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Much Ado About Almost Nothing

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Much Ado About Almost Nothing Much Ado About Almost Nothing Man's Encounter with the Electron Hans Camenzind Copyright 2008 Hans Camenzind www.historyofelectronics.com Edition 1.2 January 2008 All rights reserved Contents 1 Almost Nothing 1 Ancient superstitions and brave early investigators. 2 Benjamin Franklin, Electrician 11 After retiring from business he dabbled in electricity with three friends, and turned out to be a first-class scientist. 3 Nine Lives, Nine Discoveries 23 How the properties of electricity were discovered. 4 A Very Big Ship 53 The telegraph and the heartbreaking story of the transatlantic cable. 5 Mr. Watson, Come Here! 73 Bell and his many competitors. 6 Tesla 89 Edison and the genius who trumped him, and then went over the edge. 7 Revelation 111 The electron is finally discovered and turns out to be very strange. 8 Armstrong 129 The real inventor of radio vs. a charlatan and a ruthless promoter. 9 Farnsworth 155 A 15-year old Idaho farm boy invents television and battles the same ruthless promoter. 10 The 30-Ton Brain 169 The first computers. 11 Noyce 189 The invention of the transistor and the integrated circuit 12 Parting Shots 217 Where do we go from here? References 219 Index The author is indebted to Robert A. Pease and Reinhard Zimmerli for proofreading this book. 1. Almost Nothing Ancient superstitions, a skeptical Greek, a siege in Italy, a physician in London and shocking entertainment. The little thing that threads through this book truly amounts to almost nothing. It is so small you can’t see it, not even with the most powerful microscope. It is elusive, as if it were shy: it can appear as a tiny point with a weight (or more properly a mass) of much less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram, scurrying around at near the speed of light; or it can shed its body and become a ghost, a wave. We would never have noticed this strange particle were it not for the fact that there are many of them. They are everywhere, in every material, in numbers so huge they are beyond any human comprehension. In the point at the end of this sentence there are some 20 billion of them. It was only a little over 100 years ago that man began to deduce the nature of this weird, minuscule thing and gave it a name: the electron. For most of history he was unaware of its existence, ascribing its effects to various gods. A large, powerful god who hurled lighting bolts, such as Zeus, Thor, or Jupiter. Or little ones who hid in amber, which attracted feathers or straw when rubbed, or in the lodestone (magnet), which attracted other stones of the same kind. We shall follow man’s encounter with the electron in this book: how a few people overcame their superstitions and began to investigate; how the electron gradually became useful, though man still had no idea what it was; how it finally revealed itself and then grew in importance to such an extent that we are now completely, utterly dependent on it. The first incident of note happened around 600 BC, in the city of Miletus (or, more accurately, Miletos). The city was Greek, but it was located on what is now the west coast of Turkey. At that time Miletus was the richest city in the Greek world and the most accomplished cultural center. Part of its status was due to Thales, who had gained fame in mathematics and astronomy and also proved himself to be a shrewd businessman 2. Hans Camenzind 1 Miletus had gained its wealth through trade. It had an excellent harbor and was strategically located on the way to Egypt from the north. And the trade routes already extended all the way to the Baltic sea, 2300km (1400 miles) away, from where the traders brought the most valuable gem then in existence: amber. Amber is a resin from trees, which grew some 40 million years ago, and are now deep underground 8. Over time the resin has hardened and now appears to be a bright yellow rock; because of its sun-like appearance the Greeks named it ηλεκτρου (elektron). Unlike other gems, amber has a fascinating property: when rubbed, it attracts light objects, such as straw. The Greeks (and just about everybody else) believed there was a tiny god inside. That was the explanation for everything they couldn't understand. The Greeks had a very large number of gods: every object on earth or in the heavens had a god, everything good or bad was personified as a deity, usually in human form; and each god had its own fantastic story. There was another effect that couldn't be explained: magnetism. In some regions near Greece one could find rocks, which attracted each other (called a lodestone). More gods were created. As far as we can tell, Thales was the first person to debunk this belief. He investigated the lodestone and amber and pronounced that the effects were not due to gods. But it was only a small step forward: his explanation was that amber and the lodestone had a "soul". (He also believed that the earth was a flat disk floating on water, and that everything comes from water and returns to water). But we have to keep in mind that we know very little about Thales, about what he thought and said. Our only source of information is hearsay, comments by later scholars. If he wrote anything, nothing survived. When you had something important to say in 600 BC, you wrote it on a scroll and let other people read it. There were no public schools, universities or libraries, not even in Miletus; only a small minority of people could even read. If your dissertation was popular, a rich, educated collector had a copy made by a scribe; if your ideas were out of favor, your scroll eventually decayed and was discarded. Shortly after Thales, Miletus started to decline and Athens became the center of Greece. Miletus was captured by the Persians, its harbor silted up and then the town disappeared altogether. For more than 1800 years there was only silence on the subject. It appears that no other Greek (or Roman) picked up where Thales left off. If there were any, all traces of them have disappeared. 2 Much Ado About Almost Nothing And when the Roman Empire became Christian there was no longer any progress in other fields of science either. The church taught that every object and every effect was controlled by divine interference and thus the investigation of nature not only made no sense, but was sacrilegious. This belief was enforced by the inquisition. So it is a surprise that we find a rather detailed investigation of the magnet during this time. It is in the form of a letter written in Latin by a Pierre de Maricourt to his neighbor 10. We know very little about the author, who signed the letter as Petrus Peregrinus (Peter the Crusader); Roger Bacon mentions him in his writings and gives us the impression that Maricourt was one of the most impressive and knowledgeable people he knew. At the bottom of the letter it says: "Finished in the camp of the siege of Lucera on 8 August 1269". What was a Frenchman doing in Italy, laying siege to a town? Lucera is a town 200km (130 miles) east of Rome (not in Sicily, as most historians state) 9, and had become populated by Muslims. The pope took offense and asked the French for help. An army was dispatched, led by the brother of the king; Maricourt was almost certainly an engineer who built and operated the catapults, which hurled rocks and flaming tar-balls into the town. A siege tends to be boring for the aggressor; one has to wait until the population starves. Thus Maricourt had plenty of free time on his hands and he put on paper what had been his passion for some time: investigating the magnet. He had found that each magnet has a south pole and north pole, which he determines by carefully tracing the magnetic field with an iron needle. With two magnets the north pole of one attracted the south pole of the other, but when two north or south-poles where held together they repelled each other. When he cut a magnet in half, each piece had its own north and south pole. He also found that he could magnetize a piece of iron with a lodestone and that a strong lodestone was able to reverse the magnetism of a weaker one. Maricourt suggested improvement for the compass, which had been in crude use by mariners: a 360-degree scale which would let you find the course to be steered. But he made two grave mistakes. He believed that the magnet in the compass pointed toward the north star, not the north pole of the earth. And, at the end of the letter, he proposes a motor with magnets that would run forever, a perpetuum mobile. If it doesn't work it is probably due to the lack of skill by the one who is building it, he said. The motor never had a chance of working. Hans Camenzind 3 That is all we know about Pierre de Maricourt. His letter was copied occasionally; some 28 copies are still in existence. No two copies are the same, all were altered while copying, the majority of them substantially. Which goes to show how uncertain our knowledge of the ancient past is.
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