Act of Congress). He was invited to for Advanced Studies at Princeton, N.

special

Institute

join the J.

In 1934 an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, began

bom

barding elements with newly discovered sub-atomic par "neutrons."

ticles called

He

noted peculiar

uranium was bombarded, but he had no

results

when

satisfactory ex

(The importance of this work was recognized when Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in

planation.

Physics.)

Hahn

A

few years

later, in Berlin,

the chemist Otto

discovered that bombarding uranium with neutrons

produced atoms of about half the weight of uranium. A possible explanation of Hahn's work was advanced in 1938

by

Lise Meitner and O. R. Frisch,

two German

refugee physicists doing research in Copenhagen, Denmark.

When

uranium atoms were struck by neutrons, they

said,

He

170

in two.

some of the atoms broke fission."

Uranium

Charted

New

World

This was "uranium

fission released far

did ordinary radioactivity.

a

more energy than

It also released

neutrons that

could trigger off additional explosions of uranium atoms.

The

result could

Hahn's experiment showed that mass and energy

seen.

were

be the most terrifying explosion ever

related, as Einstein said

they were.

In January 1939, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to the

U.

S. to

spend several months at Princeton. There

he planned to discuss various problems with Einstein. At Princeton, Bohr announced Hahn's observations and what Frisch and Meitner had said. to the attention of Fermi, allied

with

Hitler's

Their theory quickly came

who had

Germany)

fled

from

Italy (then

and was working

at

Columbia University. Fermi discussed the subject with physicists John R.

Dunning and George Pegram of Columbia.

was

ar

up an experiment as quickly check Hahn's results and the theory of Frisch

ranged for Dunning to as possible to

It

set

Dunning worked around the clock for He performed the first experiment in America

and Meitner. several days.

that demonstrated

In the

summer

it

was

possible to split the atom.

of 1939, these

discussed with Albert Einstein.

new developments were

He

sent a letter to Presi

dent Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out that atomic

EINSTEIN bombs were

171

possible

and that enemy nations must not be

allowed to devise them

first.

Funds for research

Roosevelt agreed with Einstein.

were appropriated. The Atomic Age began to dawn.

On

April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein died.

day, he urged the world to

come

to

would make nuclear wars forever Einstein was the that

Newton

To

his

dying

some agreement that

impossible.

of the scientific revolution

had begun with Roentgen and Becquerel. His theories

enabled scientists to predict developments and search them out.

Thus,

as

soon

as

uranium

fission

was discovered,

Einstein's theories pointed to the possibility of an atomic

bomb and

atomic power.

All that happens in the future with respect to atomic

power

whether for good or for

equations a

young patent

clerk

evil

first

dates

back to the

introduced to express

the relationship between matter and energy.

George Washington Carver World

in a "Peanut

23 THE young

had a

botanist

difficult decision to

that year of 1896. After great hardships, he had

respected scientist at

decent living.

He

Iowa

He

State College.

make

in

become

a

earned a

could experiment with growing plants

to his heart's content.

Now

a

small

wanted him. and return to

poverty-stricken

where he would have

a land

wanted him was Tuskegee all

tion

in

Alabama

He would have to leave his good life in Iowa,

Yet the botanist could not

in

college

refuse.

Institute.

It

a

The

lowly

status.

college that

was the only place

the South where Negroes could get a higher educa

and the young botanist was a Negro. His name was

George Washington Carver. So Carver turned

his

back on the success

his efforts

brought him and returned to the South. There

still

had

greater

success awaited him.

George Washington Carver was born about 1864. There is no record of the exact date of his birth in Diamond Grove, Missouri, but

it

was some time near the end of the

CARVER

173

War. He was

Civil

Amendment

teenth

in 1865.

When he was only him and

his

He was

a

able to

few months

old, night raiders stole

The mother was

mother.

away before her

Thir

a slave until the passage of the

master,

sold

and shipped

Moses Carver, could save

her.

ransom the infant by trading a horse for

him.

The the

As

Carvers adopted the infant after he was freed. up, he

boy grew

showed

signs of considerable intelli

gence, but the Carvers were unable to help

education at home. children.

The town had no

him get an

school for

Negro

So the Carvers sent him to the county

seat,

Neosho. There he attended a one-room school with about 70 other Negro children and one teacher.

He worked

to

support himself while he studied, but his marks were ex cellent.

until

continued to study and work

he completed high school.

on to It

He

at

odd jobs

Then he determined to go

college.

was. not easy at that time to find a college that

admit a Negro.

Eventually he was accepted

College, at Indianola, Iowa.

was then

25, the first

College.

He

Negro

would

by Simpson

George Washington Carver to be accepted

by Simpson

did so well that on graduation he had no

trouble getting into further studies.

Iowa

When

State Agricultural College for

he was granted a master of science

World

174

degree there in 1892, he was appointed to the

Then came

the call to Tuskegee, founded

Peanut

in a

staff.

by Booker

T. Washington, the great Negro educator. Carver became director of Tuskegee's

Department of Agricultural Re

search.

Starting with 19 acres of the "worst land in Alabama,"

Carver showed

his students

how

to rebuild the soil with

muck from nearby swamps and compost make

heaps they could

themselves.

The Southern was worn

out.

farmer had one chief problem: the

soil

For generations, only cotton and tobacco

had been grown

in

most of the South. The plants had

taken minerals out of the

more than had been put

soil

back.

George Washington Carver knew be worn out for one crop could well.

He

restore

knew,

still

which might

grow another crop could

too, that this "rotation of crops"

needed nitrogen to

kegee backed

that soil

this up,

soil.

at

Tus

a ceaseless

cam

His experiments

and he carried on

paign of education to get Southern farmers to use variety in planting.

He wanted them

potatoes instead of cotton

and sweet

at least part of the time.

Almost single-handedly he

The Southern

to plant peanuts

won

his

way.

The

result?

farmer found his land being restored, his

crops and income improving.

Indeed, so large were the

"

'/v v;

\

-'*

1

iJV -

-

>; .~

', '

T

x

-~--..^;

^^-.

I

v

^

crops of peanuts and sweet potatoes that not

could be sold for food.

Now

peanut

Then

its

he recombined these in

of

them

what?

He

Carver went to work in his laboratory.

- separating apart

all

oils,

starches,

new

ways.

took the

amino

acids.

Carver developed about 300 synthetic products from peanuts, including cheese, dyes, and soap.

He made

sweet potato yield 118 synthetic products, including lasses,

paste,

and rubber.

wasn't merely food.

It

He showed

the

mo

farm crop

that a

was raw material which the magic

of chemistry could convert into a horn of plenty.

Now

the Southern farmer could

and sweet potatoes he wished.

He

grow

all

the peanuts

could also

grow soy

beans, for Carver introduced that valuable plant

China.

The soybean grows

replace nitrogen at the

well in poor

same time.

soil

from

and helps to

World

176

George Washington Carver's research complished wonders for agriculture.

He

in a

Peanut

in chemistry ac

was honored by

being made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts of

London. In 1923 he to outstanding

members of

Roosevelt Medal.

humbly seeking

men

won

The

the Spingarn Medal, awarded his race.

citation

the guidance of

In 1939 he

read:

God

"To and

the

scientist

a liberator to

of the white race as well as the black."

Many

honorary degrees were awarded to Carver. But

he was a simple man, content to pass on

new

a

won

generations at Tuskegee,

passed

away

in 1943.

his learning to

where he taught

until he

Irving Langmuir

He Made

Rain

24 EVEN

during droughts, water vapor and clouds are in the

Why,

air.

then, doesn't rain fall?

Apparently, dust particles were also necessary.

drops formed around dust

At N.

particles.

the General Electric

Company,

in

Schenectady,

Y., the associate director of research, Irving

had a home-made cloud in the laboratory with water vapor.

Rain

He would cool

it

a

Langmuir,

box

filled

and add various kinds

of dust.

One

hot day, a

little

more than

a decade ago, there

was

trouble keeping the box cool enough. Langmuir decided to use dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide)

of

it

to the box and at once the vapor

into a thousand swirling

little

snow storm had formed out

.

it

He

added pieces

contained turned

particles of ice.

A miniature

of the miniature cloud.

wasn't absolutely necessary after

all

just a

temperature, 40 degrees below zero or

Dust

low enough

less.

In 1946, then, an airplane flew over a cloudbank. carried

powdered dry

ice

which was dropped

It

into the

He Made

178

clouds.

Half an hour

man-made

later it

was raining

the

on January

New

York,

His parents traveled constantly,

1881.

31,

his early

education was spread across two continents.

At Columbia University he earned lurgical

engineering

in

1903.

his

Then

Germany, this time for his Ph.D. which he received in 1906.

degree in metal it

was back to

in physical chemistry,

After a short time teaching, Langmuir joined the

He

of General Electric in 1909.

50 years. His the

life

At

truly

rain.

Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn,

and

first

Rain

first

job

was

staff

stayed there for almost

to devise

methods for extending

span of light bulbs, then very short.

that time the tungsten filaments in light bulbs

enclosed in vacuum.

(If air

were

were

present, the tungsten

would burn up as soon as it was heated.) Langmuir's studies showed that in the vacuum (which could not be

made

perfect), tungsten atoms slowly evaporated

wire

at the

The were

white hot temperature of the glowing bulb.

wire grew thinner and eventually broke. filled

with gas

last

longer.

If the

bulb

some gas with which tungsten would

not react (nitrogen or argon, for instance)

would

from the

Thus the

gas-filled

the filament

bulb was invented.

Langmuir then studied the effect of hot metal surfaces on all sorts of gases. It led him in many directions that had nothing

to

do with gas bulbs, but General Electric

LANGMUIR

179

recognized his genius and gave him complete freedom.

For example, Langmuir devised

a

hydrogen blowtorch

that could produce temperatures almost as hot as the sur

face of the sun.

This was the principle:

ordinary hydrogen of hydrogen

blown

is

is

made up of two

molecule of

heated to a high temperature

past hot tungsten wires,

These atoms are very

by being

some of the two-atom

hydrogen molecules are broken up atoms.

A

atoms. If a stream

active.

into free

hydrogen

Therefore, as the

jet

of gas leaves the tungsten filament, the free hydrogen

atoms recombine to form ordinary two-atom hydrogen again.

At

the same time, they give

up

they received from the hot tungsten. inside the

hydrogen gas

Langmuir grew

drop of mineral

when lens.

oil

energy

The temperature

about 6,000 degrees.

interested in

various types of surfaces

A

is

as heat the

on

(which

how

matter spread out on

liquid surfaces, for instance. is

insoluble in water) will,

placed on water, hold together in the shape of a

However,

stearic acid (also insoluble in

water) con-

He Made

180 tains certain groupings of

A

water.

drop of

Rain

atoms which are attracted to

stearic acid,

when added

to water,

spreads out into a thin film, as each molecule tries to dip

water-loving group into the water.

its

be one molecule thick.

may show

this

For the

his

Nobel

and to study such

work

In

fact,

the film

Langmuir was the films.

in surface chemistry,

Langmuir received

Prize for Chemistry in 1932.

which he worked on with Dr. Vincent

(Rain-making J.

was

Schaefer

in the future.)

still

The

useful results of Langmuir's

work were many. His

studies of films, for instance, have given us

down

glare

measure.

from

surfaces

glass

However,

it is

ways

to cut

an important safety

rain-making that was probably

the most important breakthrough. Langmuir's system later

was

improved by Dr. Bernard Vonnegut of General

Electric.

He

found that a cloud of

chemical called

dry

to

first

ice.

silver iodide

fine particles of a

worked even

better than did

Besides, the silver iodide could be generated

the ground and

on

blown skyward.

Langmuir died in 1957,

living to see rain-making

become

a big business.

Some day we may be

by

able to nip hurricanes in the

causing a hurricane-breeding area to drop

prematurely

its

bud rain

thanks to the small cloud in the General

Electric laboratories.

Rutherford and Lawrence They Tore Apart

ERNEST RUTHERFORD was

the

after big

Atom

game. At

least it

was

"big game" in the world of science, though his quarry

was the tiny atom, only diameter.

For

The

a

few

question was:

a century, scientists

billionths of

What was

like a billiard ball.

particles

particles in

To

Then,

had been discovered.

active atoms break all

find out

inside that

atom?

had believed that the atom was

the smallest particle which could

shaped

an inch in

and that

exist,

in the 1890's, It

was found

still

it

was

smaller

that radio

down, spraying smaller "sub-atomic"

directions.

what was

Rutherford aimed

still

inside the tiny atom, therefore,

tinier bullets at

it.

He

used the

sub-atomic particles sprayed out by radioactive atoms.

These

particles

were so small and moved so quickly

they passed through thin nothing were there.

A

slices

that

of ordinary matter as though

narrow beam of

particles

would

strike a

photographic plate and leave a darkened spot, even

though

a thin sheet of metal

blocked their path. In 1906

Rutherford noticed that the metal had a strange

The darkened

spot was fuzzy, as though

some

effect.

particles

They Tore Apart

Ig2

the

Atom

the metal. had been pushed to one side in passing through Hans Geiger, de In 1908 Rutherford and his assistant,

would fire cided to investigate this phenomenon. They of only one fiftyat gold leaf beaten to a thinness particles this thinness, the wall of thousandth of an inch. Even at thick. If atoms filled all the the gold leaf was 2,000 atoms would have no reasoned Rutherford, the particles space,

particles

came through an angle,

How was

as

tissue

did get through. Practically every one

in a straight line.

like a billiard ball

particle in 20,000 actually

A

few came through

struck off

bounced back.

its

center.

at

One

183

could that be? Rutherford said afterward that

cannon

a

though

ball

had been

it

fired at a piece of

paper and had bounced back into the cannon.

Rutherford

finally

of the atom was

could pass

a tiny nucleus

decided upon an explanation. Most

empty

easily.

of the atom.

chance of getting through.

But the

RUTHERFORD AND LAWRENCE

space, through

At the

sub-particles

center of each atom, though,

which contained

practically

all

was

the mass

This nucleus was surrounded by particles

which revolved about

it

in orbits, like planets.

Rutherford was thus the

atom was

first

to discover

what the

in

These experiments were con 1908. In that year he received the Nobel Prize

side of the

ducted in

which

like.

They Tore Apart

184 in

Chemistry

greatest

for

work he had done

work came

earlier.

Atom

the

Thus,

his

he got the prize.

after

Ernest Rutherford was truly a scientist of the British

Empire.

He worked

was born

in

where

in

Canada and

New Zealand on August

his talent for

physics

first

in England, but he 30, 1871. In college,

showed

scholarship to Cambridge University.

under

a great British scientist, J. J.

Rutherford began

and magnetism, but

come

to

his

in

work

a

There he studied

Thomson.

in the field of electricity

1895 (the year Rutherford had scientific

X

once de

his discovery of

cided to strike out in this

went

rays.

new

Thomson

direction,

was a vacancy on the faculty

in Montreal,

at

and Rutherford

along.

Rutherford showed himself to be so there

won

England) Wilhelm Roentgen rocked the

world by

gladly

he

itself,

at

Thomson recommended

went Rutherford

able, that

when

McGill University him.

In 1898 off

to Canada.

In 1899 Rutherford found there were at least of radiations given off

by

two kinds

radioactive substances.

He

named them "alpha rays" and "beta rays," after the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Both rays were streams of sub-atomic particles,

it

later

turned out.

The

alpha

rays were

composed of particularly massive particles. Rutherford eventually used them as bullets to probe the atom. In 1903 he and a student

named Frederick Soddy

RUTHERFORD AND LAWRENCE worked out

the mathematics describing the rate at

a radioactive substance broke

By

which

down.

1908 Rutherford had discovered

dividual sub-atomic particles.

He

how

With

zinc sulfide "scintillated."

to detect in

allowed them to strike

a film of zinc sulfide so that a tiny flash

The

185

was produced.

this "scintillation

screen," Rutherford could follow and count individual particles.

By

using the bullets he had discovered and the counter

he had developed, Rutherford was able to probe the inside

Ten

of the atom. startling.

When hydrogen

He

years

later,

he did something even more

used his bullets not on metals but on gases.

Rutherford sent alpha rays hurtling through gas,

they struck some of the nuclei of the hydro

gen atoms. These atoms were composed of simple particles called "protons." When these protons were knocked into a zinc sulfide screen,

bright scintillation.

they gave

rise to a particular

When Rutherford bombarded oxygen,

carbon dioxide, or water vapor, nothing

When

type of

he bombarded

startling

happened.

nitrogen, the proton scintillations

suddenly appeared.

Where

did the protons

one answer

possible.

come from? There was only

When

alpha rays struck the nucleus

of the nitrogen atom, they knocked protons out of

The

it.

nitrogen was changed into a rare isotope of oxygen.

The proton was observed

as a

product of the reaction.

They Tore Apart Rutherford was thus the

first

man

(nitrogen) into another (oxygen) in 1919, the first

.

He had brought about, reaction.

more and more

atomic structure were made. Needed for faster sub-atomic bullets

were

all

right,

Atom

to change one element

man-made nuclear

the years,

Through

the

investigations of this

purpose were

and more of them. Alpha rays

but they lacked high energy, and the radio

were

active substances that gave off alpha rays

difficult to

obtain.

which could be

Scientists tried to use protons instead,

obtained easily from hydrogen. Protons were not as heavy as the particles in alpha rays,

but they could be speeded

in up to great energies by an accelerating electric field, which they were held on course by magnets. The man

who showed how

best to

do

this

was another Ernest

Ernest Orlando Lawrence, born in Canton, South Dakota,

on August In 1930,

8,

1901.

as a

Lawrence got difficulty was

young man

at the

University of California,

to thinking about speeding

up protons. The

that they finally sped right out of range of

the magnets which held

them on

course.

How could they

be kept inside the instrument until they had gained enough speed to be useful? the protons

At

Why

go around in

once, he built a

not,

thought Lawrence, make

circles?

home-made gadget

in

which he

ranged electromagnets in an ingenious fashion.

The

ar

pro-

RUTHERFORD AND LAWRENCE

187

tons were forced to travel in circles, speeding up time.

all

the

Eventually they shot out of the instrument with

amazing force. Lawrence called the instrument a "cyclo tron," because the particles

By

moved

in circles.

was

1931, a larger cyclotron than the original one

built for $1,000.

produced protons with energies of

It

over a million electron

volts.

larger cyclotrons, particles

000 electron

volts.

Before long, by using

still

were given energies of 100,000,-

Today improved

instruments based

on the cyclotron principle can produce

particles

with

energies in the billions of electron volts.

Rutherford's original "bullets" had been vastly im

Atoms could be smashed, and the debris studied manner that would have been undreamed of only a

proved. in a

few years

earlier.

Rutherford passed away in 1937.

He

lived to see the

cyclotron carry on his w^ork. Lawrence lived to see the cyclotron increase atomic knowledge to the point where

atomic power became

a reality.

In fact, in the early 1940's,

Lawrence was involved

in the research that resulted in

development of the

nuclear reactors.

first

He

conducted

program for separating out quantities of the rare isotope, uranium-235, and also for producing the man-made ele a

ment plutonium. The atoms of both could be

split in a

continuing reaction to yield useful power, or the devastat ing explosion of an atomic bomb.

Lawrence died

As long

in 1958.

of certain rare elements, science, but

What

its

influence

on man's

activities

Ernest Rutherford did was

from a phenomenon ticles as bullets

him

was only an unusual property it was important in theoretical

as radioactivity

into a tool.

with which to

He

split

was

slight.

to turn radioactivity

used sub-atomic par

open the atom, enabling

to discover the atomic nucleus.

RUTHERFORD AND LAWRENCE

189

Ernest Lawrence invented a better tool by which this

could be done. As a result of the of the atom yielded up rate.

Twenty-three years

reaction, it

its

work of

both, the inside

secrets at an unbelievably rapid

after the first

mankind has learned

to start

man-made nuclear

one going and keep

controlled as a kind of nuclear "furnace." In the same

way, many thousands of years ago, man had learned to start

fires to

ordinary

serve his needs.

Nuclear conflagrations, in the form of atomic bombs, can be a great danger to humanity, but so can ordinary conflagrations.

ordinary

fire,

the nuclear

Man has gained immeasurable benefits from

despite

fires

he

its

now

dangers. Will he be as wise with controls?

Robert Hutckings Goddard He

Launched the Space Age

2.6 THE

gasoline

mixed with the liquid oxygen and caught

Up rose the rocket, blasting through the

fire.

atmosphere.

In a short while the fuel was spent, but the rocket con tinued soaring to a peak, and then

Where

did this take place?

fell.

Cape Canaveral

in the

1950's?

Not

at all.

It

was on a snow-covered farm in Auburn,

The

first

liquid-fueled rocket ever to be shot into the heavens

was

Massachusetts.

The

date

was March

being tested by a scientist

16, 1926.

named Robert Hutchings

Goddard.

The

rocket traveled only 200 feet.

It

reached a speed

of only 60 miles an hour, but the experiment

portant as the Kitty

However, no one lish

Hawk

cared.

was

as

im

flight of the

Wright brothers. Goddard, who went on to estab

American rocketry single-handed, remained unknown

to the public to the

day of

his death.

Robert Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882.

1911.

He

He

received his Ph.D. at Clark University in

taught at Princeton, but returned to Clark in

GODDARD

191

1914. There he began his experiments in rocketry.

In 1919

Goddard prepared

theory of rockets.

Extreme

ade, a Russian articles.

was

It

Altitudes.

a small 69-page

called

A

Method of Reaching

Meanwhile, during the previous dec

named Ziolkovsky had been writing

similar

(Oddly, Russia and America were competing in

rocketry even then, though neither nation

The American was practice.

book on the

In 1923

the

Goddard

knew

tested his

first

rocket engine,

using liquid fuels (gasoline and liquid oxygen).

he sent up

his first rocket.

His wife took

standing next to that rocket. six inches in diameter,

jungle gym.

it.)

to put theory into actual

first

It

In 1926

a picture of

was about four

and held in a frame

him

feet high,

like a child's

This was the grand-daddy of the monsters

of Cape Canaveral.

Goddard managed

to get a

few thousand

dollars

from

the Smithsonian Institution and continued his work.

In

July 1929 he sent up a larger rocket near Worcester, Massachusetts.

It

went

faster

and higher than the

first.

He Launched

192

More

important,

it

carried a barometer

and

and a small camera to photograph them.

a It

the Space

Age

thermometer

was the

first

instrument-carrying rocket.

Then Goddard

small reputation as a "crackpot"

reach the moon.

was mainly

the upper atmosphere.) the police.

who

already had a

thought he could

(This was painful to him because he

detested publicity and

calls to

He

ran into trouble.

His second rocket resulted

Officials

more rocket experiments

interested in studying in

ordered him to conduct no

in Massachusetts.

Fortunately, a philanthropist

named Daniel Guggenheim

gave Goddard some money, enough to enable him to

set

up an experimental station in a lonely spot in New Mexico. Here he built larger rockets, and developed many of the ideas

now

used in

all

rockets.

He

designed combustion

chambers of the proper shape, and burned gasoline with

oxygen the

so that the rapid combustion could be used to cool

chamber

walls.

He saw

at

once that the root of the

problem was achievement of very high speeds of com bustion with respect to the

From 1930

body of

the rocket.

up rockets which attained an hour and reached heights of

to 1935 he sent

speeds of up to 550 miles a mile and a half.

He

developed systems for steering a

rocket in flight and gyroscopes to keep a rocket headed in the proper direction.

stage rockets.

He

patented the idea of multi

GODDARD

193

But our Government never his

really

War

work. Only during World

and then to help

it

was only

Navy

to enable

planes take off

him

from

became

interested in

did

finance him,

II

it

to design small rockets carriers.

In Germany, meanwhile, a group of

men were

develop

ing large rockets based on Goddard's principles.

worked out

war

V-2

the

for the Nazis

rocket,

if it

They won the

which might have

had been perfected

earlier.

When German rocket experts were brought to America after the

war and questioned about the

Why

they stared in amazement. ask Goddard, they It

was too

just at the

We

late.

Goddard had

died

on August

are living at the beginning of the

come

to

is

10, 1945,

no way of

Goddard break

telling exactly

mankind from the conquest of

we know:

Americans

Age was dawning.

ever, that conquest will increase this

didn't the

wanted to know.

time the Atomic

through. There will

science of rocketry,

what

benefits

space.

How

our knowledge.

every increase in man's knowledge helps

mankind, sometimes in unexpected ways.

(Sometimes

the misuse of knowledge has hurt mankind; but that fault of

And

is

the

men, not of knowledge.)

Whatever the future of the Goddard's

first little

rocket,

rocket,

which

snow-covered farm in Auburn.

it

all

began with

rose 200 feet over the

INDEX Abbe, Cleveland,

Cell staining, 138 Charles II (of England), 43 Chemical History of the Candle,

83

The, 73 Chemotherapy, 141 Chromatic aberration, 48

14 Alizarin, 114, 116 Alpha rays, 184

Alexandria,

A

3,

Method of Altitudes, 191

Reaching Extreme

Civil

Aniline, 112 Aniline Purple, 114 Anne (of England) Antibodies, 137

,

52

Constantinople, 15 Cook, Captain, 91 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 17 Corpuscles, red, 42

1

Correns, Carl, 107

Aristarchus, 20

Coumarin, 117

Aristotle, 33 Arsenic, 141

Cowpox, Crop

183

Automation, 57 Bacteria, 43, 102, 138 Beadle, G. W., 110 Becquerel, Henri A., 123, 157 Behring, Emil von, 139

Alexander Graham,

Curium, 161 Cyclotron, 187

Darwin, Charles Robert, 145 Darwin, Erasmus, 146 Davy, Humphrey, 68 Decay, 102

81

Bessemer, Henry, 85 Beta rays, 184 Bible, 11

De Motus Cordis, 29 De Revolutionibus Orbium

Binomial theorem, 48 Blast furnace, 88 Blood circulation, 27

tium, 24 De Vries, Hugo, 107 Diphtheria, 140 Dry Ice, 177 Dumas, Jean B., 99 Dunning, John R., 170 Dyes, 114

Blowtorch, hydrogen, 179 Bohr, Niels, 170

Brownian movement, Buoyancy, 6, 7

rotation, 174

Crusaders, 15 Curie, Irene, 161 Curie, Jacques, 156 Curie, Marie, 154 Curie, Pierre, 154

187

Atoxyl, 141

Bell,

93

Crookes, William, 123

Arsenophenylglycine, 142

Atom bomb,

82

Coal tar, 111 College of Physicians, 96 Combustion, 62 Conservation of Mass, 63

Antiseptic surgery, 104 Antitoxin, 140

Archimedes,

War,

Clement VII, Pope, 24

Amperage, 72

Atom,

13

Caxton, William,

168

Byzantine Empire, 118

cell staining with, 138

Calculus, 48 Calx, 62

Earth's motion, 18, 19 Eclipse of 1919, 163

Capillaries, 29, 42

Carthage, 7 Carver, George Washington, 172 Carver, Moses, 173 Cast iron, 86 Cathode rays, 120 Catholic Church, 13, 31

Edison,

Thomas

Edison

effect, 135

Alva, 128

Ehrlich, Paul, 137 Einstein, Albert, 163 Electric light, 133

194

Caeles-

Electricity, 67 lighting by, 128

Heart, 27

Henry, Joseph, 76 Hiero II (of Syracuse),

Electromagnet, 78 Electromagnetic induction, 72 Electrons, 125 Elements, four, 60 Energy, 165 Ether, 165

3

Hitler, Adolf, 169

Hofmann, A. W. von, Hooke, Robert, 43, 49

111, 116

Hybrid, 109

Hydrogen,

179, 185

Evolution, 152

"Experimental Researches," 73

Immunity, 92, 140 Immunology, 97

Fabricius, 27 Falling bodies, 33 Faraday, Michael, 67, 77, 84, 113, 115 Ferme generate, 58

Indigo, 114, 116 Induction, electromagnetic, 72 Industrial Revolution, 56, 128 Inquisition, Iron, 85 Italy, 18

Fermentation, 102 Fermi, Enrico, 169 Finches, Darwin's, 147

Jenner, Edward, 90 Jupiter, 19

Fission, 170

moons

Fleming, Alexander, 144 Fluorescence, 124 Franco-Prussian war, 103 Franklin, Benjamin, 82 French Revolution, 58

Lagrange, Count, 59

Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Langmuir, Irving, 177

Islands, 147

Leaning Tower of Pisa, 33 Leeuwenhoek, Anton van, 41 Legion of Honor, 100 Leibniz, Wilhelm, 48

Galilei, Galileo, 31

Galvanometer, 67 radiation, 125

Geiger, Hans, 182 Generator, electric, 72 Genetics, 110

Germs,

Germ

Lenses, 41 Lever, 4 Light, colors in, 47 refraction of, 48

102, 104

theory of

disease, 104

Germany, 116, 169, 193 Goddard, Robert Hutchings, Goodspeed, A. W., 123

velocity of, 165 Light, electric, 133, 178 Lincoln, Abraham, 145 Lines of force, 69 Lister, Joseph, 103 Louis (of France), 92 Luminescence, 120

190

Governor, centrifugal, 57 Gravity, 45, 168 Guggenheim, Daniel, 192 Gutenberg, Johann, 9

XV

Luther, Martin,

Hahn, Otto,

de, 152

Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 58 Lawrence, Ernest Orlando, 186

Galen, 27

Gamma

of, 35

Koch, Robert, 105 Kundt, August, 122

Frisch, O. R., 169 Fust, Johann, 12

Galapagos

3 1

13,

24

169

Halley, Edmund, 49 Hannibal, 7 Harvey, William, 26 Hata, Sahachiro, 142

Hayes, Rutherford

Magnetism, 67 Malpighi, Marcello, 29 Malthus, T. R., 148

Mars, 19 Mass, conservation of, 63

B., 84

195

Piezoelectricity, 156

Matter into energy, 167

Mauve,

Pitchblende, 154 Pius V, Pope, 38

115

Meitner, Lise, 169 Menlo Park, 132 Mendel, Gregor Johann, 107, 151 Mercury, 19, 168

Planets,

Methode de nomenclature chimique, 65

53

Ptolemy, Claudius, 20

Morley, E. W., 165 Morse, Samuel F. B., 76 Motion, laws of, 50 Motor, electric, 81

Pulley, 5

Quinine, 111, 119

Racemic acid, 99 Radioactivity, 188 Radium, 160 Rain, man-made, 178 Reign of Terror, 58

(of France), 90 III (of France), 85 Natural selection, 149 Neutron, 169 Newcomen, Thomas, 54 I

Relay, electromagnetic, 79 Retrograde motion, 19 Rheticus, George Joachim, 24 Rockets, 190

Isaac, 2, 45, 163

Nitrogen, 64, 185

Nobel

49

Protestants, 13 Proton, 185 Prussia, 103

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 92 Moon, motion of, 45 mountains on, 35

Newton,

of,

Priestley, Joseph, 63 Printing, 10

Michelson, Albert A., 165 Microorganisms, 110 Microscopes, 43

Napoleon Napoleon

motion

Plutonium, 187 Poland, 155 Polonium, 160 Pope, Alexander,

Prize, 142, 160, 168, 169, 180,

Roentgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 120

183

Roentgen

Nucleus, atomic, 183

Rome, Oersted,

Hans

OH film,

179

rays, 123

1

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 170

Christian, 70, 78

Royal College of Science, Royal Society, 43, 49

Origin of Species, The, 145 Osiander, Andreas, 24

113

Rutherford, Ernest, 181

Oxygen, 63,64, 186 Oxygen, liquid, 191

Salk, Jonas, 97 Salvarsan, 143 Saturn, 19

Paine, Thomas, 14 Pasteur, Louis, 99 Pasteurization, 101 Pea plants, 108 Pegram, George, 170 Pendulum, 32 Penicillin, 144

Schaefer, Vincent J., 180 Schoeffer, Peter, 12 Scintillation screen, 185 Self-induction, 78 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 104

Serum, 140

Serum therapy,

Perkin, William Henry, 111 Perkin Medal, 118 Peter the Great (of Russia), 44 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica^ 50 Phlogiston theory, 62

141

Silkworms, 102 Silver iodide, 180

Sklodowska, Marie, 155 Smallpox, 90 Smithsonian Institution, Soddy, Frederick, 184 Sorbonne, 156

Phonograph, 133 Photoelectric effect, 168 196

82, 191

Species, 147 Specific gravity, 7 Spirochete, 143

Uranium, 154 neutron bombardment

of, 169

radiations of, 124, 157

Uranium

Spontaneous generation, 102 Steam engine, 54

fission,

170

Uranium-235, 187

Steel, 86

Stock-ticker, 132

Vaccination, 96 Vaccine, Salk, 97

Sturgeon, William, 78 Sub-atomic particles, 125, 181

Veins, 27

Sulfa drugs, 144 Sunspots, 35

Venus, 19 Vesalius, Andreas, 27

Synthetics, 118, 175

Voltage, 72

Syphilis, 143

Syracuse,

Voltaire, 53

1

Vonnegut, Bernard, 180 V-2 rocket, 193

Tartaric acid, 99

Tatum,E.

L., 110

Waldeyer, Wilhelm von, 138

Telegraph, 76, 130 Telescopes, 34, 48 Third Law of Motion, 50

Thomson, J. J., Thorium, 158

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 149 Wallace's Line, 150

Washington, Booker T., 174 Washington, George, 92 Watt, James, 54

125, 184

Traits elementaire de chimie, 65

Weather Bureau, U.S., Wine, souring of, 100

Transformer, 73 Trypan Red, 141

Wrought iron,

Trypanosomes, 137 Tschermak, Erich, 107

86

X-rays, 123

Tuberculosis, 138

medical uses

Tungsten

filaments, 178 Turks, 15, 92 Tuskegee Institute, 172 Type, movable, 10

of, 126

Yeast, 100

Zinc

Tyrian Purple, 118

197

sulfide, 185

82, 83

Phillip Leonian

ISAAC ASIMOV is a man of many talents. He is one of the country's top science fiction writers;

he

is

the author of a

number

of text

books and many works of scientific popular ization for all ages; he is a professor of bio School of chemistry at the Boston University Medicine. All told he has over forty books to his credit, including

REALM OF NUMBERS and

REALM OF MEASURE. Professor Asiniov was born in the U.S.S.R.

up in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Columbia University, from in 1920, but was brought

which he received his B.S. in 1959, his M.A. in 1941 and his Ph.D. in 1948. The Asimovs, with their two small children, live in

West Newton, Massachusetts.

[I

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