In response to Daoloth, the person you are thinking of is: Edwin Howard Armstrong. Actually he was an electronics genius. Besides pioneering FM technology (which opened up the broadcasting field for television too), Armstrong also discovered the concepts of regeneration and heterodyning. (both of which advanced the field of radio electronics). Armstrong also was able to give a better technical explanation of how the vaccuum tube worked then the inventor himself - Lee Deforest.
Yeah I’d say Edwin Howard Armstrong was royally shafted.
Since someone mentioned Nobel Prizes, I agree that they sure take their sweet time dishing those out. I believe last year’s winner for physcs, Ray Davis who did neutrino reseach, is now senile.
I also read the Double Helix and seem to remember it more as Watson somehow used Rosalind Franklin’s information without really having her consent to use it. I could be wrong on that. I’d have to go back and read the book again.
I'm don't normally take the side of the history revisionists. Watson is a graduate of my alma mater (Indiana University), but I have to say the man seems like a guy who was good at manipulating the system. I heard him talk once at IU about 12 years ago. He was invited back for some such talk and a huge audience showed up, more than he expected. For that reason, he abandoned his slide presentation and gave a rambling, incoherent speech that hardly anyone could understand because despite having discovered the structure of DNA, he still has not triumphed over the simple way a microphone works. I could hardly understand a word he said and that which I did hear I wish I had not. I particularly recall him stating how he purposely tried to surround himself with good looking lab assistants to combat the long hours in the lab. This is not something you tell to a large audience. Some people were so offended by what he said that they walked out. I was shocked by the way he talked.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought maybe he just was surprised by the size of the audience, he's older, he may not give many speeches like that. Then I read his book and became even more dumbfounded by his actions. He seems to have just manipulated his way into being in the right place at the right time and largely borrowed other people's work to come up with the DNA structure. He spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how Rosalind Franklin was not that attractive, as if that had some relevance. He spends half the book talking about the aristocratic social life he experienced during his years of discovery. I won't say the man is a fraud, but I think he gets far more credit than he deserves.
Linus Pauling was actually very close to discovering the DNA structure at the same time. I think the Nobel comittee may have revised the award sometime after 1962 to include Franklin, also.
Sorry for the double post, but on a separate topic, it takes a long time to win a Nobel Prize even after the research is first published largely because the research has to be validated, which can take years. Otherwise you could give away a prize one year and the next year you’d find out the theory is completely wrong.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar came up with black hole theory around 1930. Unfortunately his ideas conflicted with Eddington’s, and Eddington used his authority and his pull with colleagues to kill off Chandra’s work. Chandra ended up having to leave England entirely in order to continue his research. Vindication came 30 years later.
George Zweig created Quark theory, calling them “Aces.” His work was halted by ridicule (since he postulated particles with charge less than the charge of an electron.) Gell-Mann & Feynman took it up later, after Zweig tested the waters and took the brunt of the hostile reaction. Gell-Mann got the Nobel prize for it.
My sense is that it isn’t at all surprising that Stringfellow didn’t make the changes that would have produced stable and controllable flight, since these changes, far from being simple, were in fact complex, subtle and very difficult to arrive at.
I’d be interested to hear of any new evidence of forgotten aviation pioneers. Two that are mentioned in your article are Clement Ader and Gustave Whitehead (Weisskopf).
Ader claimed to have flown about 1000’ in 1897 and was for a time celebrated in France. But a witness present during the supposed flight later stated that in fact the Avion never actually flew.
Whitehead apparently claimed an astounding 7-mile flight in January 1902, but no eyewitness to this ever was found and his wife and children, interviewed after his death, did not remember him mentioning this flight. I don’t believe this claim is given much standing today.
> He seems to have just manipulated his way into being in the
> right place at the right time and largely borrowed other
> people’s work to come up with the DNA structure.
I think it’s clear though that he did do some significant part of the research on DNA. Let’s face it - discovery is often mostly luck. Watson just happened to be at the right place at the right time. If everyone who contributed to the discovery were included in the award, that would be dozens of people. And the Nobel committee couldn’t include Franklin no matter what they thought her contribution to the discovery was. She was dead by 1962, and the rule that no Nobels can be posthumous is quite clear.
> He spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how
> Rosalind Franklin was not that attractive, as if that had some
> relevance.
Perhaps so, but that wasn’t as odd for the early '50’s as it now is. Anyway, it’s not true (as I heard people claim) that Watson thought Franklin was an “evil bitch.” He thought she was a solid scientist who he didn’t get along with very well.
I’ll take your word for it that Watson in person is not a likeable man.
Which, of course, is precisely my point. As I said, they are obvious in hindsight, with the knowledge of what will work behind us.
If you’ll read my article, I was skeptical of most of those early pioneers, too, but I had to modify my opinion on Whitehead/Weisskopf when, on researching him on the net, I found that his craft had been duplicated and successfully flown. I believe I provide a link to that site, which includes a picture of the reconstruction in flight.
I don’t recall reading about a 7 mile flight claim, but it could be that he did, and that his present-day supporters didn’t want to publicize that aspect .
According to some documentaries I have seen, Kildall actually went sailing the day IBM came to town (having been referred by Gates, in the first place) and left the negotiating to his wife. His wife refused to sign IBM’s non-disclosure agreement and they went back to Gates.
Yes, and there is a certain amount of scummery behind the story as well. Stephen Hawking told about the row most engagingly:
I’ve also read other opinions that Leibniz’ version was simpler and had better notation, but you’ll need someone more acquainted with the mathematics and the dispute to give you a solid answer on that point.
Sorry. I thought your point was the one you expressed here:
“Stringfellow’s monoplane looks so much like a modern plane, with its wing cross-section, rounded wing design, paired counter-rotating propellors, etc., that it’s surprising that he never made what look like the few changes that would be needed to make flight stable and controllable.”
My point was that these changes proved remarkably difficult to develop, so it’s not at all surprising that Stringfellow didn’t do so.
A copy was flown, but not with original (i.e. carbide-acetelyne) engines, which seems more than a bit dubious. There are also the questions about why Whitehead’s flights were not measured, duplicated or widely reported. The article on the first flight was supposedly witnessed by a reporter, but he held the story for several days – why?
The story as finally printed (in the Bridgeport Herald, 18 Aug 1901 ) makes interesting reading. The takeoff was before dawn, and followed a successful 2am flight on which the payload was 220 pounds of sand. The reporter (and Whitehead, as quoted) give the distance as about half a mile. Whitehead is quoted as saying that he enjoyed his 10 minutes [!] in the air. Over the sound of the engines and at about the full extent of the flight, the reporter says he heard Whitehead exclaim “I’ve got it at last!” Once Whitehead decided to land and shut off the engines, the plane glided from a height of about 50’ to a safe landing in about 2 minutes [!].
I’d like to second Zenster’s nomination of Philo T. Farnsworth. As a fourteen-year-old, while plowing a field in 1922, he conceived of the idea of drawing an image with a scanning electron beam, and a year later explained his concept to his high-school science teacher. Four years later–at 19!–he formed a company to develop the system.
While the rest of the world, including other nominal “fathers of television” like Scotland’s John Logie Baird, were messing around with mechnical systems that involved spinning wheels, Farnsworth realized that only an all-electronic system would be practical and allow for adequate picture quality.
As **Zenster **mentions, David Sarnoff and RCA engaged Farnsworth in patent battles for years, and that, with the intervention of WWII, ensured that Farnsworth’s patents expired before his system could be adopted and earn him the profit he justly deserved. He died in 1971 at age 64 in obscurity and near poverty.
The monitor you are looking at at this very moment (unless you have an LCD screen) is a direct descendant of Farnsworth’s original concept.
Father and son authors David E. Fisher and Marshall J. Fisher have written a great book about all the early television systems and their inventors, called Tube. I recommend it.
(Parenthetically, one of my family’s favorite TV comedians of the 1960s, Soupy Sales, had a private eye character called Philo T. Kvetch. It wasn’t until decades later as an adult that I first heard about Farnsworth and finally got that inside reference.)