On January 24, 1950, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Percy L. Stevens patent # 2,495,429, for his “Method of Treating Foodstuffs” with waves from a magnetron oscillator. Sixty years ago today Percy Stevens changed culinary life forever.
You guessed it: The microwave oven.
Patent for "Method for Treating Foodstuffs," granted January 24, 1950, to Percy L. Stevens of the Raytheon Corp. - the microwave oven. Image via FreePatentsOnline.com
On CBS “Sunday Morning” Charles Osgood said that in 1975 microwave oven sales surpassed conventional oven sales for the first time. This is more remarkable because the first commercial microwave in 1955 was too big for home kitchens, and at $1,300, too pricey. Japanese modifications of the magnetron to shrink it made microwave ovens much like those we have today ready for the market for the first time in 1967. Eight years from market entry to majority of the market.
It only makes sense: Today offices on every floor of every office building have microwave ovens in their break rooms, but almost none ever had conventional ovens. College students have microwaves in their dormitory rooms. Even gasoline stations offer foods for microwaving by customers.
Spencer’s invention makes it possible to heat foods quickly with a relatively small device, in thousands of places where no conventional oven would work well, or be welcomed.
According to legend — accurate? — Spencer got the idea after working with magnetron tubes while carrying a chocolate bar in his pocket. He noticed the chocolate bar melted. Within a short time he had demonstrated the ability to pop popcorn and burst an egg with the microwaves from the tube.
Sign of the changing times: Many children today do not know how to pop popcorn without a microwave. Legend has it that children in elementary school ask where the Massachusetts natives kept the microwaves with which they popped the corn that delighted the settlers of the Plymouth Colony.
Microwave oven inventor Percy Spencer with early microwave equipment at Raytheon - photo from Spencer family archive
You gotta admire the bravery of this guy, who came to fatherhood a little late (he claims), and struggles with the fatherliness expectations of a precocious child:
When my wife returned [from a vacation], we settled back into our routine, consisting of 1-2 days per week when we eat dinner out as a family. These events can also be challenging, as our daughter is one of those kids who just cannot sit still for anything. She seems well connected to her surroundings and engages with us and others, but she is perpetual motion personified. So imagine my surprise when the littlest tornado actually sat in her chair for an entire meal!
My wife’s new secret weapon was a series of iPhone apps created especially for toddlers that one of her California girlfriends had recommended. The most popular with our daughter is Letter Tracer, which works as the name suggests. So my daughter was occupied by learning to write her letters. The device and screen provided the engagement that pen and paper hadn’t, and she delighted at being able to successfully trace all the letters of the alphabet, smiling and exclaiming “Look Daddy, I did it!” each time she completed a new tracing. My daughter was having a blast learning how to write her letters, and her parents were enjoying not just her growth but a nice restaurant experience as well.
So, he got his daughter a de-activated iPhone. Seriously.
I’d love to see what Checker Finn would have done in that situation, or Diane Ravitch, or even dear old B. F. Skinner.
The discussion is good, too. Why can’t this guy be our tech director, in a district where getting technology is like asking for a French dictionary at Republican Party HQ?
It’s just such a brilliant question about technology, human communication and history, that I had to make it into it’s own post.
In response to this post about Edith Wharton’s extensive writings and what she’d have done today with e-mail, Mark posted the comment:
Who remembers Paul’s tweet to the Romans?
Helluva question. What does your Sunday school class say? What does your literature professor say? What does your history teacher say? Send ’em a tweet and see.
And that got me thinking: What if Edith Wharton had Facebooked? Had she lived in our time and communicated digitally, I wonder what her literature would be like. Looking at five days of cursive writing and personal letters made me realize that her compulsion to jot down her thoughts was no different than ours today when we tweet about what we had for lunch or share some fab link we just discovered. The difference between a letter written longhand and a Facebook post is that one takes a little bit longer (and leaves a more lasting trace), but the purpose is the same. Whether we live on a grand, Whartonian scale or a quieter, more ordinary one, we feel more significant when we share intimacies about ourselves with others.
There’s a good warm-up and/or journaling exercise in there for literature teachers.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
This is a post out of history, from the good people at NASA’s Earth Observatory, on July 6, 2007. For those of who are not climate scientists or particularly advanced in our acumen in dealing with the large datasets and complex mathematics of global warming, this Earth Observatory Image of the Day may improve understanding.
Climate models predict that the build up of greenhouse gases should warm the lower layer of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, and cool the layer above it, the stratosphere. Greenhouse gases accumulate in the troposphere where they absorb energy radiated from the Earth and re-emit energy back to the surface. Because the gases trap heat in the lower parts of the atmosphere, the stratosphere cools down. This pattern of warming in the lower atmosphere and cooling in the stratosphere is a hallmark of greenhouse gas warming in global climate models.
These images show temperature trends in two thick layers of the atmosphere as measured by a series of satellite-based instruments between January 1979 and December 2005. The top image shows temperatures in the middle troposphere, centered around 5 kilometers above the surface. The lower image shows temperatures in the lower stratosphere, centered around 18 kilometers above the surface. Oranges and yellows dominate the troposphere image, indicating that the air nearest the Earth’s surface warmed during the period. The stratosphere image is dominated by blues and greens, indicating cooling.
Globally, the troposphere warmed, and the stratosphere cooled during this period. Local trends varied. The greatest tropospheric warming was in the Arctic, where warming is amplified as snow and ice melt. The Antarctic, on the other hand, showed cooling. Some researchers have explained the localized cooling as a side effect of the ozone hole on atmospheric circulation over Antarctica. Loss of ozone cools the stratosphere, a change which intensifies the vortex of winds that encircle the continent. The stronger vortex isolates the air over the continent, cooling the stratosphere even further. At different times of the year, the unusually cold air dips down from the stratosphere and into the troposphere.
The cooling trend in the stratosphere was probably not solely due to greenhouse gas warming at lower altitudes; loss of ozone also cools the stratosphere. In the stratosphere, two warm spots over Antarctica and the Arctic appear to defy the overall cooling trend. One explanation for these warm spots is that polar stratospheric temperatures can fluctuate widely. The poles, especially the Arctic, experience periodic events known as sudden stratospheric warmings, during which the vortex of winds that circles the poles breaks down. When this happens, the stratosphere can warm several tens of degrees Celsius in a few days. Although these events are more common in the Arctic, a significant sudden stratospheric warming also occurred in the Antarctic stratosphere in 2002 and may help explain the apparent warming trend. Whether the localized warming trend is significant is still uncertain.
The measurements were taken by Microwave Sounding Units and Advanced Microwave Sounding Units flying on a series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites. The instruments record microwave energy emitted from oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. Warmer molecules release more energy than cooler molecules, so scientists can measure the temperature of the atmosphere by recording the amount of microwave energy being emitted. Early analyses of these measurements showed little or no warming in the troposphere, where models predicted that warming should be occurring. For a time, these measurements caused some people to question the validity of global climate models and greenhouse gas warming. Scientists discovered, however, that the satellites carrying the microwave instruments had drifted in their orbits over time, so that more recent measurements were taken at a different time of day than older measurements. Once scientists accounted for this bias and other differences between the individual instruments, the measurements showed a warming trend in the troposphere, consistent with surface observations of rising global temperature.
Re-analysis of the satellite measurements answered one of the frequently asked questions about global warming: why didn’t the early satellite data show warming in the lower layer of the atmosphere? To read more on this topic, see Global Warming Questions & Answers, which addresses this and other common questions about global warming.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of Remote Sensing Systems. Caption information courtesy Carl Mears, Remote Sensing Systems, and Paul Newman and Joel Susskind NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Spread the historic word:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Conspiracy fans — a category which appears to include almost all climate change denialists — won’t like the news from Planet Green’s “Planet 100.” This little news show claims evidence that China was the source of the hacking of the University of East Anglia’s climate related e-mails.
Why won’t the denialists like it? They won’t like it because it makes sense: Who stood to profit from embarrassing scientists just before the Copenhagen meetings? China, who wished to avoid any binding agreements, would gain simply by sowing confusion.
Evidence is pretty thin, but for the first time since the hacked e-mails were published, there’s a plausible motive. Also, the source is also not wholly pristine or reputable in science stuff — the Daily Mail of London, which specializes in gossipy tabloid news. Watch that space.
P.S. — Don’t miss the squid invasion story in the same newscast.
Here it is, the invention that stole sleep from our grasp, made clubbing possible, and launched 50,000 cartoons about ideas:
The light bulb Thomas Edison demonstrated on December 31, 1879, at Menlo Park, New Jersey - Wikimedia image (GFDL)
The light bulb. It’s an incandescent bulb.
It wasn’t the first bulb. Edison a few months earlier devised a bulb that worked with a platinum filament. Platinum was too expensive for mass production, though — and Edison wanted mass production. So, with the cadre of great assistants at his Menlo Park laboratories, he struggled to find a good, inexpensive filament that would provide adequate life for the bulb. By late December 1879 they had settled on carbon filament.
Edison invited investors and the public to see the bulb demonstrated, on December 31, 1879.
Thomas Edison in 1878, the year before he demonstrated a workable electric light bulb. CREDIT: Thomas Edison, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing left, 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction number LC-USZ62-98067
Edison’s successful bulb indicated changes in science, technology, invention, intellectual property and finance well beyond its use of electricity. For example:
Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, offices and laboratory were financed with earlier successful inventions. It was a hive of inventive activity aimed to make practical inventions from advances in science. Edison was all about selling inventions and rights to manufacture devices. He always had an eye on the profit potential. His improvements on the telegraph would found his laboratory he thought, and he expected to sell the device to Western Union for $5,000 to $7,000. Instead of offering it to them at a price, however, he asked Western Union to bid on it. They bid $10,000, which Edison gratefully accepted, along with the lesson that he might do better letting the marketplace establish the price for his inventions. Other inventive labs followed Edison’s example, such as the famous Bell Labs, but few equalled his success, or had as much fun doing it.
Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — but his improvements on it made it commercial. “In addressing the question ‘Who invented the incandescent lamp?’ historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance lamp that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.”
Look around yourself this evening, and you can find a score of ways that Edison’s invention and its descendants affect your life. One of the more musing effects is in cartooning, however. Today a glowing lightbulb is universally accepted as a nonverbal symbol for ideas and inventions. (See Mark Parisi’s series of lightbulb cartoons, “Off the Mark.”)
Even with modern, electricity-saving bulbs, the cartoon shorthand hangs on, as in this Mitra Farmand cartoon.
Brilliant cartoon from Mitra Farmand, Fuffernutter
Or see this wonderful animation, a video advertisement for United Airlines, by Joanna Quinn for Fallon — almost every frame has the symbolic lightbulb in it.
Thomas Edison's electric lamp patent drawing and claim for the incandescent light bulb CREDIT: “New Jersey--The Wizard of Electricity--Thomas A. Edison's System of Electric Illumination,” 1880. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-97960.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Ultraviolet image of the Andromeda Galaxy, first known to be a galaxy by Edwin Hubble on December 30, 1924 - Galaxy Evolution Explorer image courtesy NASA
On December 30, 1924, Edwin Hubble announced he’d discovered other galaxies in distant space. Though it may not have been so clear at the time, it meant that, as a galaxy, we are not alone in the universe (whether we are alone as intelligent life is a separate question). It also meant that the universe is much, much bigger than most people had dared to imagine.
Hubble was the guy who showed us the universe is not only bigger than we imagined, it’s probably much bigger and much more fantastic than we can imagine. Hubble is the guy who opened our imaginations to the vastness of all creation.
How does one celebrate Hubble Day? Here are some suggestions:
Easier than Christmas cards: Send a thank-you note to your junior high school science teacher, or whoever it was who inspired your interest in science. Mrs. Hedburg, Mrs. Andrews, Elizabeth K. Driggs, Herbert Gilbert, Mr. Willis, and Stephen McNeal, thank you.
Rearrange your Christmas/Hanukkah/Eid/KWANZAA lights in the shape of the Andromeda Galaxy — or in the shape of any of the great photos from the Hubble Telescope (Andromeda Galaxy pictured above; Hubble images here)
A few of the images from the Hubble Telescope
Go visit your local science museum; take your kids along – borrow somebody else’s kids if you have to (take them along, too)
Spend two hours in your local library, just looking through the books on astronomy and the universe
Anybody got a good recipe for a cocktail called “The Hubble?” “The Andromeda?” Put it in the comments, please
In 1924, he announced the discovery of a Cepheid, or variable star, in the Andromeda Nebulae. Since the work of Henrietta Leavitt had made it possible to calculate the distance to Cepheids, he calculated that this Cepheid was much further away than anyone had thought and that therefore the nebulae was not a gaseous cloud inside our galaxy, like so many nebulae, but in fact, a galaxy of stars just like the Milky Way. Only much further away. Until now, people believed that the only thing existing outside the Milky Way were the Magellanic Clouds. The Universe was much bigger than had been previously presumed.
Later Hubble noted that the universe demonstrates a “red-shift phenomenon.” The universe is expanding. This led to the idea of an initial expansion event, and the theory eventually known as Big Bang.
Hubble’s life offered several surprises, and firsts:
Hubble was a tall, elegant, athletic, man who at age 30 had an undergraduate degree in astronomy and mathematics, a legal degree as a Rhodes scholar, followed by a PhD in astronomy. He was an attorney in Kentucky (joined its bar in 1913), and had served in WWI, rising to the rank of major. He was bored with law and decided to go back to his studies in astronomy.
In 1919 he began to work at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California, where he would work for the rest of his life. . . .
Hubble wanted to classify the galaxies according to their content, distance, shape, and brightness patterns, and in his observations he made another momentous discovery: By observing redshifts in the light wavelengths emitted by the galaxies, he saw that galaxies were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them (Hubble’s Law). The further away they were, the faster they receded. This led to the calculation of the point where the expansion began, and confirmation of the big bang theory. Hubble calculated it to be about 2 billion years ago, but more recent estimates have revised that to 20 billion years ago.
An active anti-fascist, Hubble wanted to joined the armed forces again during World War II, but was convinced he could contribute more as a scientist on the homefront. When the 200-inch telescope was completed on Mt. Palomar, Hubble was given the honor of first use. He died in 1953.
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
(Does anyone have a suitable citation for that video? Where did it come from? Who produced it? Is there more somewhere?)
Happy Hubble Day! Look up!
Resources:
Journey to Palomar site (production currently being broadcast on PBS affiliates – wonderful story of George Ellery Hale and the origins of modern astronomy at Palomar; that’s where Hubble worked)
maybe a little late for Christmas: Here’s the typewriter used to answer letters to Santa Claus, at the U.S. Post Office of Santa Claus, Indiana:
Typewriter used to answer letters to Santa Claus, from the U.S. Post Office in Santa Claus, Indiana - Roadside America photo
For 30 years, kids letters to Santa Claus were answered, with the responses typed on this Corona at the Post Office. The machine rests on display at the Santa Claus Museum in Kris Kringle Plaza in Santa Claus, Indiana, about 40 miles east northeast from Evansville (south of Interstate 64).
Answers to letters to Santa Claus are answered from the museum today.
GE labs suggest some improvements to the Santa Claus Sleigh. A good way to introduce research, I think.
Click here for GE's interactive feature
Among improvements:
“Iceophobic Coatings” to make the metal parts super water resistant — a boon to airborne sleighs and commercial aircraft, and to windpower mills, all of which may be subject to icing in winter operations.
Sodium batteries for hybrid locomotion (this would be the first reindeer/electric hybrid).
Trip optimization mechanics and software — similar to that used by Canadian Pacific Railroad engineers — helps conserve fuel (I’m not sure how the reindeer get wired into this thing, but hey, this is all a bit of fantasy, isn’t it?).
Santa’s “naughty and nice” and gift request lists get reduced to a CD-sized, 500 gigabyte disk attached to his belt. He probably got this holographic data storage idea from Star Wars and R2D2.
Sensors in Santa’s gift bag allow real-time tracking of the gifts, something the wonks at GE call Asset Intelligence Tracking Tech (why not “accurate gift delivery?” “Package targeting?”). Again, Santa’s borrowing from the trucking and rail industries for this.
Here at Bathtub Manor we switched to LEDs on the Christmas tree this year. The blue lights are a bit intense (more yellow and red in the mix, please, string assemblers). Travel home, shopping, recipe-finding, and most other parts of our family’s Christmas preparations are laced with cell phones, computers, internet and digital photography, and microprocessors performing music — not to mention the yearly infusions of new technology under the tree.
QWERTY Exhibit at the Museum of Printing History, Houston
QWERTY: A Typewriter Retrospective
October 8, 2009– March 20, 2010 Typewriters inhabit a special place in the American psyche. No longer in widespread use, typewriters have been outsourced by the desktop computer, although they maintain a special air of nostalgia. Americans remember their junior high typing class, while many of today’s youngsters have never set eyes on such a machine. Tucked away in closets and in office corners, many typewriters are still occasionally put to good use. In addition to being beautiful specimens of design, who can forget the characteristic music of taps and bells created by a manual typewriter? From the collection of the Museum of Printing History.
More details on the Museum:
The Museum of Printing History
1324 W. Clay Street
Houston, Texas 77019
Hours:
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Tuesday – Saturday
713-522-4652
Free admission for self-guided tours
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
KERA Television has a marvelous short film profile of Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel in physics for his invention of what we now call “the computer chip.”
Late in his life, Jack Kilby holds his first integrated circuit, which is encased in plastic. Photo via Texas Instruments, via Earth & Sky
Teachers should check out the film and use it — it’s a great little chapter of Texas history, science history, and U.S. history. It’s an outstanding explanation of a technological development that revolutionized so much of our daily life, especially in the late 20th century. At 8 minutes and 37 seconds, the film is ideal for classroom use.
2009 marks the 50th anniversary of Kilby’s filing for a patent on an integrated circuit. He’s been honored by the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. Despite the stupendous value of his invention, Kilby’s name is far from a household name even in North Dallas, home of Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who came up with almost exactly the same idea at almost exactly the same moment, is similarly ignored.
Shouldn’t today’s high school students know about Kilby and Noyce? Not a class period goes by that I don’t use a device powered by Kilby’s invention; nor does one pass that I don’t have to admonish at least one student for misuse of such a device, such as an iPod, MP3 player, or cell phone. It’s difficult to think of someone whose invention has greater influence on the life of these kids, hour by hour — but Kilby and his invention don’t get their due in any text I’ve seen.
It’s a great film — original and clever animation, good interviews, and it features Kilby’s charming daughter, and the great journalist and historian of technology T. R. Reid. Don’t you agree that it’s much better than most of the history stuff we have to show?
Texas history standards require kids to pay brief homage to inventors in the 20th century. Kilby is not named in the standards, however, and so he and his invention are ignored as subjects of history study. You ought to fix that in your classroom, teachers.
Alan Lomax at the typewriter, 1942, using the "hunt and peck method" of typing - Library of Congress photo
Who was Alan Lomax? Have you really never heard of him before?
Lomax collected folk music, on wire recorders, on tape recorders, in written form, and any other way he could, on farms, at festivals, in jails, at concerts, in churches, on street corners — anywhere people make music. He did it his entire life. He collected music in the United States, across the Caribbean, in Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Spain and Italy.
Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Lillie Mae Ledford and an obscured Sonny Terry, New York, 1944 (Library of Congress Collection - photographer unknown)
Almost all of that collection is in the Library of Congress’s unsurpassed American Folklife collection, from which dozens of recordings have been issued.
Born in 1915, Alan Lomax began collecting folk music for the Library of Congress with his father [John Lomax] at the age of 18. He continued his whole life in the pursuit of recording traditional cultures, believing that all cultures should be recorded and presented to the public. His life’s work, represented by seventy years’ worth of documentation, will now be housed under one roof at the Library, a place for which the Lomax family has always had strong connections and great affection.
Were that all, it would be an outstanding record of accomplishment. Lomax was much more central to the folk revivals in the both England and the U.S. in the 1950s and 19602, though, and in truth it seemed he had a hand in everything dealing with folk music in the English-speaking world and then some. Carl Sagan used Lomax as a consultant to help choose the music to be placed on the disc sent into space with the exploring satellite Voyager, “the Voyager Golden Record.”
Have you listened to and loved Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo,” and the famous passage, “Hoedown?” How about Miles Davis, with the Gil Evans-produced “Sketches of Spain?” [Thank you, Avis Ortner.] Then you know the work of Alan Lomax, as Wikipedia explains:
The famous “Hoedown” in Aaron Copland‘s 1942 ballet Rodeo was taken note for note from Ruth Crawford Seeger‘s piano transcription of the square-dance tune, “Bonypart” (“Bonaparte’s Retreat”), taken from a recording of W. M. Stepp’s fiddle version, originally recorded in Appalachia for the Library of Congress by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in 1937. Seeger’s transcription was published in Our Singing Country (1941) by John A. and Alan Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Miles Davis‘s 1959 Sketches of Spain album adapts the melodies “Alborada de vigo” and “Saeta” from Alan Lomax’s Columbia World Library album Spain.
“To Hear Your Banjo Play” featuring Pete Seeger, written and produced by Alan Lomax.
Trailer for the PBS P.O.V. film, “The Song Hunter,” by Rogier Kappers
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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