My Science School

The Wright brothers need no introduction. Best known for achieving the first powered heavier-than-air craft flight, the Wright brothers obtained the patent for a "Flying Machine" on May 22, 1906.

The names of Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright will forever be intertwined with the history of flying machines. For, the Wright brothers were the first to achieve the flight of a powered heavier-than-air craft.

 The elder of the two, Wilbur, was born in 1867 and was the third child in the Wright family. Orville was the sixth of seven children that his parents had. The seeds for an idea about flying were sown when Wilbur and Orville were still two young boys.

A toy that inspires

Their mother gave them a toy helicopter to play with. This little piece of wood that had two rubber bands to turn a propeller laid the foundation for a lifetime's work.

Drawn towards flying, the Wright brothers spent plenty of time observing birds in flight. This allowed them to notice that lift was created when birds soared into the wind and the air flowed over the curved surface of their wings. They use this knowledge to build kites, which they even sold to their friends.

Cycling to aviation

As avid cyclists, Wilbur and Orville owned a bicycle shop as adults. Despite the fact that they had less than 10 years of combined high school education, the experience of building bicycles provided them the understanding of early engine design - be it using chains, sprockets, or ball bearings.

Years of riding a bicycle gave them ideas as to how they could control and balance an aircraft. Add to this the countless hours that they had spent observing flight in nature and they had the necessary knowledge and interest to get started.

By 1899, the Wright brothers ventured into flying. Between 1900 and 1902, they researched every aspect of flight, from roll, pitch, and yaw to the rudder, elevator, and performance of the wing. In order to test the aerodynamic qualities of wing models, they even developed the first wind tunnel. The brothers also worked on their own piloting skills by making over a thousand flights on a series of gliders at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Master a control system

Their years of trial and error allowed them to master their glider in all three axes of flight: pitch, roll, and yaw. While the pitch was operated by a forward elevator, their breakthrough discovery included the simultaneous use of roll control with wing-warping and yaw control with a rear rudder.

Even though they had just started conducting experiments with propellers and begun to build their own engines, they applied for a patent in March 1903 for their control system. They were granted U.S. Patent 821,393 for a "Flying Machine" on May 22, 1906. This patent is significant as it laid down a useful and modern means of controlling a flying machine, regardless of whether it was powered or not.

Not ones to be kept waiting, the Wright brothers had already made the first free, controlled, and sustained flights in a powered, heavier-than-air craft on a chilly day at Kitty Hawk, on December 17, 1903. With just a handful of others witnessing history, Orville stayed 12 seconds in the air and flew 120 feet in the first trial at 10.35 a.m. In the fourth and final trial of the day, Wilbur achieved the longest flight of 59 seconds in the air and reached a height of 852 feet. In a little over 100 years since then, human beings have flown farther and faster than ever before, and continue to progressively get better at it.

Picture Credit : Google 

On May 9, 1893 the first public demonstration of the kinetoscope was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Featuring three workers pretending to be blacksmiths, the film was among the first glimpses into motion pictures.

With the vacation upon us already and the pandemic scene relenting a bit, one of the activities that most families tend to do over the weekend is visiting a theatre to watch a new movie. Even though motion pictures are a multi-billion-dollar industry in the world today, they have been around only since late in the 19th Century. By the end of that century. the concept of moving images as entertainment was picking up. Magic lanterns had been around for generations and these devices employed glass slides with images that were then projected. We had looked at how pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope in this column about two months back. Muybridge's zoopraxiscope projected a series of images, which were printed on a rotating glass disc, in successive phases of movement.

Muybridge meets Edison

It isn't clear as to when American inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison's interest in motion pictures began. Even though some argue that he was already interested for years, it is obvious that Muybridge's visit to Edison's laboratory in West Orange in February 1888 convinced the latter to invent a motion picture camera.

Muybridge suggested that they collaborate and work together to combine the zoopraxiscope with Edison's  phonograph - a device for the recording and reproduction of sound. While Edison was clearly intrigued by the idea, he decided against the partnership, maybe because he could see that the zoopraxiscope wasn't the best way of recording motion.

Calls it kinetoscope

Always an entrepreneur, Edison decided to protect his future inventions by filing a caveat with the Patents Office in October 1888. He described his ideas for a machine that would record and reproduce objects in motion, calling it a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He named this yet to be invented device as a kinetoscope, by combining the Greek words for "movement" and "to watch"  kineto and scopos.

Much of the credit for the design of the kinetoscope actually goes to Edison's assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, an accomplished photographer. Tasked with inventing Edison's kinetoscope in June 1889, Dickson, assisted by Charles A. Brown, carried out a lot of experimentation to turn the concept into reality.

Celluloid film to the rescue

After the initial attempts proved futile, Edison's team changed direction to that of others in the field. Edison had encountered French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, who had produced a sequence of images by utilising a continuous roll of film in his chronophotographie, in Europe and this put them onto their new track

By now, the inventive process was being delayed by the lack of film rolls of requisite length and durability. Edison's experiments started using emulsion-coated celluloid film sheets that were developed by photographic pioneer John Carbutt. When the Eastman. Company started producing its own celluloid film, Dickson and his new assistant William Heise got it in large quantities and set about working on their machine.

Means of seeing motion pictures

Dickson had the prototype ready by 1891 and the device doubled up both as a camera and a peep-hole viewer. On August 24, 1891 they applied for a patent for the kinetograph (the camera) and the kinetoscope (the viewer) and the device was completed by 1892.

Consisting of an upright wooden cabinet that was four feet high, the viewer had to look into a peep-hole at the top of the cabinet to see the motion picture. The first public demonstration of Edison's films featured three of his workers pretending to be blacksmiths and was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on May 9, 1893. By 1894. hundreds of people often lined up in parlours housing these devices to pay 25 cents (over $7 in today's money) and watch five reels.

In the years that followed, Dickson left Edison to be a part of the group that formed the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company: Edison sued that company in 1898 for infringing on his patent for the kinetograph; and the two companies started working together from 1909 until Edison's company left the film industry in 1918. By then, Dickson, Edison, and the kinetoscope had more than just provided a glimpse of a new form of media - the motion pictures.

Picture Credit : Google 

Peter Higgs is a British physicist who proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle, which was confirmed through the discovery at CERN, a European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2012. He and Belgian physicist François Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles." The Higgs boson is the fundamental particle associated with the Higgs field, a field that gives mass to other fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks.Higgs was born in England in 1929. He was taught at home as a child. Later, he attended Cotham Grammar School in Bristol and was inspired by the work of the school alumnus Paul Dirac founder of the field of quantum mechanics. Peter Higgs graduated in Physics from King's College London in 1950 and achieved a master's degree in 1952. He was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1951 and performed his doctoral research in molecular physics under the supervision of Charles Coulson and Christopher Longuet-Higgins. He received his PhD degree in 1954 and became a lecturer in mathematical  physics at Edinburgh in 1960 and remained there till his retirement in 1996.

In 1956, Higgs began working in quantum field theory. In 1964, he proposed the theoretical existence of the Higgs Boson. Higgs developed the idea that particles - massless when the universe began - acquired mass a fraction of a second later as a result interacting with a theoretical field (which became known as the Higgs field). Higgs postulated that this field permeates space, giving mass to all elementary subatomic particles that interact with it. Independently of one another, both Peter Higgs and the team of François Englert and Robert Brout proposed this mechanism. In 1964, Physical Review Letters, published Higg's paper which predicted a new massive spin-zero boson (now known as the Higgs boson). In 2012, two experiments conducted at the CERN laboratory in Geneva confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle. Definitive confirmation that the particle was the Higgs boson was announced in March 2013.

Picture Credit : Google