Category: Biography

Illuminate your own path by learning about the remarkable lives of the exceptional individuals who have lived on our planet.

Isaac Newton: Education, Books, and Inventions
Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics, had a difficult and lonely childhood. His father, a small farm owner, died three months before he was born. Sir Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. When he was two years old, his mother Hannah married the neighborhood pastor, who was far older than herself, and they moved away. As a result, Isaac was raised in Woolsthorpe by his grandmother and a nursemaid. Looking at Newton’s list of sins that he wrote when he was 19, it seems that he was a mad child who “desires the death of many.” At some point, he wanted to burn the house where his mother and stepfather lived.
Who Was Isaac Newton?
Newton started King’s School near Grantham around 1655. He stayed with a pharmacist during his education. This environment helped him to flourish; he was extraordinarily creative in making wooden toys, watches, and other mechanical tools, and, as the 18th-century biographer William Stukeley said, also at “playing philosophical games.” However, in 1659, his mother took him out of school to run the farm. However, Isaac was not interested in performing the tasks expected of him. Isaac was fortunate as his outstanding academic success was noticed by people like the school principal, Trinity College, and his uncle, who studied in Cambridge. Although her mother, Hannah, saw academic life as a waste of time, she allowed her to return to high school to prepare for college.
Newton enrolled at Trinity College in the summer of 1661 and received a traditional education based on Aristotle’s writings. However, in 1664, he attended the lectures of Isaac Brown, the first Lucasian mathematics professor (who holds a special professorship in Cambridge). Brown’s implementation of physics into mathematics had a lasting effect on Newton. He decided to move away from the old-fashioned education methods and concentrate on the “mechanical” philosophies of advanced thinkers such as René Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler. During the two years that followed, he made intriguing discoveries in optics, mechanics, and mathematics, mostly in his home in Lincolnshire, as Cambridge was closed because of the plague.
In late 1666, he was the first to describe the calculus (derivative and integral) technique through the analysis of extremely small units, which he called fluxion. He was also the first to express the binomial theorem, which allows the expansion of the form (a + b)n with a formula that can be used for all n values, including minus and fractions. As far as it is known, he saw an apple falling from the tree during this period and compared the gravity applied to the surface of the Earth with the gravity required to keep the Moon in orbit. He thought that the force exerted by the Earth on other objects was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects. Both cases were in line with this law. However, the result was not precise enough to announce it to wider circles.
In the same period, through a series of ingenious experiments, Isaac Newton discovered how white light was composed of different light rays, each with its own color and refractive index. One by-product of this research was the discovery of a reflecting telescope that produces images from a very bright mirror instead of a lens.
Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke Debate
Robert Hooke’s constant debate with Isaac Newton did not help him much.
Newton returned to Cambridge in 1617 and became a Trinity College lecturer. But his academic success was just the beginning. Over the next few years, he refined his mathematics research and wrote an article called “Of Analysis by Equations of an Infinite Number of Terms.” Soon after, his efforts were rewarded with his election to the Lucasian professor position, which had been vacated by Barrow’s resignation in 1669. Two years later, while Newton was rewriting his lecture notes and studies on optics, Barrow showed the members a reflecting telescope made by Newton and brought him to the attention of the Royal Society. Newton sent them a crucial article. This article demolishes the continuing ancient belief that white light changes as it passes from one environment to another and also introduces the science of colors into mathematics.
Newton made a definite distinction between absolute mathematical claims and those that could not be proved, describing the latter as mere hypotheses or predictions. His arguments did not have a strong influence on Robert Hooke, the author of the famous Micrographia of 1665 and the dominant personality of the Royal Society. Hooke thought the light was a wave or vibration moving in an invisible medium or ether. He joined Newton in the reality of what he was explaining, but he still believed that the colors were formed by the change of white light in the prism. He said that Newton’s theory was just a hypothesis, which made the Lucasian professor angry.
In 1675, Isaac Newton was reluctantly convinced to publish his interpretation of his private views on natural philosophy under the title “The Theory of Light.” In this impressive text, he gives a detailed account of his understanding of the various cosmological roles of the ether associated with light, sound, electricity, magnetism, and gravity. His work sparked a second debate with Hooke; Hooke had told many people that most of the text was taken from his own Micrographia. Always quick to sense that he was underestimated, Newton accused Hooke of stealing all his work from Descartes. However, when Hooke stated that his views were misled, Newton calmed down. In his famous reply, Newton tells Hooke that he is doing well and adds, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants“
Alchemy and Theology
Newton’s replica of the first reflecting telescope shown to the Royal Society in 1668.
Newton abandoned his plans to publish his optical and mathematical works due to the controversy caused by his entry into the intellectual community known as the Republic of Letters in Europe and America, as well as his extensive communication through letters. He became increasingly devoted to other studies, such as alchemy. In one of his texts, he claimed that metals were “growing” on the Earth like trees, according to the laws governing the development of living things. Behind this was the hidden soul, which energized other processes such as fermentation, nutrition, and chemical processes. Newton was also committed to theology. He developed a sophisticated and profoundly Protestant view of history in the late 1670s. Probably in a draft text he created in the mid-1680s, he argued that ancient people believed in the Newtonian cosmos and worshiped around the central Vesta fire, imitating the solar system. He claimed that this custom was proven by the shape of the ruins at Stonehenge and Avebury, and this was the most rational religion before Christianity.
Throughout his adult life, his main interest was to explain the mystery of prophecies. Influenced by the Protestant movement, where the Pope was the antichrist and Catholicism was seen as the religion of the devil, Newton’s investigations were in an extraordinarily radical style, highly opposed to the Trinity (he believed the Trinity was deliberately fabricated). According to Newton, shyster politicians like Athanasius of Alexandria were deceived by the devil, who was born in the 4th century AD. According to Newton, they had imposed an incomprehensible and corrupt form of Christianity on the world, and it easily believed it. Isaac Newton lived in a society that would be horrified by these thoughts. If his contemporaries knew his views, he would be, at best, excluded from society.
Principia Mathematica
Principia Mathematica, which is Isaac Newton’s greatest work, consists of 3 volumes.
Hooke wrote to Newton at the end of 1679 about the orbital dynamics of the celestial bodies. During this correspondence, Hooke stated that the motions of the planets and their moons can be determined by adding the linear line of inertial movement to the force that attracts objects. He also brought up that this force would be inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. As we’ve seen, Newton knew about the inverse square law. However, he didn’t understand Hooke’s other point about orbital motion until 1680, when he saw an important event in the sky.
Later that year, the Great Comet of 1680 appeared in the skies. It disappeared behind the Sun at the end of November, and then another comet appeared at the beginning of the next month. Royal Astronomer John Flamsteed wrote to Newton in January 1681 that he predicted the comet’s return and that these comets were the same, as the comet in November was now in front of the Sun with the magnetic thrust.
Newton still considered the two comets to be different and responded by saying that the routes of both comets would be inconsistent if they passed in front of the Sun. If the two were the same comet, then they had to go into the back of the Sun, but there was no known physical mechanism for that. In any case, Newton doubted that the force of the Sun was magnetic. because the heated magnet was losing its strength.
At a time when the physical causes of the philosophy of nature had to be used to properly describe a case, the only possible theory of magnetism was the vague “ether” fluid defined by Descartes in the 1630s and 1640s and the “whirlpool” idea of the period. When Isaac Newton published the Universal Law of Gravitation Theory in his 1687 work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known as Newton’s masterpiece Principia, he explicitly denied that there is ether or a whirlpool in space.
Isaac Newton and De Mundi Systemate
Edmond Halley asks Isaac Newton about the planetary motion.
Such abstract mechanisms were leaving no room for God’s intervention (which keeps the cosmos standing as an absolute reference system) in what he created. Whereas he had to intervene once in a while. Newton was criticized by many contemporary scientists for throwing away the physical mechanisms needed to explain the idea of universal gravity, but he eventually managed to change the way natural phenomena are expressed.
Edmond Halley’s visit in 1684 served as a stimulus that guided the publication of the Principia. When Halley insisted, Newton claimed that he could demonstrate the relation of the elliptical orbit with the inverse square law but was unable to show it until November of that year. In 12 months, he discovered that all bodies, no matter how small, were attracting other bodies according to the equation F=Gm1m2/R2 (G is the gravity constant, and r is the distance between masses m1 and m2). Thus, Newton presented the modern ideas of force and mass, the laws of motion, as well as universal gravity.
Principia’s final version consisted of three volumes. The first deals with a variety of “mathematical worlds” about different laws of nature. The second relates to motion in mediums such as liquid, and the third is called the De Mundi Systemate (System of the World), which handles the laws of nature that exist in the cosmos. The first explanations of the tide, comet motions, the shape of the Earth, and the orbit of the Great Comet (which he now knows was a comet) were made by Isaac Newton, and they played an important role in his work. Soon, Newton’s work was seen as the creation of a genius. The brightest natural philosophers and mathematicians tried to grasp the content, and the difficulty of it had become a legend. Many people had great respect for him, but some weren’t too impressed.
When Principia was about to hit the shelves, Hooke was angry about Newton’s lack of respect for the tips he got on orbital dynamics. Newton became disturbed when he heard Hooke’s complaints. He took out some of the references he made to him in the manuscript of the work and told Halley that Hooke was a braggart thief and a novice mathematician. Similarly, Flamsteed began to see Newton as a pathological tyrant whose followers worshiped him obsessively.
Isaac Newton Signs a Death Sentence
The conflict between Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton is the most famous intellectual mathematics debate in the world of science. Leibniz created the Calculus as a result of these discussions.
In 1687, Isaac Newton publicly defended Cambridge University against Catholic King James II’s efforts to appoint a Catholic priest at Sydney Sussex College. Two years later, at the dawn of the 1688 Revolution, Newton was elected to Parliament on behalf of Cambridge University. In the following few years, he failed in his attempts to obtain an office in London. But he continued to work intensively on several different topics. For example, he tried to explain how ancient people knew that God was the main cause of gravity but hid that and other facts in public in a mysterious and obscure language. Newton was eventually assigned to the Mint in 1696.
He turned this job—which his predecessors saw as an opportunity to receive a salary without working—into a mission in which he was devoted to seeking out and finding treacherous counterfeiters who lowered the value of the British coin. Therefore, his job required him to sign the execution warrant for the people who committed this crime. When he became the new director of the mint in 1699, he played a big part in combining the English and Scottish mints. This made it possible for the Acts of Union, which created Great Britain in 1707.
He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1703 and moved to one of the highest positions in British science; two years later, he was declared a knight. Those who supported and spread his ideas outside of England gained great respect. By the 1720s, the Newtonian system was dominant in British and Dutch universities and cities. The wide acceptance of the doctrine in Italy and France took more than twenty years.
But the idea of some kind of mysterious force acting between all the objects in the universe since the beginning seemed incredible and unscientific to great European natural philosophers like Gottfried Leibniz and Christiaan Huygens. Newton’s theories led to various debates with his rivals throughout his life. Leibniz visited England in 1673 and 1676. Before the second visit, he had designed a calculus that is different from Newton’s. At this time, he had a good relationship with Newton, which was expressed in Newton’s two letters to Leibniz in 1676. However, this mutual respect would not last. Leibniz wrote the rules of calculus in 1684, but evidence of Newton’s work in this area would appear only 20 years later.
While the Fight With Leibniz Continues
Newton’s 1704-dated Opticks is an important experimental physics work. By breaking the light into a prism, he found that the white light decomposes into the colors that made it. He discovered that if one of these colors was selected and passed through a second prism, neither the color nor the refractive index had changed, and thus the color was primary.
Meanwhile, some of Newton’s followers suggested that Leibniz’s calculus method was worthless compared to Newton’s and that their “hero” was the one who found it first, and even Leibniz received important clues about Newton’s discovery when he visited London in 1676. In the years 1712–1713, fierce swordplay broke out between Newton and Leibniz supporters. When Queen Anne died in the summer of 1714, Leibniz was the librarian and effective court philosopher of the Hanover regime (under the name of George I) that would continue the Protestant comprehension, and this further complicated the debates.
According to Leibniz, Newton’s system was stupid not only because of its absurd gravity doctrine but also because it meant God had to intervene again and again perversely in what he created. Isaac Newton thought that Leibniz had designed a perfect system like Descartes that did not require God. He also compared Leibniz’s vague metaphysical ideas to the teachings of people who try to change the simple truths of Christianity.
Despite these discussions, Newton’s theories continued to dominate much of the intellectual environment. The publication of his new book, “Opticks,” in 1704 enabled a much richer set of doctrines to be discussed and supported. While it mostly encapsulated his previous works, he also added the “Quaestiones” section to the book, where he explained his personal views on active principles governing phenomena such as growth and movement. In subsequent editions, other Quaestiones were added about subjects such as chemistry, electricity, and magnetism. Surprisingly, he tried to explain the ether in his work, Hypothesis, dated 1675.
Isaac Newton continued his administrative duties perfunctorily in the last years of his life, but his solid interest in theology and chronology continued. When he died in 1727, he had been a scientific legend for decades. He received the greatest respect from the British state and was declared the founder of reasoning. Despite some of the immoralities that have been revealed recently, historians have agreed that he was mentally better equipped than his contemporaries. They agreed with Halley’s quote, saying, “Nor can any mortal come closer to touching the gods.“
Bibliography:
1. Ball, W.W. Rouse (1908). A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. New York: Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-20630-1.
2. Christianson, Gale (1984). In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & His Times. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-905190-0. This well documented work provides, in particular, valuable information regarding Newton’s knowledge of Patristics
3. Craig, John (1958). “Isaac Newton – Crime Investigator”. Nature. 182 (4629): 149–152. Bibcode:1958Natur.182..149C. doi:10.1038/182149a0. S2CID 4200994.
4. Manuel, Frank E (1968). A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
September 5, 2022
James Clerk Maxwell: Education, Facts, and Inventions
September 5, 2022
David Livingstone: His Life, Journeys, and Accomplishments
Who Dr. David Livingstone was, what was like his early life, and how did he die on the African continent? This famous explorer spent 30 years of his life living in Africa and exploring every point of this “dark continent.” He is perhaps the person who caused today’s Africa to be so doomed by the colonial empires.
Dr. David Livingstone and the exploration of Africa
The Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone had been fighting for his life for two weeks in an African village at the tip of Lake Tanganyika. Just when he was about to die of illness, hunger, and thirst, he stumbled upon a village in Ujiji after tramping for 350 miles (563 km).
However, the stocks of food, medicine, and a small group of servants that had to be there waiting for him were sold by unscrupulous porters. Livingstone was too sick to walk the 780-mile (1255 km) road to the east coast, and since he had nothing to trade with anyone like a cloth or a bracelet, he fell into a pitiful situation and had to beg from Arab natives for food and clothing.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
In his diary, he described himself as a “beanpole” and admitted that his mood was incredibly bad. Then, suddenly, at noon on November 10, 1871, Livingstone’s English-speaking servant Susi rushed to him and shouted excitedly, “An Englishman,” “I see him!“
When Livingstone limped off to the village square, he saw the American flag waving in front of a large, rich caravan. Then a stocky, bearded man with a long leather boot, the head of the caravan, came forward solemnly, lifted his hat, and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” The New York Herald newspaper asked the English-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone.
A few minutes later, Stanley was sitting with Livingstone on the tembe, the veranda of his house, whose walls were made of clay. On Livingstone’s insistence, Stanley quickly listed the news from the outside world, including a description of the Suez Canal, which had recently opened and about which Stanley had written an article.
The 58-year-old Scot was all ears with his faded red vest and a worn blue cap on his head. Since it had been more than five years since his departure from London, a bag of letters from his family and friends was now standing on his knees, waiting to be read.
Stanley opened a bottle of champagne and took out two silver cups. He handed the goblet, having filled it to the brim, to Livingstone. “To your health, sir,” he said, raising his goblet. “And to yours too,” Livingstone responded softly.
Finding the source of the Nile River
Dr. David Livingstones Arrival At Lake Ngami, Botswana, South Africa In 1849. David Livingstone, 1813.
David Livingstone was one of the most admired people in the Western world at the time. For 30 years, he spent his energy and talents trying to bring Christianity to Central and East Africa and also end the slave trade that continued in those areas.
He had traveled on the back of a pedestrian, a mule, or an ox for a million miles (1.6 million km) in Africa without minding the desert, forest, or marshland. He created the maps of the lands and continued his mission by saying he would either find a way inside or he would disappear.
During his travels, he mapped the Central African river system and traced the Zambezi River to its source. His experience as an explorer led him to an inevitable goal: he had to find the source of the Nile River. He started his research in 1866, but no news was heard from him for a long time. Then, there started an intense public opinion in order for him to be found.
There had been unfounded reports before that he was killed by African Zulu people, but this time he could have indeed died. Research delegations were sent to locate Dr. David Livingstone, and the delegation led by 30-year-old Stanley was one of them.
Although Stanley was venturous and assertive and Livingstone was sullen and thoughtful, these two people, who are very different from each other in terms of age and creation, soon became the closest friends.
“You gave me a new life,” said Livingstone, who wanted to express his heartfelt debt while his friend was making him eat nutritious soups and meat dishes. But most of his teeth were rotten and shed, so he had difficulty eating.
Thanks to the food and the medicines Stanley brought, David Livingstone soon regained his former health and strength. The two then took with them as many as twenty locals and went out to explore the northern stretches of Africa’s Tanganyika Lake. But when they realized that the water did not flow out of the lake, it was fairly disappointing.
On the way back, Stanley got a fever and dysentery. This time, it was Livingstone who played the doctor and nurse. When they returned to Ujiji, the fully recovered Stanley begged Livingstone to give up the Nile obsession and return. But Livingstone refused the proposal.
David Livingstone is dying
After spending an unforgettable four months together, the two companions said goodbye to each other in tears on March 14, 1872, near Tabora, the largest city in Central Africa. Stanley pledged to send supplies to Livingstone, such as carriers, food, and medicine, to help him continue his research.
Livingstone stubbornly hit the road again in August and searched for lakes and mountains to the south of Lake Tanganyika for eighteen months. He became increasingly weak, sick, and sluggish from dysentery and loss of blood due to hemorrhoids. Since he was too sick to get on the mule, he had to walk in swamps while the rain bucketed down.
Sometimes he found himself in black mud to his knees; ants, mosquitoes, and venomous spiders never left him alone. When he could no longer eat or walk, his men carried him on logs. “Knocked up quite and remained—recovered—sent to buy milch goats,” Livingstone wrote in his diary on April 27, 1873. “We are on the banks of the Molilamo.” The next day, they moved Livingstone to Chitambo, in the southeast part of Lake Bangweulu.
In a hut made of mud, he was laid on a bed of grass and wands. He drank some chamomile tea and told his servant, Susi, to leave him alone. Just before dawn on May 1, David Livingstone’s death was noticed by an African boy sleeping at the door of the lodge. Kneeling next to the bed, Livingstone’s gray-haired head had fallen into his hands as if he were praying.
Who was Dr. Livingstone?
David Livingstone, the son of a poor Scottish family, was born on March 19, 1813, in the industrial town of Blantyre in the Lanarkshire region. When he was ten years old, he started working in a cricket workshop and spent 14 years there. At the same time, he went to evening school, learned Latin and Greek, and decided to become a missionary physician in China.
Livingstone became a doctor after studying medicine in Glasgow in 1840, and he was accepted into the priesthood by the London Missionary Association. When the Opium War prevented him from going to China, he set out for South Africa and arrived in Cape Town in March 1841. The search for people to adopt Christianity led him to the dangerous Kalahari region, and by the summer of 1842, he had gone further north than any white person before him.
Two years later, Livingstone was attacked by a lion when he was about to set up a mission center on the border of the Kalahari Desert; he would never be able to lift his left arm higher than the shoulder.
In 1845, he married Mary Moffat, the daughter of a missionary, who participated in many research trips with him. Livingstone also launched a campaign against the slave trade, which was mostly directed by the Arabs on the east coast.
In 1852, he went on a four-year expedition. During this trip, he tried to determine the trade routes and place indigenous missionaries in the Transvaal region. He acquired a wealth of information on Central Africa and was welcomed as a hero when he returned to England in 1856.
The British government made a monetary contribution to his next research trip; thus, from 1858 to 1864, he would continue exploring the Zambezi River. During this time, his wife died and was buried in Africa. Livingstone’s last expedition to search for the source of the Nile River began in January 1866.
How did Stanley become an explorer?
Born on January 29, 1841, in the town of Denbigh in the Wales Region, Stanley fled to Liverpool in his youth, boarded a ship as a crew, and went to New Orleans. There, he became friends with a cotton broker named Henry Stanley, who gave him his name. After serving as a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, Stanley turned to journalism. In 1868, he joined a British force sent to save British diplomats and their families imprisoned in the capital city of Magdala, in Abyssinia.
It was Stanley who first wrote in the New York Herald newspaper how the sent force captured Magdala, freed the British, and then looted the city. This scoop made the 27-year-old reporter, who later used the name “Morton” to be more effective, one of the leading journalists in the world. In 1869, the owner of The Herald, James Gordon Bennett’s son, called Stanley to Paris and told him to “find Livingstone.”
After Livingstone died in 1873, Stanley took over the African expeditions from where the Scottish left off. He traveled all around Victoria and Tanganyika lakes. He went down from the Congo to the lake he called Stanley Lake, and from there to the waterfalls he called Livingstone Falls.
In 1879, he helped establish the Congo Free State with the support of Belgian King Leopold II. When he returned to London in the 1890s, he was elected deputy for the North Lambeth area and was given the title “Sir.” He died in May 1904 and was buried near his home in Pirbright, Surrey, England, his hometown.
Why were Livingstone and Stanley criticized?
Despite all the praise and reward for Livingstone and Stanley, some people did not find these two researchers admirable. The Royal Geographical Society did not see Livingstone being discovered in the middle of the African forest as an exciting newspaper article. Sir Henry Rawlinson, the president of the association, said that “it was not Stanley who had discovered Livingstone, but Livingstone who had discovered Stanley.”
Stanley was accused of treating African workers as “savages” and using unnecessary violence against the indigenous people who came his way. Although Livingstone generally got along well with the carriers, he had a fight with them on his last trip, causing several of them to escape. Scot was also chastised for failing to complete many of the tasks he set out to do.
For example, he was not able to establish a single mission center in all his time as a missionary. He had also lost his way in researching the source of the Nile River. More specifically, he had not done anything for the illness that resulted in his wife’s death, and he had also left his children alone at home for years.
More importantly, Livingstone and Stanley whipped up the enthusiasm of people and states for the discovery of Africa. This effort implied a desire to acquire new lands. At the beginning of the 20th century, the five countries participating in this race—England, Belgium, France, Germany, and Portugal—shared most of the African continent among themselves.
References
“David Livingstone (1813–1873)”. BBC – History – Historic Figures. 2014.
Bayly, Paul (2013). David Livingstone, Africa’s greatest explorer : the man, the missionary and the myth.
Mackenzie, John M. (1990). “David Livingstone: The Construction of the Myth”.
“David Livingstone Centre: Birthplace Of Famous Scot”.
Blaikie, William Garden (1880). The Personal Life of David Livingstone… Chiefly from His Unpublished Journals and Correspondence in the Possession of His Family.
“The University of Glasgow Story : David Livingstone”. University of Glasgow. n.d.
September 5, 2022
Antoine Lavoisier: Discoveries, Experiments, and Death
When Antoine Lavoisier or Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier started his chemistry studies in the 1760s, Aristotle’s four-element theory (earth, water, air, and fire) still dominated the discipline. At the time of Lavoisier’s death thirty years later, this discipline had been transformed into a science that was practiced in modern chemistry experiments.
Who Was Antoine Lavoisier?
Antoine Lavoisier was the son of a wealthy attorney and received formal training at the College des Quatre-Nations in the city, usually known as the College Mazarin. He studied mathematics under the supervision of astronomer Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille after finishing his humanities education in 1760. On another occasion, he would explain his mathematician-like attention to detail and care when conducting scientific studies. “They never prove a proposition before the previous step becomes clear. “Everything is linked, everything is connected, from the definition of the point to the definition of the line and the supreme realities of transcendental geometry.“
He left the college in 1761 and studied law to please his father, but his interest in science continued. He studied meteorology with Lacaille and continued to work in this field even after his teacher died in 1762. After observing the northern lights (Aurora borealis), he published his first scientific paper in 1763. He attended chemistry courses given by pharmacist Charles Louis La Planche at the Pharmacists Association, public classes on electricity by Guillaume-François Rouelle, and Bernard de Jussieu’s lectures on the plant kingdom.
He studied mineralogy, geology, and chemistry with Jean-Etienne Guettard, a member of the French Academy of Sciences. He received a law degree in 1764 and was accepted as a lawyer. But he never worked as a lawyer. In fact, he was already planning for the transition to the Republic of Science.
The following year, in 1765, he presented his first paper on “the analysis of gypsum” to the Academy of Sciences, where he went as a guest scientist. He showed how solid gypsum turns into powder when heated and creates steam during the process. He gathered the steam and found that it was pure water. This was crystallization water, with a quarter of its solid weight being heated. When he mixed the water with powdered gypsum, it turned into a solid mass again.
So, the source of the stiffness of gypsum was water. By weighing and measuring ingredients and products during synthesis and analysis, Lavoisier proposed the “double demonstration” method that he would use throughout his science career. His paper was published in the proceedings of the Academy. About a year later, he published a second paper on gypsum, showing that it consists of chalk and sulfuric acid and that its solubility depends on acid concentration. Lavoisier insisted that the analysis of mineral substances is important to shed light on Earth’s past.
Academician and Tax Collector
One of Lavoisier’s human respiration experiments was done with his colleague Armand Seguin. In the drawing, Madam Lavoisier is depicted taking notes on a nearby table.
In 1776, the Academy announced a public competition for the best method to illuminate the city streets. The participants were required to present a theory adapted to calculations, physical and chemical experiments, and practice. Lavoisier studied all kinds of lighting meticulously, looked at lamps of different sizes and types, and tested them with oil and wax. In his report, he concluded that olive oil was the best fuel. The paper was awarded a gold medal. Antoine Lavoisier said with great energy that he wanted to put his energy, intelligence, and knowledge to work for the state.
In 1767, with a long field trip to the Vosges Mountains with Guettard, he collected data for his extraordinary work, “The Mineralogical Atlas of France.” For more than four months, they roamed the land, analyzing the soil, minerals, and water and taking samples from agricultural products. There were 26 maps, eight of which belonged to Lavoisier. He was elected to the academy in 1768.
Lavoisier joined the private company Ferme Generale (General Farm) by purchasing shares, which also collected tax revenues on behalf of the King of France. The company was collecting tax on goods entering Paris, such as salt, tobacco, and alcohol, as well as the customs money, with a six-year revenue rental agreement with the king’s Controller-General of Finances. They were paying a certain sum to the royal treasury in cash, which was close to 150 million libres in 1770.
Lavoisier was particularly responsible for the Tobacco Commission, where he was tasked with preventing fugitives and cheating at retailers. Then he had much more important tasks to complete. Jacques Paulze de Chastenolles was a strong and wealthy manager. In 1771, her 14-year-old daughter, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, married the 28-year-old Lavoisier. Maria brought lots of dowries with her and became Lavoisier’s assistant. She learned chemistry and took notes while Lavoisier conducted experiments. She also translated English chemistry books for him and hosted many scientists who came to visit Lavoisier. They had no children.
Antoine Lavoisier and the Four Elements
Antoine Lavoisier spent most of his life in this laboratory setting. It is currently stored in the Paris Musee des Arts et Metiers.
Lavoisier installed a well-equipped laboratory in his first house in Paris, the Rue des Bons-Enfants. The distinctive feature of his work was the quantitative approach based on the constant use of chemical balance. The law of conservation of mass has long been the basic principle. He would later say in his textbook: “The whole art of experimenting in chemistry rests on this principle; in all experiments, one is obliged to assume an actual equality between the principles (that is, elements) of substances examined and those obtained by the analysis of these substances.“
He applied the axiom for the first time in his paper “Nature of Water,” dated 1770. At that time, many chemists believed that water could be turned into soil. Because it was known that when the distilled water was evaporated in the glass container, there was always a soil residue. Lavoisier weighed the glass container called a “pelican” and poured in water that he had distilled eight times, then measured its weight.
He kept the container at 70 degrees Reaumur (80 degrees Reaumur is the boiling temperature of water). After 101 days, he began to identify dust particles in the container, but there was no change in the temperature of the water. Also, the weight of the container had decreased, and the weight loss was equivalent to the weight of the powder particles. It was clear that the powder on the surface of the glass container was dissolved in water. Moreover, Antoine Lavoisier found that water did not turn into soil.
Lavoisier has moved on from Aristotle’s Four Elements and is now experimenting with air and fire. He decided to find out what happened to the air during combustion. By using air and water, he would also examine a second process called calcination. When metals are heated, a lime-like substance forms on the surface of the metal; chemists thought this type of calcination was kind of slow-burning.
Both calcination and burning were thought to be caused by fire, or more specifically by its main component, phlogiston—the enigmatic substance named by German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl. Nobody had detected phlogiston, but it was thought to be present in everything that was burning, at different rates. Oil and coal were said to be almost pure phlogiston.
When substances burned, phlogiston was released from the substance, producing fire. The same process was thought to produce calx during the calcination. But Lavoisier wasn’t too happy with this statement as the final weight of the burned metal was more than the weight of the initial metal when its weight and calx’s weight were added together.
If phlogiston was thrown out of the metal, then how could the burned metal be heavier? Antoine Lavoisier suspected that something was added to the metal to form calx and it could be the air.
The Birth of Modern Chemistry
“Planche XIII. Des fourneaux” written by Madam Lavoisier for the Traite elementaire de chimie (Elementary Treatise on Chemistry), shows various furnaces and distillation apparatus.
Antoine Lavoisier delivered a sealed envelope to the Academy of Sciences on November 1, 1772, to be opened in 1773. He found that when sulfur and phosphorus were burned with air, their weight would never decrease, in fact, it would actually increase. Moreover, when the lead calx, called litharge, was treated with charcoal, it lost weight and released a large amount of air.
Early in the next year, he wrote the memorandum of a long series of experiments that he intended to begin to clarify the role of gases in chemical combustion. One of his aims was to discover whether the air involved in combustion and calcination was atmospheric air or a special kind of air, then known as “fixed air,” that was named by Scottish chemist Joseph Black (we know it as carbon dioxide today). The answer to this question would revolutionize chemistry.
British scientist Joseph Priestley assisted Lavoisier in starting this revolution. In 1774, he went to Lavoisier’s house in Paris for dinner and told him that he had discovered a new kind of air. While working on the mercury calx, he had found that air was extracted from the calx as it turned back into metal, and this air had completely different properties than Black’s “fixed air.” Priestley called it “air without phlogiston.” But Lavoisier did not resort to phlogiston, as he understood the meaning of this phenomenon better than Priestley. Unlike other calxes, this new gas could not come from charcoal, as mercury calx did not require charcoal to return to metal; it should have come from the calx itself.
On April 26, 1775, Lavoisier proudly reported to the Academy of Sciences that “the principle [substance] that combines with metals during their calcination is the purest part of the air.” That “fixed air” results from the combination of the highly respirable part of the air with charcoal. He later called this “purest part” “oxygen,” which means “acid producer” in Greek, because he (wrongly) thought that all acids contain oxygen.
In 1783, British scientist Henry Cavendish burned hydrogen in a closed container to obtain water. He accurately concluded that water was created from the burning. But since he still believed that oxygen does not contain phlogiston, he thought the missing substance was supplied by hydrogen. In the presence of many members of the Academy, Lavoisier repeated Cavendish’s experiment and showed that hydrogen and oxygen form water when burned together.
He argued that water is a combination of two gases, not one element. In 1785, he carried out a major experiment on the analysis and synthesis of water; the experiment both validated his discovery and enabled the development of hydrogen as a large-scale production method. (Soon after, Lavoisier would realize how hydrogen was a better lifting gas while refereeing a hot air balloon competition between the Montgolfier brothers and another inventor.)
There was nothing left of Aristotle’s theory of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air, and there was no such thing as phlogiston. In 1787, Lavoisier, Claude Berthollet, Antoine Francois de Fourcroy, and Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau published the new Chemical Nomenclature, which would change the way we think about chemistry. Two years later, in his book Traite elementaire de chimie, Lavoisier summed up his ideas and gave a list of the known elements.
The Chemistry of Life: Oxygen
During the French Revolution, Jacobean Terror led to the execution of intellectuals such as Antoine Lavoisier.
Antoine Lavoisier was now exploring the physiology of the human respiratory tract. He concluded that breathing was kind of slow-burning. Therefore, the oxygen in the air must be essential for the chemistry of life. Lavoisier and Pierre Simon-Laplace invented the calorimeter to measure the heat emitted from an animal.
He compared this to the heat released during coal combustion and calculated the animal’s energy consumption. He then compared animal and human oxygen consumption while inactive and also on the move. Lavoisier created two papers on the physiology of animal respiration.
Lavoisier was one of the first to predict the value of the chemical approach to the physiology of nutrition and the mechanisms of tissue anabolism. In the 1790s, he was ready to start a second scientific revolution in biology. He sensed the vital role of the liver in synthesis. In fact, he had created a conceptual study program, and it would take almost 100 years for science to develop it.
Why Was Antoine Lavoisier Executed?
The French Revolution began in 1789, and Lavoisier was drawn into the process of demolishing the General Farm, which was thought to represent the worst excesses of the regime and was hated by revolutionaries. All his contributions in other areas had been forgotten, including:
- Significant progress was made in gunpowder production under his management.
- Agricultural reform began thanks to his model farm in France, the first scientific farm.
- Efforts to enforce the metric system.
- Participation in the Art and Trade Advisory Board.
- Deep thoughts on public education.
- Efforts to save France from bankruptcy.
- His collection of memories, Regional Welfare of the French Kingdom, is a touchstone in the history of economics.
During the worst days of the Reign of Terror, on May 28, 1794, the Jacobins, thinking that all officers of the tax farm were against the revolution, caught 28 government representatives of the national treasury and tried them in the Revolutionary Tribunal.
All were found guilty and executed by guillotine at the Place de Revolution. Antoine Lavoisier was the fourth. The great mathematician Joseph Lagrange commented on this event: “It took only a moment to cause this head to fall, and a hundred years will not suffice to produce its like.“
Bibliography:
1. “Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent”. Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press.
2. “Lavoisier”. Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 30 July 2019.
3. (in French) Lavoisier, le parcours d’un scientifique révolutionnaire CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
4. Schwinger, Julian (1986). Einstein’s Legacy. New York: Scientific American Library. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-7167-5011-6.
September 5, 2022
John von Neumann: Early life, Discoveries, and Accomplishments
John von Neumann was born in Budapest. He was the eldest of the three sons of a wealthy and cultured Jewish banking family. He took lessons from a private teacher until he was 10 years old, and then he started studying at the Lutheran High School in the capital of Hungary. His remarkable ability was evident from an early age; he had an almost photographic memory and the ability to quickly perform arithmetic calculations in his mind.
Who Was John von Neumann?
At the age of 18, he enrolled in the mathematics department of the University of Budapest but spent most of his time in Berlin getting to know the European scientific elite. He then started his doctorate at the University of Budapest, but also studied chemical engineering at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, due to the insistence of his father, who wanted his son to have a professional education. In 1925, ETH gave him a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. In 1926, the University of Budapest gave him a Ph.D. in mathematics.
John von Neumann received the Rockefeller Scholarship from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1926. The following year, he was appointed as a Privatdozent (faculty member) at the University of Berlin, making him the university’s youngest Privatdozent in its history. He conducted extensive research in the 1920s on mathematical logic, set theory, operator theory, and quantum mechanics. In the 1930s, he became a guest professor at Princeton University, dividing his time between Berlin and Princeton for several years. However, he wanted a permanent position in the United States due to the deteriorating political situation in Europe.
This opportunity came from the newly established Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1933, which appointed me as a founding professor (the other professor was Albert Einstein). He became an American citizen in 1937. Von Neumann achieved fundamental results in institutional and applied mathematics at the Institute and also developed his game theory. Together with Oskar Morganstern, he wrote “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” in 1944. This book was a major step forward in the field of mathematical economics.
Wartime calculations and the first electronic computer
John von Neumann and J. Robert Oppenheimer, former director of the Manhattan Project, in front of the IAS machine in 1952.
John von Neumann had a pleasant personality, great social skills, and brilliant political intelligence. When the United States entered World War II after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, there was a huge increase in demand for consulting services. John von Neumann served in this field thanks to his adaptability, legendary mental abilities, and talent to solve complex math problems easily. In 1943, he turned his attention to war-related work, especially numerical computational problems.
Most importantly, he was a consultant to the Manhattan Project in Las Alamos. There, he consulted on implosion techniques to detonate the nuclear material in the center of the atomic bomb. Complex math system equations had to be solved numerically as part of this process, so he looked for the most advanced calculators he could find.
John von Neumann was also a consultant to the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. One of the lab’s main tasks was the production of ballistic charts and the founding of the first electronic computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which was developed by the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Due to technical and design limitations, Neumann’s calculations for the atomic bomb couldn’t be done on the ENIAC. Neumann and the group at Moore worked together to design EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), which replaced ENIAC.
In June 1945, he summarized the group’s findings in his report, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The report provided the logical definition of what is known as a “stored-program computer” that all subsequent computer developments would be based on. The computer was called by this name because both the program and the numbers were using the same electronic memory. This made the computer much more powerful and flexible because now a program could run its instructions without having to use cumbersome ways to program like plugboards, punched cards, or paper.
John von Neumann and the hydrogen bomb
In 1946, von Neumann returned to the Institute for Advanced Study, leading the construction of one of the first practical computers. With the advent of general-purpose computers, he began to be concerned less with numerical weather forecasting and more with philosophy, cybernetics, and automata. At the same time, he kept giving advice in Los Alamos about how to make the hydrogen bomb.
In 1954, President Eisenhower took over the Atomic Energy Commission. Here, he made an impact on science and military policy with an inclination toward war. Neumann was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1955, and he eventually died of this disease.
His last major competence was the preparation of the Silliman Conferences for Yale University, which were published in 1958 after his death under the title The Computer and the Brain. He died in 1957 at the age of 53.
Bibliography:
- Ayoub, Raymond George (2004). Musings Of The Masters: An Anthology Of Mathematical Reflections. Washington, D.C.: MAA. ISBN 978-0-88385-549-2. OCLC 56537093.
- Blair, Clay, Jr. (February 25, 1957). “Passing of a Great Mind”. Life. pp. 89–104.
- Blume, Lawrence E. (2008). “Convexity”. In Durlauf, Steven N.; Blume, Lawrence E. (eds.). The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Second ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 225–226. doi:10.1057/9780230226203.0315. ISBN 978-0-333-78676-5.
September 5, 2022
Adolf Hitler: Early Life, Nazi Party, and Death
- Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau, Austria.
- Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.
- Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, as Russian troops approached Berlin.
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the village of Braunau, near the Austrian border with Bavaria, the son of a low-ranking customs officer. For the first 25 years of his life, he drifted from place to place on his own. Twice rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he broke down and made a living doing odd jobs, such as beating carpets. Just before World War I, he joined a prejudice shared by many in Vienna and began to see Jews as the scourge of Europe.
The Life of Adolf Hitler
Hitler joined the war as a corporal. He was a loyal soldier in the army and earned a medal twice. In 1918, his vision was damaged in Ypres, and during the treatment, he decided to become a politician. In 1920, Hitler was enrolled in the small German Workers’ Party and soon became the leader. By 1923, he had given the party a new name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi for short.
He created the SA, a bandit group of former soldiers, and gave the party’s message with a kick and baton in Munich for the first time. The plan to overthrow the Bavarian government as a way to get ready for an attack on Berlin failed, and Hitler spent all of 1924 in prison for his part in the failed uprising.
There he wrote his first book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), with the help of a friend, Rudolf Hess, who would later become the vice president of the Nazi Party. Hitler underestimated democracy in his book through the theories he made with prejudices collected from various sources. He expressed his hatred for Jews and Slavs and shared his intention to create a Lebensraum (habitat) in Eastern Europe based on his idea of a superior race. However, Hitler had learned from the Munich fiasco and decided to use parliamentary means to eradicate democracy. He put together a group of people who were loyal to him. Some of them were self-taught, like Goebbels, Goring, Ernst Rohm, and Heinrich Himmler, who were in charge of propaganda events like the Nuremberg Rallies.
Even Hitler’s most loyal fans hadn’t read My Struggle, which is full of long, self-centered ramblings and half-grown racist assumptions.
By using his oratory skills, Hitler washed the nation’s brain in a short time on a series of trips, with the promise of a new and powerful Germany that would rise from the ashes of old Germany.
Nazi Election Tactics
During the campaign, Hitler always focused on two strong themes that deeply affected the hearts of most Germans. The first is the tale of the German Army being stabbed in the back in 1918. According to the theory, if the weak politicians had not surrendered by then, Germany would have won the world war. The second was the argument that the provisions of the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty turned Germany into a second-class nation by seizing German territory, requiring very high compensation, and forbidding the rearmament of Germany.
According to Hitler, the Weimar Republic, founded in 1919, ruled Germany in the interests of Jewish-capitalist cooperation. Big business saw Hitler as a defense against Communism, and his hatred of Jews gave the unemployed and poor a scapegoat to take the blame for their problems.
The 1929 Great Depression helped the Nazis become the second-biggest party in the Reichstag in 1930. In the 1932 elections, the number of unemployed reached almost 6 million, while the Nazis became the largest party in the state. It was two months before Hitler achieved his political goal.
The Nazis asked the Germans to boycott a Jewish store in Berlin. Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) resulted in thousands of Jewish shops being destroyed in 1938.
What Was the Night of the Long Knives?
In the spring of 1934, Hitler began receiving reports from the SS and the Gestapo that SA leaders were preparing a conspiracy for him. The reports were fake, but Hitler believed them. SA was now a force of 2.5 million people, and many leaders like Röhm were proposing a pure socialist revolution. Furthermore, the Regular Army should have been led by a single defense minister, with the SS and SA led by Röhm. It was time for SA to be brought into line.
Early on the morning of June 30th, SS officers took Röhm from his bed. He was sleeping in a hotel outside Munich. He was thrown into prison and was offered suicide. Röhm said, “If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.” Instead of Hitler, two SS officers performed the task. During that night and weekend, many other SA leaders and Hitler’s political opponents were assassinated. This is known as the “Night of the Long Knives“.
Ernst Röhm.
Some officials say hundreds of them were killed; others say it was thousands. Despite the fact that these events were widely publicized, no one objected, including the press, the church, soldiers, or the party itself, demonstrating how Hitler enslaved the German people.
Hitler advocated cleaning up the SA in the Reichstag on the grounds that Röhm was homosexual. Hitler was able to persuade army officers that SA was no longer a threat, and it was at this point that Hitler benefited from the slaughter because he needed the army’s support. On his deathbed, Hindenburg wrote a telegram to Hitler saying, “You have saved the German nation from serious danger,” and continued, “He who would make history must also be able to shed blood.“
Hitler’s Enormous Power
Hitler stole a large number of artworks for Germany during World War II or hid them elsewhere.
Hitler took on the chancellor’s post in 1933 after receiving the support of almost one of every two Germans in the election held three months ago. For the next five years, he established his own administration without knowing any rules, crushed all possible sources of opposition, and eventually boasted that “It is my ambition not to know a single statesman in the world who has a better right than I to say that he is a representative of his people.“
By 1937, the unemployed had fallen from 6 million to 1 million. Hitler had created an extensive public service program, with particular emphasis on road construction. He also created a program for the armament industry, which had made great strides. Previously, a 100,000-person army with no modern weapons was transformed into a formidable fighting force.
It was a slap in the face for England and France because it simply violated the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler struck blow after blow, retaking the Rhineland in 1936 and swallowing Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, but the Western powers responded with shaky protests.
On the other hand, the Nazis’ obsessive campaign against Jews was gaining momentum, and the horrible days of the “Final Solution” were getting closer.
Who Were the Gestapo, SA, and Ss?
Hitler’s names and uniforms were those of fearful organizations.
- Gestapo: Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police, was founded in 1933 by Hermann Göring to arrest and interrogate political criminals.
- Sturmabteilung: Also known as Brown Shirts, the Nazi militia power was founded by Hitler in 1923 and eliminated in 1934.
- Schutzstaffel: The arm of the Nazi Party in black uniform, passionately bound to Hitler. It was first established as the Führer’s bodyguard, then expanded and became an army. Although the difference between the two is not clear, it had two branches: the Totenkopf or “Skull” SS, charged with concentration camps, and the Waffen or “Warrior” SS, which claims to be an elite military unit. The difference between the two is often incomprehensible.
Neville Chamberlain and His Crucial Mistake
Chamberlain and Hitler 1938.
When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned home from his meeting with Hitler in Munich in September 1938 where he received the promise of not getting attacked, he said, “I believe it is peace for our time.” Of course, this has its place in history as a big lie.
The Rise of the Nazis and Hitler
Let’s evaluate how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis conquered the country step by step. This is a significant example of how economic issues in countries can damage people’s decision-making abilities.
The troops endlessly flowed through the Brandenburg Gate in front of the imposing Chancellery building from the lush Unter den Linden boulevard. The torches held high by the soldiers created a river of fire. It was the evening of January 30, 1933, and Berlin was witnessing the most magnificent scenery in its history. That afternoon, the president of the nation, 85-year-old WWI hero Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Adolf Hitler as the German chancellor.
The Nazi propaganda machine had transformed Hitler into the “Führer (leader) of future Germany“—the man who would wipe out the shame of the peace treaty signed in Versailles after World War I. Hitler was once dubbed the “little Bohemian corporal,” but the time had come for National Socialism. As the “Heil Hitler” shouts surrounded the Chancellor building, the marching SS guards and SA troops in brown shirts lifted their arms bearing the swastika and gave a Nazi salute.
Once a simple worker in Vienna, Adolf Hitler never concealed his disdain for democracy and the Weimar Republic that rose from the ashes of the German Empire, which was defeated after Kaiser Wilhelm retreated from the throne. Making Hitler prime minister meant some kind of gambling. However, his National Socialists were the largest party in the German Parliament (Reichstag). The conservative politicians who agreed to form a coalition government with him believed that Hitler would inevitably settle down due to the responsibilities of his duty.
The Planned Reichstag Fire
The Reichstag fire and mentally handicapped Dutchman.
The Reichstag elections in the first week of March provided an opportunity to see whether the German nation approved the new government. However, just before the day of voting, the Nazis gained the upper hand: On the evening of February 27, Hindenburg had dinner with people working with him in Herrenklub, just around the corner from the Reichstag. He suddenly saw something shining outside on the street. Everyone ran to the windows. They saw the Reichstag’s huge, gilded dome sparkling.
Adolf Hitler had dinner at the house of Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, and was listening to the record on the gramophone. A phone rang to report that the Reichstag was on fire. Hitler and Goebbels were on the scene within minutes. They immediately declared the fire an arson act and that the communists were attempting to start the “red revolution“.
As Hitler watched the Reichstag collapse, his right-hand man, World War I air hero and current Reichstag President Hermann Göring, shouted, “Every Communist official must be shot.” The next morning, while the smoke was still rising from the remnants of the Reichstag, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to declare a “state of emergency.” The right to liberty was suspended, and the police were given the authority to arrest and detain anyone without a trial.
Thousands of communists and liberals, including the Reichstag members, were gathered and imprisoned. A young man was arrested and convicted of setting the Reichstag on fire. However, there was an overriding belief that the explosion that led to the fire was actually the job of a Nazi detachment that took action upon the open orders of Goebbels and Göring.
Shortly after the Reichstag fire, Marinus van der Lubbe, a former communist and mentally disabled Dutchman, was arrested and put to death for setting the fire. Although he admitted his guilt and was known as the arsonist, Lubbe has been proven to be ruled by the Nazis.
Nazis Undid Democracy
The new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, passes by the people of Berlin next to President Paul von Hindenburg.
The Nazis tried to impress and convince the mass of voters, sometimes by frightening them and sometimes by flattering them. However, they still did not achieve the majority in the March 5 elections. Still, 44% of the votes, which was more than any other party, gave Hitler the power to get rid of democracy and set up a dictatorship in Germany.
Hitler decided to open the new Reichstag with a stage show at the old Garrison Church in Potsdam, where the great emperor Frederick the Great was buried. Again with cunning symbolism, March 21 was chosen as the date of the ceremony, and this date was when Bismarck opened the first Reichstag in 1871. Everything was prepared to emphasize that the old Germany is integrated with this new Germany.
The houses in the old capital were completely decorated with Swastika flags and red-black-white imperial flags. Elderly army officers in imperial uniforms at the church were next to the Nazis in black and brown clothing.
While Hindenburg prayed for Hitler, saying, “to save the old soul of this famous temple from selfishness and party fights, thus bringing the nation together as a proud and free Germany,” Hitler kneeled and thanked the president for restoring the pride and honor of the motherland.
Two days later, the Reichstag gathered at the Potsdam opera house and approved an Enabling Act, which gave Hitler unlimited authority, with an overwhelming majority of 441 against 94. German democracy took its last breath.
By the summer of 1933, all political parties except the National Socialist Party were closed. The state’s and the party’s solidarity were officially confirmed by law in December. To emphasize this point, the “Hitler salute” was made mandatory while the national anthem played.
In June 1934, the German nation accepted the dictation of Hitler by displaying no reaction to the sinister “Night of the Long Knives.” During the bloody weekend, many former comrades, including the ones who helped Hitler come to power, were also among the killed.
Important Dates About Adolf Hitler
April 20, 1889: Birth of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in the remote Austrian hamlet of Braunau. At the age of fourteen, he lost his parents: a customs officer and a lady of peasant stock.
February 24, 1920: Hitler presents the Nazi doctrine
Adolf Hitler gave his first public presentation of Nazi doctrine to an audience of around 2,000 people at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. It was his idea to form a Nazi party in order to establish a “racist national socialist state.” Five years later, in 1925, Hitler released his book program “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle or My Battle).
January 30, 1933: Hitler becomes German Chancellor
Hitler was named Reich Chancellor by the President of the German Republic, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, despite his weak credentials for the position. He had a bad attitude toward the Nazi party’s top dog, whom he called a “Bohemian corporal.” A new administration of “national concentration” was ordered into place by Hindenburg and given to Adolf Hitler to lead. Hitler became Chancellor, Göring became Prussia’s Interior Commissioner, and Frick became the Minister of the Interior, all key posts held by members of the Nazi party in the new administration. After Hindenburg passed away on August 2, 1934, Hitler took over as head of the German Reich.
February 27, 1933: Reichstag fire
There was a fire at the German parliament building during the night. A Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was arrested near the inferno’s epicenter. As the new chancellor, Adolf Hitler promptly found him guilty, labeling the crime a communist conspiracy. The NSDAP used the incident as an excuse to wipe out communists in Germany. The next day saw the arrest of four thousand CP leaders.
March 16, 1935: Hitler reinstated military service
Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany, declared the reinstatement of mandatory military duty. Also, he wanted to double the strength of the army from 100,000 to 500,000. The Allies, including France, England, and the United States, watched helplessly as the Treaty of Versailles was broken for the first time. Hitler was now very open about his plans to build an aggressive and formidable army.
September 15, 1935: Creation of the Nuremberg Laws
Hitler’s first anti-Semitic measures were enacted at the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. Among other things, Hitler stripped Jews of their German citizenship and outlawed their relationships with, and even friendships with, “Aryans.” These regulations were the first step in a process of exclusion that would ultimately lead to the “Final Solution” and the Nazis’ 30 months in power.
March 7, 1936: Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles
The Ruhr Neutral Zone was occupied by the Wehrmacht. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Treaty of Versailles’s clauses null and unenforceable, including those that required Germany to demilitarize the Ruhr. Despite widespread indignation, Western nations did little to stop Germany from breaking international law. It had been a year since the unauthorized reinstatement of mandatory military duty. In 1938, when the Führer authorized an invasion of Austria, the agreements on the boundaries were once again disregarded.
March 13, 1938: Hitler carried out the Anschluss
Hitler authorized an early morning invasion of Austria after the forced resignation of the Austrian government. The Austrians applauded the Reich’s troops, who quickly and easily took control of the land. The German chancellor marched through his hometown, Braunau am Inn. In the guise of the “Anschluss,” the “attachment,” Hitler announced the reunification of Austria and Germany.
This reunion between the two nations, outlawed under the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain, was attempted as early as 1934 but failed under the threat of Italy, and still the Western democracies did not respond. In a referendum that Hitler orchestrated, the people of Germany and Austria overwhelmingly voted in favor of the annexation. As the Nazis moved Austria to the eastern side of the board, it became known as the “Ostmark,” or eastern march of the Reich.
September 30, 1938: Signing of the Munich Agreement
At midnight, in Munich, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and the British and French prime ministers, Chamberlain and Daladier, signed an agreement settling the status of Czechoslovakia. France and Britain caved in to German demands after twelve hours of discussions in order to prevent a new war in Europe. Despite its reluctance, the Czechoslovak government ultimately caved in to the demands of the major nations and admitted that their country had violated the Treaty of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
The gathering was a huge success for Germany. The following day, Hitler invaded the Sudetenland, starting the process of demolishing Central Europe’s lone democracy. Over time, the Munich Agreement came to represent the inability of European democracy to effectively counter Nazism.
August 23, 1939: The German-Soviet Pact
In Moscow, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a 10-year no-aggression deal. Their sphere of influence over Eastern Europe was allocated according to a covert system. Hitler declared war on Poland on September 1, having secured the Soviet Union’s neutrality in the process. Stalin then proceeded to conquer Romania, the Baltic States, and Finland as a result. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, he violated this treaty.
September 1, 1939: The Wehrmacht invades Poland
Hitler invaded Poland 20 years after the conclusion of World War I, a conflict that many survivors hoped would be the “la der des ders” (the final one). The next day, both Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had officially begun, and before it ended in 1945, it had claimed the lives of almost fifty million people. Poland’s antiquated military would be quickly defeated. During the Nazi occupation, Poland’s situation was especially grim.
May 10, 1940: Hitler invades Belgium
After France and England declared war on Germany, it took Germany 7 months to break the western front. In this way, the Führer ended the “phony war” by unleashing his army against the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. 8 to 10 million Belgians and Frenchmen took to the highways in a matter of days. On May 15 and May 27, respectively, the Dutch and Belgian armies capitulated. On June 14, the Germans invaded Paris, prompting Marshal Pétain to request an armistice, which was agreed on June 22.
June 22, 1941: Operation Barbarossa in the USSR
The Soviet Union was invaded by German forces. Barbarossa was the codename for this military mission. Even after being warned by his secret agencies, Stalin did not believe Hitler would violate the non-aggression agreement they had struck two years previously. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister and an outspoken opponent of Bolshevism, quickly declared his support for the Soviet Union. Despite early success against a weakened Red Army, the Wehrmacht was unable to advance on Moscow due to the onset of winter.
The Nazis conducted a considerably bloodier war in the Soviet Union than they did in the West because they saw the Slavs as subhuman and communism as their major opponent. Inciting more national pride among all Russians was exactly the wrong move.
July 20, 1944: Assassination attempt against Hitler
The “Führer” was spared a murder attempt by the German military aristocracy while attending a conference at the headquarters in Rastenburg. The Home Army’s Chief of Staff, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, plotted the offensive to either reinstate the monarchy or establish a conservative dictatorship. He detonates the device himself by sliding a suitcase full of explosives beneath the conference table. However, the lucky break came when someone shifted the luggage. It exploded around noon, far from Hitler. His wounds were minor. Himmler took over after Stauffenberg’s execution that same night.
30 April 1945: Hitler commits suicide
Hitler and his lover Eva Braun killed themselves in their bunker on April 30, 1945, as Russian troops were getting close to Berlin.
References
Aigner, Dietrich (1985). “Hitler’s ultimate aims – a programme of world dominion?”. In Koch, H. W. (ed.). Aspects of the Third Reich. London: MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-312-05726-8.
Doyle, D (February 2005). “Adolf Hitler’s medical care”. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 35 (1): 75–82. PMID 15825245.
Bauer, Yehuda (2000). Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-300-08256-2.
Beevor, Antony (2002). Berlin: The Downfall 1945. London: Viking-Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-670-03041-5.
September 5, 2022
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman: Early Life, Discoveries and Inventions
September 5, 2022
Enrico Fermi: Biography, Discoveries, and Awards
Among the 20th century physicists, there were people more creative than Enrico Fermi; one or two of them thought more deeply, and a few were more skilled in mathematics. But Enrico Fermi was the best problem solver of them, with his amazing ability to see the essence of any physics problem. He was also the last person to reach the highest level in both theoretical and experimental fields.
The invention of the atomic bomb
His reaction to the explosion test of the first atomic bomb shows these qualities. Fermi was the scientist in charge of the physical concepts developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which served as the research and design center for the nuclear weapon development program known as the “Manhattan Project“. He played an important role both in these concepts that led to the making of the atomic bomb and also in the construction of the actual bomb. Many of those at Los Alamos saw him as a prophet to be consulted in any difficult problem of theory, experiment, or computation. Nevertheless, he never made an engraved quote to honor the memories of the test explosion of the atomic bomb on July 16, 1945. However, there is an interesting story.
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s immediate response to this event as director of the Manhattan Project is the most well-known. When he saw the explosion light up the sky, he remembered a line from the Hindu inscription Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu said to the Princess: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” On the other hand, the head of the test, Kenneth Bainbridge, summarized the same event differently: “Now, we are all sons of bitches.” While those present on the test side were feeling emotions ranging from fear to pride, the always pragmatic Fermi was seen breaking down a sheet of paper to find a quick and simple way to measure the impact of the explosion.
When the shock wave reached his location after 40 seconds, it blew the pieces around. He calmly observed how far the pieces flew, then referred to a simple chart he had previously prepared, took out the spreadsheet, and made his prediction about the size of the atomic explosion. Fermi’s ability to calculate the dimensions of any physical phenomenon was legendary, and as the detailed measurements show later, this was no exception.
Who was Enrico Fermi?
The first nuclear explosion happened on July 16, 1945, at 05:30:45 am was the beginning of the Atomic Age. Enrico Fermi and J. Oppenheimer observed the explosion in a bunker 16 km away from the event. The only known monochrome image of the incident was taken by civil mechanical engineer Jack Aeby.
Enrico Fermi was born on September 29, 1901, in Rome and grew up in an ordinary family. His father worked on the state railways; his mother was a teacher. Fermi’s extraordinary abilities were quickly noticed, and he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Scuola Normale Superiore at the elite university of Italy, Pisa. Here, he quickly overshadowed not only other students but also teachers. At that time, Italy was relatively weak in physics. This means that Fermi was a self-taught student. He has made it his style to try to find a simple solution to a problem by figuring out what the main points are.
This approach was opposed to the dominant German school of that time, which was based heavily on mathematics. After graduation, Fermi quickly solved many important problems in theoretical physics, one of which was the subject of statistical mechanics, which incorporated the approaches of the new quantum mechanics. This success attracted the attention of physics professor Orso Corbino in Rome. He was a much older man than Fermi, who was looking for the person of his dreams to run the world-class physics institute.
Corbino, a politically strong man, saw his dreams come true in Fermi. In an unprecedented fashion in Italy, Fermi helped him join the theoretical physics chair in Rome when he was 26 years old.
Enrico Fermi went far beyond Corbino’s dreams by attracting visitors from all over Europe and developing young Italian talents. Fermi’s best-known contribution to theoretical physics was made in 1934, when he introduced the theory of weak interactions in particle physics. It has been known for several years that nuclear decays that release electrons do not seem to comply with the energy conservation law. This principle was an important enigma as it was the cornerstone of physics at the time. Niels Bohr argued that conservation might not be so absolute. On the other hand, Wolfgang Pauli thought that it was absolute, and the lost energy was carried by a new particle called the neutrino. But how?
Theory and experiments
Three young physics geniuses Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli are on a boat in Lake Como during the physics session held in 1927. Pauli, turned 27, was the oldest among them.
In 1934, Fermi showed how this phenomenon could occur. He called Pauli’s unknown particle the neutrino and suggested the existence of a new kind of interaction in which a neutron decays and dissociates into protons, electrons, and neutrinos. He showed the possible paths the interaction could take, calculated its size, and explained the results. At a time when the only two known forces were gravity and electromagnetism, this was a revolutionary concept; it is still seen as a milestone in physics.
While continuing to work as a theorist, he formed a tightly connected group of experiments, most of whom will continue on their way to distinguished careers. The original group of Edoardo Amaldi, Bruno Pontecorvo, Franco Rasetti, and Emilio Segre took part in the most important experimental initiative of Fermi. Until the early 1930s, scattering from nuclear targets was done by bombarding the rays of alpha particles (i.e., helium nuclei) from radioactive decay using a technique led by Ernest Rutherford.
But in 1932, James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron in Cambridge offered a new opportunity for bombardment. Focusing on the neutron beam was more difficult, but the fact that the electrical charges were neutral meant that neutrons would not be pushed away in the nuclear bombardment. Therefore, they were more likely to reach the target. Fermi now had an important insight.
The possibility of a nuclear transformation was expected to increase with the increasing energy of the bombarding neutron, but he realized that the opposite was true. The slower the incoming neutrons are, the more time it takes for them to pass through the target nucleus, and the greater the chances of a reaction. This new system has led to several important discoveries, some by his group and some by other scientists. One of them was the invention of nuclear fission in 1938.
Enrico Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1938 and went directly from Sweden to the USA. The decision to migrate was wise, as his wife was Jewish and brutal race laws were introduced in Italy under Mussolini. The departure of Fermi determined the end of an era in Italian physics, but now this area has taken its place in the mainstream of the country, even though it lost its biggest practitioner.
Enrico Fermi and the world’s first nuclear reactor
Chicago Pile-1 is the world’s first nuclear reactor. It was founded in 1942 on the indoor tennis court beneath the out-of-service west open tribune of Stagg Field Stadium at the University of Chicago. It consists of uranium pallets separated from each other with graphite blocks and intended to produce neutrons.
Enrico Fermi’s neutrino research was increasingly turning toward military purposes, but he continued it in his new homeland. He oversaw the construction of the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in 1942, and he was still working when criticality — the point at which a reactor can sustain a fission chain reaction on its own — was achieved. He then transferred his work to Los Alamos, but at the end of the war, he returned to the University of Chicago and performed activities in other fields, such as astrophysics. He also became the leading name in emerging high-energy physics.
He continued his legendary career as both a theorist and an experimental worker. He attracted many talented young American physicists to Chicago. In 1954, Fermi was diagnosed with stomach cancer while he was at the summit of his power and died shortly after the exploratory surgery, which showed how the cancer had spread. His death caused sadness all over the world. The largest high-energy facility in the USA was named Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). More importantly, all the particles with a half-odd integer spin (neutron, proton, electron, and neutrino) are now called fermion particles.
Bibliography:
1. Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939–1946 (PDF). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07186-5. OCLC 637004643.
2. Hewlett, Richard G.; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07187-2. OCLC 3717478.
September 5, 2022
Richard Trevithick: Early Life and Inventions in the Steam Engine
September 5, 2022
Louis Pasteur: Early Life, Discoveries, and Contributions to Science
When Louis Pasteur died in 1895, he was a national hero in France and became internationally famous as well. The public got to know him most with his work on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases in the last years of his life. But for the scientific community, he was the person who started the field of stereochemistry, showed that fermentation is a biological process, disproved the theory of spontaneous generation, explained how diseases work on a biological level, helped establish the microbe theory, and showed the economic and social benefits of experimental laboratory research in many fields.
Although Pasteur’s position was partly based on his own advertising, it was actually due to the wide-ranging achievements of microbiology in its theory and practice. Gerald Geison wrote for him: “While he often exhibits great courage and a powerful imagination, the characteristic features of his work, in general, are clear mindset, extraordinary experimental skills, perseverance, and even stubbornness.“
Who Was Louis Pasteur?
Pasteur was born in Dole, in the east of France, and his father was a tanner. He went to school in Arbois and Besançon, and his grades were good enough to be recommended for the entrance exams of the respected Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He failed the exam in 1842 but succeeded the next year. He chose physical sciences, and after he finished his undergraduate degree, he focused on crystallography, a new field in physics and chemistry, and got a double doctorate in it.
He studied the chemical formula and the relationship between the crystalline forms of sodium tartrate. Scientists were interested in different, that is, isomorphic, chemicals with very similar chemical structures. Salts of tartaric acid were of particular interest. Because of dimorphism, the microscope revealed that the two forms are mirror images of each other. Of course, luck played a role: crystallization is extremely heat-sensitive, and Pasteur was working at the most appropriate time of the year. Sodium tartrate shows this asymmetry more clearly than almost any other salt. He found that crystals that come from nature have the same polarization properties as those that are made in a lab.
Through long and difficult observations, he revealed that natural crystals always have right-handed material, while synthetic crystals have equal amounts of right and left material. This meant that the polarization properties neutralized each other. In this study, Pasteur’s scientific style is defined by five things: his ability and willingness to experiment, his use of the microscope, his interest in how life works chemically, how he made the most of luck, and how important his results were.
In 1849, Louis Pasteur transferred to Strasbourg University as a professor of chemistry, continuing to work on asymmetry and enjoying his growing reputation. His private life changed when he married Maria Laurent, the daughter of the university president. Marie provided both financial and moral support for his career. Six years later, he was appointed dean of the newly established Science Faculty at Lille University and moved there. He welcomed the university’s mission to combine research with teaching and science practice to support the local industry. He taught lectures on bleaching, refining, and brewing but continued his research in the field of asymmetric compounds and optical activities.
The Great Fermentation Controversy
In a drawing of the day, Louis Pasteur and Felix-Archimede Pouchet argued.
Pasteur’s great interest in the chemistry of living organisms led him to investigate fermentation and especially the role of yeast in alcohol production. In 1857, he gave a speech on lactic acid and amyl alcohol, the common by-products of bad fermentation. He argued that the asymmetric optical properties of amyl alcohol came from the fermentation process, which was related to living organisms. This was against the common idea that fermentation is a chemical process.
Returning to the Ecole Normale as director of scientific research in 1860, Pasteur published his main work, which finalized the biological explanation of fermentation. It was interesting that a person trained in chemistry and physics advocated vitalism, emphasizing the uniqueness of life and the fact that life cannot be reduced to material forces. Pasteur turned his microscope from crystal structures to fermented grapes and sour milk, observing large molecules such as yeast and other ferments that were previously supposed to change shape in the process. It once again affirmed that yeast consists of living cells or microorganisms.
During the fermentation studies, there was a very famous contrast between Pasteur and Félix Archimède Pouchet on the spontaneous generation of life. Pasteur first made a speech against spontaneous generation in February 1860, publishing an article the following year dealing with the fact that life always derives from an earlier life. He received an award for this article. The subject of his work was leavening in liquid mixtures and the deterioration of natural products. He argued that these could always generate spontaneously without contamination from live organisms.
Two scientists embarked on a scientific duel, with mutual scientific results and polemics being presented and sophisticated sterilization techniques mixed with religious inferences over whether life was constantly created. Louis Pasteur defended the general view that life was created by God in the distant past and could not be created by simple physical force. This strife not only resulted in the consensus of the scientific community but, unusually, in the judgment of the committees of the French Academy of Sciences in favor of Pasteur and against spontaneous generation.
The microscope, other instruments, and silk cocoons Pasteur used to study silkworm disease pebbles in the 1860s.
This contrast led Pasteur to a new field: the research of disease in animals and humans. Doctors had long thought that the development of fever and septic infections was similar to fermentation and spoilage. Thinking that these processes involve living organisms or microbes raised new questions. Of course, the link was speculative, and this was well reflected in the phrase “germ theory of diseases.” The term “microbe” explained that these organisms were very diverse, very common in the environment, especially in the air, and were potentially powered by fission; the fact that it was a “theory” meant that the link that is needed to show they caused the disease still had to be proven.
Following the practical applications of the microorganism theory to fermentation and spoilage, Pasteur found that heating the wine to 50 degrees killed yeast cells and prevented spoilage. The same method is still used to prevent milk from spoiling and is called pasteurization. The most famous application of Pasteur’s germ theory was the development of antiseptic methods by British surgeon Joseph Lister, who assumed that the septic infection of wounds was related to microorganism contamination, leading to rotting. Lister had always given Pasteur credit for his work, and he became Pasteur’s most well-known supporter by extending Pasteur’s germ theory to all infections and diseases that spread from person to person.
Pasteur’s application of science to practical problems prompted the French government to demand that he lead a team to study the disease that had arisen in the silk industry in 1865. After three years of investigation, the disease was attributed to a parasite, and they recommended ways to keep silkworms healthy and free from germs. Pasteur’s success provided a more distinguished view of the theory that diseases are germ-borne. Tests have begun in medical research around the world. But during one of his projects, Pasteur had a stroke. This didn’t slow him down or change how hard he worked in school, but his left side was partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.
Pasteur’s first study of microbial diseases was on anthrax, which was not only one of the main problems of the French livestock industry but also affected humans. The bacterial cause was identified in 1876 by Robert Koch. Although Pasteur is best known for the vaccine he produced for this disease, he opposed some aspects of Koch’s work. He predicted that a mild disease could revert to a virulent strain based on the principle of smallpox vaccination. He exposed the anthrax bacteria to the air, and its virulence decreased. The laboratory results were successful. So he undertook a field trial at Pouilly-le-Fort, near Paris, in 1881.
Twenty-five sheep were vaccinated, and an equal number of sheep were in the control group. Two weeks later, all of them were infected with anthrax. Nearly all of the vaccinated sheep survived, while almost all of those who were not vaccinated died. Pasteur’s work had shown that in addition to directly benefiting French farmers, vaccination could be applied to many, if not all, infectious diseases. At the International Medical Congress in 1881, he was treated like a star, and the French government gave him a lot of help.
Louis Pasteur and the Rabies Vaccine
Pasteur’s interest in helping people and his popularity led to many images of him in the media, such as on chocolate boxes.
But even bigger improvements were imminent. His next project was a protective vaccine against rabies. Its unpredictability and the fact that the symptoms, once they appeared, brought about a terrible death that could not be prevented were causing great concern in the public. Pasteur and his increasing number of assistants first reproduced the disease in laboratory dogs and rabbits under controlled conditions. The first trials with dogs were successful. Then, because of public pressure and more trust in the new vaccine, they switched to testing on people.
However, the rabies vaccine was not used for protection but to treat people who were already infected. The aim was to strengthen immunity by taking advantage of the long incubation period. The first human subject was a boy named Joseph Meister, who was bitten by a rabid dog in eastern France. It was brought by her parents, who knew of Pasteur’s possible life-saving treatment. The boy survived with treatment. After this case, the vaccine was tried on another child, and the result was again positive. Once it was made public in October 1885, rabid dog-bitten victims from France and Europe, and soon all over the world, flocked to Paris to receive this free treatment.
The press published Pasteur’s newly popular rabies treatment on their front pages. They celebrated Pasteur as the great scientist and humanist who promised to rid humanity of infectious diseases. He received many new awards, but most importantly, there were donations from the public that allowed him to set up an institute to develop further vaccines and other life-saving innovations. With donations from around the world, the Pasteur Institute officially opened in November 1888.
This great man’s health had deteriorated. Although he was still in the laboratory and the clinic, he could not take an active role in any research. When he died in 1895, it was proposed that he be buried in the Pantheon alongside other French heroes with a large public funeral. But Pasteur and his family had already made their plans. The best place to bury a scientist who changed the role of laboratory research in science and public relations was in the crypt at his institute.
Bibliography:
1. Ullmann, Agnes (August 2007). “Pasteur-Koch: Distinctive Ways of Thinking about Infectious Diseases”. Microbe. 2 (8): 383–387.
2. Anderson, C. (1993). “Pasteur Notebooks Reveal Deception”. Science. 259 (5098): 1117. Bibcode:1993Sci…259.1117A.
3. “History of the Cholera Vaccine | Passport Health”. www.passporthealthusa.com.
September 5, 2022
Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey: Origins of the Humankind
Sometimes great scientists make their greatest discoveries while they are working with a partner. This was true for Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, who complemented each other’s work in their research on radioactivity, and also for Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, who pioneered research on the origins of man in East Africa. The Leakey team worked together on numerous research projects and excavations, which established the “Leakey” name as a prominent figure in the field of human evolution studies. Their work conclusively established that the origins of humankind can be traced back to Africa. Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey traced the origins of the human lineage over a period spanning 18 million years to learn more about the ape-like ancestors of Homo sapiens. They discovered the first human being to make a tool, called Homo habilis, and named it “Jonny’s child.”
Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey
The Leakey discoveries were a family business. Here in 1960, Louis, Mary, and 11-year-old Philip excavated a site near the Olduvai Gorge where the first humans lived two million years ago.
The couple also made independent discoveries. Mary found fossil footprints that show the first humans walking upright three million years ago—about a million years before our ancestors started making tools. The visionary Louis helped launch the first long-term field studies of wild primates by sending Jane Goodall to record chimpanzee behavior, Dian Fossey to observe mountain gorillas, and Birute Galdikas to observe orangutans. These studies helped shape our understanding of the social lives and cultures of our early ancestors. Together, Louis and Mary turned paleoanthropology from a simple study of rocks and bones into the complex and rich field it is today.
Although it was Mary Leakey who made many of the most important discoveries, Louis Leakey was the person who fueled the work. Louis Leakey’s idea to seek out the origins of humanity in Africa, disregarding the prevailing scientific consensus, was the driving force behind their expedition. At the time, paleoanthropologists believed that humans migrated to Africa after evolving in Europe and Asia. Louis proved this idea wrong, and over time, with Mary’s contributions, he completely ruled out the old belief.
Louis’ bias in favor of Africa was partly due to his origins. His parents were missionaries who lived with the people of Kikuyu in a village in the mountains above Nairobi, in British colonial East Africa (now Kenya). Although his parents were English, Louis always saw himself more as a Kikuyu. He was the first white boy born among the Kikuyus, and they accepted him into their lives. When he was 11, he joined the secret reception ceremony of the tribe with other children his age and became a member of the Mukanda.
His parents had hired a teacher for his two older sisters, his brother, and himself, but he eventually did not receive a regular education. Louis had plenty of time to participate in even more interesting events and adventures with the Kikuyu blood brothers. He learned their language and how to hunt with a bow and arrow, make traps, trace, and even hunt animals with his bare hands. Louis Leakey attributed his unique insights and perspectives on early humans and human evolution to his traditional Kikuyu education.
Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey: Exploring ancient Africa
However, it was the book his cousin gave him for Christmas that took him on this professional path. The book Days Before History was about the adventures of an English boy named Tig who lived in the Stone Age. The book included illustrations of the Stone Age peoples and the tools they created, with dates on them. Louis began collecting glass rocks inspired by the book, which he discovered in eroded carvings along streams near his home. His family made fun of his “broken bottles,” but Louis had an independent streak.
He then consulted the only scientist he knew, Arthur Loveridge, the curator of the small natural history museum in Nairobi. Loveridge studied the finds and determined that some of them were indeed “tools,” but also explained to Louis Leakey that there is still much unknown about the Stone Age in Africa. These words changed Louis’ world; now he had research to pursue his entire life. In his autobiography, White African, he writes, “I definitely decided to go down this road until everything about the Stone Age [in Africa] was known.” He had just turned 13 years old.
It was not easy for Louis to pursue his desired career. His schooling was limited to the few years he attended school in England during his off days, but he managed to close this gap by working hard and was accepted into St. John’s College, Cambridge. After earning a dual bachelor’s degree in anthropology and modern languages (one was Kikuyu), he received a small research scholarship.
On this scholarship, he bought a ticket for a ship to Kenya and organized the first East African archaeological expedition in the summer of 1962. One of the Cambridge professors tried to dissuade him by saying that he would waste his time looking for the first humans in Africa because “everybody knows they originated in Asia.” Such negative remarks made Louis even more determined to find the evidence he is looking for and prove the professor wrong.
Eventually, Louis led four separate voyages to East Africa. On each, he uncovered further evidence of the continent’s obscure ancient epochs, such as bone fragments and prehistoric stone tools, that shed light on a time period that few scientists had ever considered. He was particularly interested in discovering stone hand axes from the Chellean (Abbevillian) civilization, named after those unearthed in the French town of Chelles. Large, oval-shaped hand axes were formerly seen as evidence of the world’s first civilization by archaeologists.
Louis Leakey and his axe
On the team’s second expedition, John Solomon, the team’s geologist, found such a hand axe in 1929 at the site called Kariandusi. He wasn’t sure what he found was a hand axe, but Louis made the correct diagnosis as always. He sent Solomon and a student to find more of these, which they did. In those days, there was no method for dating the geological layer where fossils and ancient man-made remains were found.
Geologists often estimated the age of such objects by measuring the depth of the sediments surrounding them, which were assumed to accumulate at a constant rate. Using this approach, Louis estimated the hand axes to be at least 50,000 years old. Later, more precise dating tools were used, and scientists found that hand axes were actually as old as 500,000 years.
Discovering tools in Africa that were at least as old as those in Europe was thrilling, and Louis had the funds to undertake his biggest expedition yet. In 1931, he set out for Olduvai in the Tanganyika District (now Tanzania). In the Rift Valley, the 25-mile (40-km)-long Olduvai Gorge meandered deep along the Serengeti Plateaus. German geologist Hans Reck surveyed the valley in 1913 and found an abundance of extinct mammal bones as well as modern human bones. Reading Reck’s report, Louis thought that although Reck did not find any stone tools in the valley, the geologist had overlooked them.
He invited Reck on an expedition. With four vehicles and a crew of eighteen people, they traveled overland, following the footsteps of Indian traders who had crossed Nairobi for three days, but the trail ended at some point. They then advanced about five miles (eight kilometers) an hour over two days and finally reached the border of the Olduvai Gorge on the morning of September 27. A little after dawn the next day, Louis walked on his own across the valley and found a hand axe. The feeling was enrapturing. He quickly ran to the camp with an axe in his hand and awakened others to share his joy.
Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey’s love
Louis met Mary after his expedition. Mary (Douglas) Nicol, as she was called at the time, was a young artist and a promising anthropologist. Louis was married, had a daughter, and his wife was pregnant. He was also truly broke. He had an income from anthropology and his lectures at St. John’s but felt he could get some funding with his popular book, Adam’s Ancestors, in which he described his discoveries. He needed someone to make drawings showing the stone tools, and a friend introduced him to Mary at a dinner party.
The daughter of a landscape painter, Mary grew up traveling in Italy, Switzerland, and France. Like Louis, she was struck by archeology as a child. A French archaeologist had guided her and her father through the rooms of the prehistoric Pech Merle Cave with murals and allowed them to search for stone tools in the excavated deposits. This trip lit a fire in her heart. “After that, I really never wanted to do anything else,” she said.
Mary was also not properly educated. After the sudden death of her father, her mother sent her to a convent school, but she managed to be expelled from school by pretending (she had put soap in her mouth) and causing an explosion in the chemistry class. “The explosion was quite noisy, a lot of nuns came running, it must have been good for some to run,” she said about the incident. She then volunteered for many excavations and attended archeology and geology lectures at University College London and the London Museum.
At the age of 20, she was unconventional, artistic, playful, and a glider pilot with a passion for French cigarettes. Whether she explained all this to Louis at their first meal is unknown, but they found each other very attractive and soon fell madly in love.
Louis invited her on his fourth (and final) East African archaeological expedition. He was returning to Olduvai in January 1935. This time they followed a new route, the long, muddy road to the summit of the Ngorongoro Crater and then the dark, narrow gully lines. There were herds of animals—elephants, zebras, rhinos, and buffaloes—on the plateaus, and Mary fell in love once again, this time with Africa.
Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey’s first discoveries
Louis and Mary Leakey in 1961, looking at the tooth and palate of the Zinj (OH 5), Australopithecus boisei (Paranthropus boisei) fossil. Credit: The Leakey Foundation Archive
Louis and Mary were looking for stone tools and well-preserved fossils of animals that are no longer alive in the gully. They found numerous hand axes and more primitive tools that they later called the Oldowan culture (now known to be 2 million years old, the oldest man-made objects in the world). But they could only find two bone fragments from the first human skull.
It took 21 years before Louis was correct about the origins of humanity. During this time, he was divorced from his wife, married Mary, and had four children, three boys and one girl, but their daughter died in infancy. They settled in Nairobi, and Louis became the director of the museum where he first encountered his mentor, Loveridge. They spent all their spare time and every penny searching for bones and stones at sites in Kenya and Tanzania.
Sometimes they found surprising things. In 1942, in the Olorgesailie of the Rift Valley in southern Nairobi, they found a path literally paved with hand axes, as if the first humans once owned a factory to produce them. In 1948, on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, Mary discovered the skull and facial bones of an ancient but well-preserved 20-million-year-old ape, the Proconsul; it was the first such ape face to be discovered.
They found these fossils with the financial support of a London-based American businessman, Charles Boise. The businessman continued to provide them with small funds for expeditions, and in 1959, in Olduvai, finally, the financial support and the couple’s perseverance paid off. Mary Leakey made a discovery again. She went out alone while Louis was lying ill in the camp, and she slowly began to stroll down the rocky slope at the bottom of the gully. Around 11 o’clock, she noticed a piece of bone that stuck out of the ground rather than just standing on the surface. It looked like a piece of skull. She carefully brushed the soil above it and saw two large teeth on the jawbone. She immediately jumped into the Land Rover and drove frantically towards the camp.
“I found it. I found it. I found it.” Louis asked, “What did you find?” “Him, the man! Our man. The man we were looking for. Come now, I found his teeth!” Louis quickly pulled himself together and the two of them went to the site together. Mary was right: They had finally found the man they were looking for. Louis first named the skull Zinjanthropus, after the East African word for “man.” But it was later classified as a hefty form of Australopithecus, the hominin found in South Africa. Mary and Louis simply called it “Dear Boy.”
After the “Dear Boy,” Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey became famous. With new dating techniques, geochronologists were finally able to determine the age of the fossils at Olduvai. It proved to be “very, very, very old,” as one of the Dear Boy’s scientists told Louis. In fact, the skull was 1.75 million years old, tripling the initial assumption. It was a discovery that shook the world. The discovery made headlines around the world and sparked an anthropological rush to East Africa by scientists in an attempt to make a claim. The American paleoanthropologist Clark Howell, a colleague of the Leakeys, explained that the discovery of Zinj started the era of scientific research into human evolution.
Leakeys started full-time excavations in Olduvai with funding from the National Geographic Society. Mary led these excavations, assembling a team of Kamba workers, many of whom would be famous fossil hunters in their own right. Excavations were often family business; Louis, Mary, and their sons Jonathan, Richard, and Philip worked together. It was Jonathan who first found the bone fragments of the new human ancestor. Louis and Mary believed that Homo habilis was the hominid who made the oldest, most primitive tools for carving.
From the very beginning, Homo habilis has been the subject of debate. Being an organism different from the Dear Boy would mean that the two hominin species—the first upright, bipedal humans—lived on the African savannah at the same time. Louis argued that this possibility was very significant; by looking at other animals, it could be seen that a large number of antelope and primate variants lived together. But most contemporary scientists strongly criticized this branched family idea; they expected a long and linear human line, but it was never going to be the case.
3 million-year-old footprint
Mary Leakey’s most extraordinary discovery: 3 million-year-old footprint series of the first hominins in Laetoli, Tanzania.
Then came the sought-after proof: Leakey’s middle son, Richard, went on his hominin hunt expedition around Lake Turkana in Kenya. Here they found the same footprints; two different hominin species lived side by side, one with thicker bones and the other with a larger brain but slender bones. “They won’t believe you.” That’s what Louis said when Richard gave him the Homo habilis skull.
But over time, they believed him. Today, paleoanthropologists draw many different human lineages, and they are all very branched. Louis Leakey died of a heart attack in 1972, a week after seeing Richard’s Homo habilis skull. He was 69 years old. Mary Leakey continued her excavations at Olduvai. Her team unearthed many fossils and thousands of stone tools. She mapped all of them in great detail, creating an almost 2 million-year-old record of the animal and human habitats that nestled in the gully.
In 1974 she turned her attention to another site, Laetoli, where fossils older than Olduvai had been found. This is where one of the team members spotted a very old set of footprints in 1978. These were the footprints left by three people walking in the rain when a nearby volcano erupted three million years ago. When she revealed one of the finest footprints, Mary sat back and gazed at its beauty. She lit a cigar and said, “This is really a piece to be placed over the mantelpiece.“
Mary was 65 years old when she made this discovery. Mary continued her research in Laetoli and Olduvai until the late 1980s. When she died in 1996, Mary Leakey was the world’s most famous female archaeologist. Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey had achieved the goal they set before they set out on this African expedition. They had unearthed the evidence that the first ancient humans evolved in Africa. Like all great scientists, they shattered old ideas and ways of thinking – with stones and bones.
Bibliography:
- Mary Bowman-Kruhm, The Leakeys: a Biography, Greenwood Press, 2005.
- Roger Lewin, “The Old Man of Olduvai Gorge”, Smithsonian Magazine, October 2002.
- Hans Reck and the Discovery of O.H.1 Archived
- “The Leakey Foundation”. The Leakey Foundation.
September 5, 2022
Francis Galton: Founder of Eugenics, Psychologist, and Explorer
Often known as the father of the eugenic movement, Francis Galton was interested in a wide variety of fields, from the exploration of Africa to psychology, statistics, and fingerprint control. Tertius and Violetta were the youngest of Galton’s nine children. He was related to his older cousin, Charles Darwin, through their grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.
Francis Galton’s early life
It was taken for granted that Francis Galton, like Darwin, would study medicine. He started his education at the fully-fledged hospital in Birmingham, but in 1839 he transferred to King’s College in London. He had just returned from his Beagle cruise and was living near Darwin, who had just married Emma. Having hated his medical experience in Edinburgh, Darwin persuaded Galton to drop his medical education and join his university, Cambridge. In October 1840, Galton went to Trinity College, hoping that he would graduate with honors in mathematics, but he graduated only with an average degree.
After drifting aimlessly for six years, Francis Galton organized an expedition to uncharted parts of Namibia, discovering a new tribe, the Ovambos, and taking meticulous measurements of the latitude, longitude, and temperature of the area. When he returned to England in early 1852, he was awarded the Founder’s Medal by the Royal Geographical Society. In 1853, he married Louisa Butler, the daughter of George Butler, Dean of Peterborough Cathedral, and published his first book, Tropical South Africa.
Two years later, he published a very successful guidebook called The Art of Travel. However, he became interested in making retrospective weather maps, during which time he discovered high-pressure systems where the wind moved clockwise. These various steps formed the first part of Galton’s career.
The idea of hereditary talent
Killers were detained at Millbank Prison in London. Francis Galton was putting together such photographs to examine whether people convicted of a particular crime had common facial features. He eventually decided they didn’t have it.
The second phase began with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin used examples of artificial selection, such as fancy pigeons, to show how natural selection might work. Francis Galton thought that if selection works for pigeons, it can work for humans as well. Maybe the human race could also be developed by selective breeding.
In 1865, Francis Galton’s article titled “Hereditary Talent and Character” was published in MacMillan’s Magazine, one of the many high-quality periodicals of the Victorian era. In this article, he examines the close relatives of famous people in his ensuing 1869 book, The Hereditary Genius. If talent and character are hereditary, he thought, these elite individuals’ closer relatives might have been more distinguished than their distant relatives. Galton came to the conclusion that this was, in fact, the case, ignoring bias and wrongdoing. That is, a famous man could get his son a job.
The Hereditary Genius is regarded as the first example of the historical study of human progression or individual traits. Also in this context, Francis Galton is the first person to ask the question, “nature or nurture?” He even worked on a questionnaire and sent it to 190 people from the Royal Society to justify this issue with solid evidence. He tabulated the characteristics of these individuals’ families and tried to find out whether their interest in science was “innate” or came with the support of others. These studies were published in Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture in 1874.
Acquired properties
In 1875, the second edition of Darwin’s book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication was published. It was the chapter titled “The Theory of Pangenesis” that aroused Galton’s curiosity. Darwin needed a source of variation to keep natural selection working. He claimed that the particles he called gemmules were collected from different parts of the body to form sexual elements, and that their development in the next generation creates a new living being.
Darwin thought of two mechanisms that produced variations. The first was that the genitals suffered damage that prevented the gemmules from assembling properly. Second, the gemmules could change due to the direct effect of changing conditions. These altered gemmules are then transferred into offspring, and after many generations, the change becomes inherited.
Francis Galton was very interested in Darwin’s hypothesis, although he disliked the idea of gemmular differentiation with changing environmental conditions. From this, he attempted to form his own theory of inheritance. His theory was a version of the German evolutionary biologist August Weismann’s theory of heredity, which means that acquired traits are not passed on to subsequent generations (Weismann made this point in his 1889 letter to Galton) and that inheritance occurs only through the inheritance cells (egg and sperm cells).
The anthropometric laboratory is established
Francis Galton’s first anthropometric laboratory debuted at the International Health Exhibition in London in 1884-1885.
But Francis Galton was more of a practical scientist than a theorist. In particular, he wanted to analyze data on human characteristics. On the advice of Darwin and botanist Joseph Hooker, he decided to measure the seeds of sweet peas. One reason he chose the sweet pea was that it usually does not cross-fertilize. Galton found that seed sizes were distributed in the next generation similarly to those in the ancestral plants. But he also found that the average seed size of the big ancestral seed returned to the mean. This was true for small seeds. When Galton plotted the mean diameter of the ancestral seeds along the x-axis and the new generation along the y-axis, he got a straight line. It was the first time that he obtained the regression curve, which was now one of the basic principles of statistics. From here, he calculated the first regression (or reversion, as he called it) coefficient.
In 1884, Francis Galton London set up an anthropometry lab at the International Health Fair in South Kensington. Visitors were given cards on which various measurements were recorded. Galton also managed to collect partial origin data. From there, he showed that regression to the mean is also valid in humans. He also saw the correlation of measurements when he plotted a measurement such as forearm length on the axis of coordination with height and thus obtained the correlation coefficient, a new milestone in the history of statistics.
When the International Health Exhibition closed in 1895, Galton moved its anthropometric laboratory to the South Galleries of the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria & Albert Museum). Francis Galton was now interested in fingerprints, so he added a place for the thumbprint to his questionnaire. His friend, Sir William Herschel of the Bengal Civil Service, made the key observation that fingerprint patterns remained the same over time. In the 1890s, Galton published two books on fingerprints and played an important role in the use of fingerprints for personal identification.
Heredity and eugenics
Thumbprints from Francis Galton’s Finger Prints, 1892.
Francis Galton’s most important book, “Natural Inheritance,” was published in 1889. This book inspired three main followers: Karl Pearson, W. F. R. Weldon, and William Bateson. The chapters about normal distribution and the continuous variation of characters grabbed the attention of Pearson and Weldon. But there was something else that caught Bateson’s attention. Galton was grappling with a problem. How could natural selection proceed in small marginal steps when it was constantly thwarted by regression and returns to the mean?
To solve that problem, Francis Galton put forward the “organic stability” hypothesis to create variants that cannot return to the mean. According to Bateson, these discontinuous variants were exciting. He compiled many examples of discontinuous variation and published them in 1894 under the title Material for the Study of Evolution. As a result, Bateson was ready to rediscover Gregor Mendel‘s principles in 1900. Mendel’s laws defined the distinction and diversity of the different traits that Bateson was interested in, such as yellow and green pea seeds.
On the contrary, Pearson and Weldon were firm supporters of the new model Francis Galton proposed in 1898, called the Law of Ancestral Heredity. The ancestral law was indeed applicable to the entire genome because it was based on a continuous series in which parents contributed half (0.5), grandparents a quarter (0.5) 2, and great-grandparents one eighth (0.5) 3. When the whole series was added together, it was equal to 1. Pearson and Weldon tried to adapt Galton’s ancestral law to different traits, but every time Bateson failed his attempts by showing that Mendel’s principles were much more in line with the data.
Francis Galton and human intelligence
Francis Galton was also interested in measuring human intelligence. Anthropometry obtained the first estimation from laboratory data. But later, he developed a better idea. He knew that there are two different types of twins, now called identical twins and fraternal twins. He published his findings in Fraser’s Magazine in his 1875 article. He found that identical twins were behaviorally similar beyond their physical similarities. He could not quantitatively measure their intelligence because an IQ test had not yet been created. But their results suggest that behavior and, therefore, intelligence have a distinct inherited component.
Francis Galton described eugenics in a footnote to his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. He explained that eugenics deals with questions about those who have superior qualities by inheritance, terminated by the Greek word eugenes, that is, “well-born.” He continued to use eugenics in his speeches and writings, and eugenics gained popularity in the 20th century. But it was not Galton’s idea to favor positive eugenics and weed out inferior eugenics.
The idea began to gain momentum at the First International Congress in London in 1912, a year after Galton’s death. There have been many bad and unexpected results, especially in the United States, Scandinavia, and Nazi Germany, where women who were thought to be mentally or physically unhealthy were forced to get sterilized.
In short, Francis Galton left behind a rather complex legacy. He made important contributions to a wide variety of subjects, such as his discoveries in Africa, his travel writings, statistics, and fingerprinting, but he also established eugenics, which paved the way to horrifying things.
Bibliography:
- Caprara, G. V.; Cervone, D. (2000). Personality: Determinants, Dynamics, and Potentials. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-58310-7.
- Clauser, Brian E. (2007). “The Life and Labors of Francis Galton: A Review of Four Recent Books About the Father of Behavioral Statistics”. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. 32 (4): 440–444. doi:10.3102/1076998607307449. S2CID 121124511.
- Conklin, Barbara Gardner; Gardner, Robert; Shortelle, Dennis (2002). Encyclopedia of Forensic Science: A Compendium of Detective Fact and Fiction. Oryx Press. ISBN 978-1-57356-170-9.
September 5, 2022
Linus Carl Pauling: Architect of Structural Chemistry, and An Activist
Chemistry dominated Linus Carl Pauling’s (or Linus Pauling) entire spiritual and social life, beginning from his youth when he first witnessed a chemical reaction at a friend’s house in Oregon until his final months on his farm in Big Sur Beach, California. When he proposed to his future spouse, he was honest enough to say that marriage would come after his job. Linus Carl Pauling’s passion for science paid off; he made discoveries about the nature of chemical bonds and the basic structure of important biological molecules such as proteins.
Who Was Linus Carl Pauling?
In 1954, Linus Carl Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for these discoveries. His scientific expertise also supported his humanitarian efforts. The evidence he provided that fallout from above-ground nuclear tests caused a large number of birth defects and cancers was the main factor in his 1962 Nobel Peace Prize. The award was given on October 10, 1963, on the day the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty entered into force. Linus Pauling became the first person in history to receive two Nobel Prizes on his own.
Linus Carl Pauling was the eldest and only son of three children of pharmacist Herman W. Pauling and Lucy Isabelle Pauling, also the daughter of a pharmacist. Linus spent the first years of his life in Condon, in the monotonous western town of Oregon’s hinterland, where his father’s pharmacy was located. His childhood memories included cowboys, of whom one taught him how to sharpen a pencil with a knife, and Native Americans who showed him how to find and dig edible roots. These seemingly negligible lessons taught him in two ways: there was the right technique to do a job, and experienced people were valuable sources of information.
In the primitive elementary school in Condon, his favorite subjects were arithmetic and spelling because they were only interested in right or wrong answers. Economic difficulties and the fire in the shop caused Herman to move his family to Portland in 1909. Not long after starting a new pharmacy, Pauling’s father died suddenly at the age of 33 of a perforated stomach ulcer.
His mother, who lacked any profitable skills, borrowed heavily to buy a large house in hopes that it would enable boarders and room renters to support her and her children, but she was often in short supply of money and had health problems. Linus had to work at jobs where he delivered milk and newspapers. When he became interested in chemistry, he set up a laboratory in the basement and started doing simple experiments.
Linus Carl Pauling and His Extraordinary Educational Background
Over the past 58 years of marriage, Ava Helen supported his scientific work, fully undertaking housework and household responsibilities, and became the chief collaborator in “peace studies”.
He also took all the science and mathematics courses he could at Washington High School but left without a diploma because he had not taken the mandatory American history courses (instead of those courses, he took mathematics). He later had a well-paid job in a workshop that produced cargo elevators. Her mother wanted her to give up her university plans and continue to support the family. Luckily, Linus’s friend’s father stepped in and made it possible for Belle Pauling to let her son go to OAC, which was now Oregon State University.
Linus Pauling continued his studies in chemical engineering (the only major available for prospective chemists at the OAC) with extraordinary success, while at the same time working in a variety of jobs to support himself, his mother, and his sister. He even had to drop out of school for a year due to his mother’s financial problems. He worked as a road construction supervisor at that time, then became a quantitative analysis assistant at OAC. Around this time, he began reading articles by Gilbert Newton Lewis and Irving Langmuir on chemical bonds. While teaching chemistry to female home economics students in his senior year of school, he met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller.
After graduating from the OAC in 1922, Pauling began his graduate education at the California Institute of Technology (commonly known as Caltech or Pauling’s preferred acronym, CIT). Along with the weighty courses he took, Linus Pauling began research under the supervision of X-ray crystallographer Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson, who directed him to the structural studies of the mineral molybdenite. They wrote an article about it because sulfur atoms in the mineral molybdenite were found to be arranged in a triangular prismatic shape around molybdenum atoms.
Linus Pauling married Ava Helen after her first year at CIT; his husband became the main supporter of scientific research and peace efforts in the ensuing years and held this role throughout their fifty years of marriage. Pauling successfully defended his dissertation, which was based on articles about crystal structure, and got his Ph.D. in 1925.
Determining the Nature of Chemical Bonds
42 structural drawings describing the nature of the chemical bonds of aromatic hydrocarbon naphthalene used in the production of the moth remedy and paints prepared by Linus Pauling for his 1939 book The Nature of the Chemical Bond.
In 1926, he received the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Europe with his wife. There he explored the possible effects of newly discovered quantum mechanics on his work on the nature of chemical bonds—the gravitational forces that hold atoms together in a unified form. Although he also spent time at Niels Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen and with Schrödinger at the University of Zurich, he was most influenced by the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics in Munich. He started making predictions about the properties of ionic crystals using wave mechanics, Sommerfeld’s favorite type of quantum mechanics.
Linus Pauling returned to CIT in 1927 and began his long and successful career in X-ray studies of crystal structures such as silicate minerals. His work on crystal structures helped make this branch one of the best understood in science. Using what he knew about bond angles and distances, he came up with rules called “coordination theory” that would make it easier for crystallographers to put the right atoms in the right places in different crystals.
During a meeting with Herman Mark in Germany in 1930, electron diffraction caught his attention. Using this technique, he and his colleagues solved the structures of many molecules in gas and liquid.
Ferrocene
Diamond
Acetic Acid
In the 1930s, he used the energy of the displacement (or oscillation) of two electrons in the hybridization analysis (involving the mixing of atomic orbitals—the location of a particular electron in an atom). It was a revolutionary idea featured in his best-known articles on the nature of chemical bonds. Linus Pauling’s knowledge of quantum mechanics was a big part of how he came up with the valence bond theory. In this theory, he said that some molecules, like benzene, could be thought of as intermediates made up of hybrids of two or more structures in which atomic orbits overlap.
The Nature of Chemical Bonds and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals, a book he wrote in 1939 based on the George Fisher Baker Lectures at Cornell University, is a summary of his own experimental and theoretical work as well as that of other structural chemists.
In the mid-1930s, Linus Pauling’s interest began to shift to biological molecules; he and his colleagues conducted magnetic studies on hemoglobin to prove that the magnet attracts hemoglobin in veins but repels it in arteries. Hemoglobin was the protein molecule. That work inevitably led him to be more generally interested in proteins, such as the roles of proteins in the antibody-antigen response. He worked on the denaturation of proteins and the human immune system’s antibodies, which fight against antigens that attack in the form of bacteria or viruses.
The Discovery of the First Molecular Disease
This drawing (left) shows the faulty side chain (right) causing anemia by not stabilizing this part of the hemoglobin molecule.
During World War II, Linus Pauling started to focus on more practical problems, such as providing plasma supplies for wounded soldiers by producing an artificial mixture that could be used in place of blood plasma. He invented the oxygen detector based on the magnetic properties of oxygen particles. This invention was widely used in submarines and aircraft. He had also worked on explosives, rocket fuel, and ink for confidential correspondence. He refused J. Robert Oppenheimer’s offer to lead the chemistry-related arm of the atomic bomb project as he was battling a serious disease called glomerulonephritis. Towards the end of the war, Linus Pauling learned about the inherited disease sickle-cell anemia, where the red blood cells in venous blood take the shape of a sickle. He thought that this sickle shape was caused by a genetic mutation in the globin part of the cell’s hemoglobin. After three years of study, Pauling and colleagues were able to prove that such a molecular defect in hemoglobin was indeed the cause of the disease. Thus, Linus Pauling discovered the first molecular disease.
In the post-war years, Linus Pauling continued to work on proteins. In the early 1950s, he published a cylindrical helix amino acid arrangement of amino acid groups (later called alpha helices) linked by hydrogen bonds. These and other protein structures he published were extremely effective. In addition to that work, Linus Pauling also participated in educating the public about the possible consequences of nuclear weapons. He devoted more and more time to campaigns to stop nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere.
In January 1958, Linus Pauling and his wife submitted to the United Nations an application signed by more than 9,000 scientists to stop the trials.
Although United States officials wanted to undermine his efforts by confiscating his passport, they had to return it when he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. Throughout the rest of the 1950s and 1960s, Pauling and his wife tried to spread the word about this case around the world. For his efforts, Pauling won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963 (his wife did not share the prize as the Nobel bureaucracy was mostly male and had not nominated her).
Second Nobel and Vitamin C
Linus published No More War in 1958, in which he passionately explained the potentially terrifying consequences of nuclear war for humanity. He gave a copy of the book to everyone in the US Senate, The Senate ratified the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Linus Carl Pauling left the Institute in 1963 as a result of the CIT representatives’ negative response to his peace studies and the Nobel Peace Prize. The laboratory space Pauling used for molecular medicine studies was taken away to punish him. In the mid-1960s, he was working at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. His humanitarian work was supported here; he developed a theory of atomic nuclei (the theory was eventually rejected by many nuclear physicists). He needed a laboratory for his experimental research, and in 1967 he became a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. Here he dealt with the neglected potential of vitamin C to cure diseases such as the common cold. He accepted the professorship at Stanford in 1969. In 1970, he published a book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold, which had the largest readership and initiated a debate over megavitamin therapy that lasted until the end of his life.
His view on the effects of using large amounts of vitamin C in the treatment of infections, cancer, and other diseases had been largely rejected by medical institutions. Pauling co-founded the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine in 1973. It was later renamed the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and its main goal was to find evidence in the lab and in real life to backup Pauling’s ideas.
Linus Carl Pauling’s Death and View on Life
Linus Pauling’s institute grappled with personal and legal issues, and he faced further challenges after his wife’s death in 1981 and when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991. Despite these problems, Linus Pauling keeps working. He developed arguments, in particular, against crystallographers who violated the traditional rules he defended by considering quintet symmetric semi-crystals intrinsic.
What he did in the last 20 years was no different than the years when he hung up tables of chemical substances and their properties on the laboratory desk in the basement of his mother’s boarding house: that is, to investigate the connections between the structures and functions of molecules not only with chemistry but with physics, biology, and medicine.
As an atheist and reductionist, he believed in the power of science to answer any questions people might ask. For him, the universe consisted of only matter and energy. The structure of molecules had the potential to explain all physical, chemical, biological, and even psychological phenomena. He talked about the death of his wife and how it made him feel. At the same time, his cancer spread from his prostate to his intestines and then to his liver, killing him in 1994.
He left behind a unique body of chemical knowledge that he said would lead to wealth, variety, and new discoveries.
September 5, 2022
Niels Bohr: A Luminary of the Quantum Research
September 5, 2022
Carl Linnaeus: The Botanist Who Named Nature
Carl Linnaeus was in many ways a symbol for Swedish science in the 18th century. Not only was he one of the pioneers of Sweden’s new scientific era, but he was also very well-known internationally, so the country was of interest to scientists. Although Carl Linnaeus gained the title of nobility later in his life, he came from humble roots.
Who Was Carl Linnaeus?
Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707, in the Smaland countryside in southern Sweden to a family of priests and farmers. Carl soon became interested in flowers and plants thanks to his amateur botanist father, Nils, who was also the pastor of the small village community.
After years in high school, he joined Lund University in 1727, but only a year later decided to enroll at Uppsala University. Linnaeus wanted to study medicine, but it was botany that most impressed him, which also played an important role in medicine.
Carl Linnaeus found that this discipline was complex and uneven. His knowledge of new plants was rapidly increasing with his travels abroad. Although he tried to emulate recent systematics such as those of Aristotle, Andreas Cesalpino, Caspar Bauhin, or Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, there were always several problems.
Some naturalists grouped the plants according to their color, some according to their size, and some according to their leaves and fruits. Eventually, Linnaeus decided to establish his own system.
He discovered that plants have separate sexes from German Rudolf Jacob Camerarius and French Sebastien Vaillant. The stamen with pollen represented the male reproductive organs, while the pistil with ovaries represented the female reproductive organs.
By the end of 1729, Linnaeus had written a short article in Swedish, but the title was in Latin: “Praeludia sponsaliorum plantarum” (On the prelude to the wedding of plants). He would then go even further based on his new observations.
At that time, Uppsala’s botanical professor had grown old. Linnaeus took up the task of teaching the students and going on short tours. In the summer of 1732, he made a trip to Lapland and published his views on the trip later under the name Iter lapponicum.
The book was published in English in 1811 and in Swedish in 1889. To become a medical doctor in Sweden, it was necessary to study abroad and get a doctorate from a foreign university.
Linnaeus set out on this trip in 1735, arrived at the small university town of Harderwijk in the Netherlands via Hamburg and Amsterdam, and received his doctorate with a thesis on fever.
He then traveled to Leiden to meet both the most distinguished medical expert of his time, Herman Boerhaave, and the respected botanist Johann Friedrich Gronovius. Luckily, Linnaeus got a job at George Clifford’s estate, Hartekamp, located between Leiden and Haarlem.
Clifford was the Dutch East India Company’s wealthy director. He spent two years here taking charge of Clifford’s garden, library, and herb collection.
Classification Systems Including Homo Sapiens
Original manuscripts of Carl Linnaeus’ article “Praeludia sponsaliorum plantarum” dated 1729.
Carl Linnaeus’ research at Hartekamp was intense and enthusiastic. He was working on and publishing many manuscripts he brought from Sweden. Being supported financially and morally by both Gronovius and Clifford, his apparent talent led his patrons and supporters to compete with each other. The most important text published in this period is Systema Naturae, published in late 1735.
He divided nature into three kingdoms on tables made of folded sheets of paper: the mineral kingdom (Regnum lapideum), the plant kingdom (Regnum vegetabile), and the animal kingdom (Regnum animale). Linnaeus placed man above the four-legged animals and called him Homo sapiens, the term he developed.
Such a suggestion, of course, was too daring for its time and could cause discomfort. In his argument, Linnaeus explained that man is also a part of creation and belongs to the animal kingdom, not the mineral or plant kingdoms.
He was also the first to divide the human species into races or varieties. Thus, he established a field of science called physical anthropology that could never get rid of its roughness.
He suggested that there were five varieties of man, consisting of European, American, Asian, African, and the “monsters” or Homo monstrosus, such as the Hotantos. Considering the period, it was not surprising that the European races were considered to be at the top and Africans at the bottom.
But the most famous of the kingdoms laid out in Systema Naturae is the plant kingdom. Carl Linnaeus especially described the sexual systems of plants, and this system was known as the Linnaeus system. In the book, he created a new system for the genitals called stamen and pistil, based on the belief that plants are sexual creatures.
By counting the stamens and specifying their arrangement, he divided the plants into 24 groups, that is, classes, and subgroups, that is, by counting the stigmas of the pistils. Classification is divided into classes, then orders, families, and species.
There are plants with one to ten stamens in the first ten classes; the following thirteen classes include plants with different stamen arrangements (e.g., two long and one short). The twenty-fourth grade is flowerless plants, class Cryptogamia.
Carl Linnaeus: Engraved by Georg Dionysius and Jan Wandelaar from Hortus Cliffortianus, a sheet showing Collinsonia canadensis from the mint family, native to North America.
Linnaeus gives lively and poetic accounts of plant sexual life in the Systema Naturae, as he did in his early article on plant marriage. According to that, the first flower in the first class is monogamous; the flower in the eighth class has one female and eight male bridal chambers; and in the fourteenth class, there is one woman and four males, two short and two tall. Some were disturbed by this frankness. Nevertheless, the sexual system was accepted and gained great importance.
Carl Linnaeus had given botanists a common language. Systema Naturae was reprinted many times during his lifetime. The last self-published edition is the 12th edition from 1766–68; at that time, the original 13 pages were expanded into three languages.
Although Linnaeus’s sexual system is not used in advanced science today, it is still used in basic manuals. The Linnaeus system was not intended to represent natural groups but to be used only for diagnosis. During his three years in the Netherlands, his productivity was incredible.
Besides Systema Naturae and other small works, he published eight large studies, mostly on the extensions and implementations of sexual systems.
He did an impressive job of describing the flowers in the Clifford garden, named Hortus Cliffortianus. Then came his original work. In his book Fundamenta botanica (Foundations of Botany), he explained the underlying method of specifying the plants into species, teams, and classes in his system.
Critica Botanica (Critique of Botany) presented the rules for the nomenclature of species. The Genera Plantarum (general plants) defines all the plant families he was concerned with until then, divides them into classes and orders, and describes all botanical systems from Cesalpino to his own. In the summer of 1736, he found the opportunity to travel to England at Clifford’s expense.
In London, he met Sir Hans Sloane, who was the chairman of the Royal Society after Newton, and the German botanist Johann Jacob Dillenius at Oxford.
Carl Linnaeus returned to Sweden in June 1738 and never left the country. He settled in Stockholm and worked as a medical doctor. In 1741, he became a professor at Uppsala University and was appointed as the court physician. In 1758, he bought the Hammarby farm outside of Uppsala. In 1762, he was given the title of nobility and the name von Linne.
Naming the Natural World
Systema Naturae, one of the greatest works in natural science history.
If the sexual system in Systema Naturae was Linnaeus’ first great achievement, the latter should be Species plantarum (species of plants), which is considered the starting point of the modern botanical nomenclature of 1751 that deals with the species of plants.
It contains approximately 8000 plant species, which were all known at the time. How they are recorded is just as important.
Here, Carl Linnaeus suggests using a binary naming system with a first name and a surname for all species. Previously, the species was given a family name followed by a long description.
Now Linnaeus could clearly identify a plant with just two words. The first, the surname, indicates the genus, and the second, the genre; for example, Sinapis arvensis is wild mustard.
The names were not given by coincidence. Genus names were often attached to the name of a famous botanist. For example, Linnaeus’ colleague Gronovius named an ordinary plant in Sweden called Linnaea borealis after Linnaeus, while borealis meant north.
Linnaeus found it appropriate because he himself was “humble and unpretentious” like the flower, but perhaps not all of his colleagues agreed on this.
His third important contribution was the way he described plants. He described the most difficult species precisely and offered terminology for the parts that identify the plants.
He had sharp eyes that easily noticed small details, and his definitions were always clear and concise, explaining the essentials in a few words. Carl Linnaeus pursued his passion for classification to its logical conclusion.
Science Based on Faith
Carl Linnaeus had to think for a while about this flower, which he would later call Peloria. Because the plant was a hybrid, it took him time to convince himself.
Linnaeus’ view of nature was based on his religious beliefs. According to him, the universe had a fixed structure. Species were fixed and unchanging. The number of species has been the same since creation. God created all species in their exact present forms.
After this act of creation, everything naturally emerged from the seed or egg. Carl Linnaeus often quoted the Latin phrase “Omne vivum ex ovo,” “all life [is] from life.”
These words indicated that he did not accept the idea of the primordial soup or the belief that some flies were derived from animal carcasses. But after a while, Linnaeus had to question the idea of the stability of species.
He saw a new plant that he would later name Peloria and first thought it was a decayed specimen of Linaria vulgaris. He later realized, however, that it was a hybrid, the result of a cross between the two species.
Confused, in his 1744 treatise, he described the plant as Peloria and attempted to explain why it did not fit into the classification system. Since he had to admit that hybridity is a phenomenon, he thought that all species in a family came from the same parent form.
Despite his clear academic manner, Linnaeus was never one of those armchair thinkers who were disconnected from nature. Nobody could describe the beauty of nature like him, and no one could celebrate the closeness of the Creator like him.
God was everywhere in creation, and the scientist was obliged to show this. Carl Linnaeus thus followed Aristotle’s idea of the “chain of being,” catena naturae: everything in creation was arranged as angels at the top, humans, animals, plants, and inanimate matter at the bottom. There were no gaps in creation; therefore, Carl Linnaeus said, “Nature does not make jumps.”
The Economy of Nature
Oeconomia naturae (The economy of nature).
The Divine Order could be described in another way, by some kind of state of equilibrium. Carl Linnaeus discussed this in his Oeconomia naturae (The Economy of Nature), published in 1749. All living things depend on each other for survival.
The defeat and death of an individual always benefit another. What happens is a “war of all against all.” Carl Linnaeus, therefore, believed that in societies, wars broke out in the most populous areas, thereby limiting population growth.
Nature exhibits order and balance in a variety of ways. Linnaeus never stopped repeating the geographical distribution of plants and animals. Different lifestyles require different environments.
God had established different climates and environments on Earth in which all creatures could be satisfied. Due to his thoughts on distinct plants and their demanding special conditions for their survival, Carl Linnaeus can therefore be regarded as the forerunner of what we now call “ecological thinking.”
Another interesting aspect of Linnaeus was his interest in common folk beliefs and mysticism. Carl Linnaeus lived in the middle of the 18th century, when rationally enlightened belief was spreading throughout Europe, but he could be quite old-fashioned in some ways.
He believed, for example, that swallows spend the winter at the bottom of the sea. Nevertheless, he never experimented by putting a swallow underwater.
He was warm to numerology and the idea that people went through twelve periods of seven years each, such as the child losing his milk teeth at the age of seven and entering puberty at the age of fourteen.
Carl Linnaeus and His “Apostles”
Linnaeus also wrote a study on various creatures from the animal kingdom. These included not only chimpanzees and orangutans but also some animals, such as cavemen and tailed men. Of course, Linnaeus had never seen these fantasy creatures; he had only heard or read about them.
However, that did not prevent him from publishing pictures of them. While Linnaeus behaved like a rational scientist by placing man in the animal kingdom, he also believed in superstitious folk beliefs.
Linnaeus had a special relationship with his disciples. He looks at them, speaks affectionately about them, and sends them into the world to discover rare plants.
He called them “the apostles.” He had a desire to learn as much as possible about the created world, mostly about all plants and animals. He sent his apostles to every corner of the world, from Iceland in the north to Australia in the south, from Japan in the east to America in the west.
They brought what they found home to their master in Uppsala; they wrote letters and reports to him and published their findings in scientific journals and books.
Carl Linnaeus did not even go to Europe in his adult years but continued to study nature in every corner of the world through his apostles. In the last four years of his life, Linnaeus was unable to do any scientific work due to two strokes that left him semi-paralyzed. He died at the age of 71 at his home in Uppsala, quite old for his time.
FAQ
What was Carl Linnaeus’ contribution to the field of taxonomy?
Carl Linnaeus is considered to be the father of modern taxonomy. He developed a hierarchical system of classification that is still used today, which is based on similarities in physical characteristics among organisms. He also developed the binomial system of nomenclature, which is still used today to name and classify organisms.
How did Carl Linnaeus’ work influence the scientific community during his time?
Carl Linnaeus’ work had a significant impact on the scientific community during his time. His development of a systematic approach to naming and classifying organisms helped to standardize the way in which scientists discussed and studied the natural world. His ideas were widely accepted and used throughout Europe, and his system of classification remains an important tool in biology today.
What was Carl Linnaeus’ impact on the field of botany?
Carl Linnaeus is considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of botany. His classification system was based on the physical characteristics of plants, which helped simplify the study of botany. He also introduced the use of Latin as the international language for scientific names, which is still used today.
How did Carl Linnaeus’ work on the natural world relate to his religious beliefs?
Carl Linnaeus was deeply religious, and he believed that the study of the natural world was a way to understand God’s creation. He believed that each organism had a purpose and that the study of nature was a way to better understand God’s plan.
What is the legacy of Carl Linnaeus today?
Carl Linnaeus’ legacy can be seen in his enduring contributions to the field of biology. His system of classification and nomenclature is still widely used today, and his ideas have influenced generations of scientists. He is also remembered as a pioneer in the field of ecology, and his work helped to establish the importance of understanding the relationships between organisms and their environment.
References
Braziel, Jana Evans (2007). “Genre, race, erasure: a genealogical critique of “American” autobiography”.
Anderson, Margaret J. (1997). Carl Linnaeus: Father of Classification. United States: Enslow Publishers. ISBN 978-0-89490-786-9.
Broberg, Gunnar (2008). “The Dragonslayer”. Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek.
Davis, P.H.; Heywood, V H. (1973). Principles of Angiosperm Taxonomy. Huntington, New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company.
September 5, 2022