Henry Ford
H.G.Wells
Marie Curie
Karl Landsteiner
Orville Wright
Ernest Rutherford
Bertrand Russell
Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Although Ford invented neither the automobile nor the assembly line, he developed and manufactured the first automobile that many middle class Americans could afford. In doing so, Ford converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into a practical conveyance that would profoundly impact the landscape of the 20th Century. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. As the owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. He is credited with "Fordism" - mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to systematically lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put dealerships throughout most of North America and in major cities on 6 continents. Ford left most of his vast wealth to the Ford Foundation and arranged for his family to control the company permanently.
Ford long had an interest in plastics developed from agricultural products, especially soybeans. Soybean-based plastics were used in Ford automobiles throughout the 1930s in plastic parts such as car horns, in paint, etc. This project culminated in 1942, when Ford patented an automobile made almost entirely of plastic, attached to a tubular welded frame. It weighed 30% less than a steel car and was said to be able to withstand blows ten times greater than could steel. Furthermore, it ran on grain alcohol (ethanol) instead of gasoline. The design never caught on. In 1927 Ford partnered with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone to create the Edison Botanic Research Corp. in Florida, to look for a native source of rubber. Ford was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. Ford had a vacation home in Richmond Hill, Georgia which became the center of social gatherings with visitations by the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and the DuPonts. Ford was also widely known for his pacifism during the first years of WWI, and for promoting antisemitism through his newspaper “The Dearborn Independent” and the book “The International Jew”.
Henry Ford was born on a farm in Michigan. His father gave him a pocket watch in his early teens. At 15, Ford dismantled and reassembled the timepieces of friends and neighbors dozens of times, gaining the reputation of a watch repairman. At 20, Ford walked 6.5km to church every Sunday. His father expected him to eventually take over the family farm, but he despised farm work. In 1879, when he was 16, Ford left home to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. In 1882, he returned home to work on the family farm, where he became adept at operating the Westinghouse portable steam engine. He was later hired by Westinghouse to service their steam engines. During this period Ford also studied bookkeeping.
In 1888, Ford married and the couple had one child. Ford supported his family by farming and running a sawmill. In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. After his promotion to Chief Engineer in 1893, he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal experiments on gasoline engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of a self-propelled vehicle he named the Ford Quadricycle. After various test drives, Ford brainstormed ways to improve the Quadricycle.
In 1896, Ford attended a meeting of Edison executives, where he was introduced to Thomas Edison. Edison approved of Ford's automobile experimentation. Encouraged by Edison, Ford designed and built a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. Backed by the capital of a rich investor, Ford resigned from the Edison Company and founded the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. The automobiles produced were of a lower quality and higher price than Ford wanted. Ultimately, the company was not successful and was dissolved 2 years later.
Ford designed, built, and successfully raced a 26-horsepower automobile. With this success, he formed the Henry Ford Company which was renamed the Cadillac Automobile Company. Ford received the backing of an old acquaintance, a Detroit-area coal dealer and they formed a partnership, "Ford & Malcomson, Ltd." to manufacture automobiles. Ford went to work designing an inexpensive automobile, and the duo leased a factory and contracted with a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge to supply parts. Sales were slow, and a crisis arose when the Dodge brothers demanded payment for their first shipment. In response, Malcomson brought in another group of investors and convinced the Dodge Brothers to accept a portion of the new company. Ford & Malcomson was reincorporated as the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Ford then demonstrated a newly designed car on the ice of Lake St. Clair, driving 1.6km in 39.4 seconds and setting a new land speed record at 146.9km/h. Convinced by this success, the race driver Barney Oldfield of the day, took the car around the country, making the Ford brand known throughout the United States.
In 1908, the Model T was introduced. It had the steering wheel on the left, which every other company soon copied. The entire engine and transmission were enclosed; the 4 cylinders were cast in a solid block; the suspension used 2 semi-elliptic springs. The car was very simple to drive, and easy and cheap to repair. It only cost $825 in 1908 or $21,760 in 2016 prices. The price fell every year and by the 1920s, a majority of American drivers had learned to drive on the Model T.
Ford created a huge publicity machine in Detroit to ensure every newspaper carried stories and ads about his cars. Ford's network of local dealers made the car ubiquitous in almost every city in North America. As independent dealers, the franchises grew rich and publicized not just the Ford but the concept of automobiling; local motor clubs sprang up to help new drivers and to encourage exploring the countryside. Ford was always eager to sell to farmers, who looked on the vehicle as a commercial device to help their business. Sales skyrocketed. Always on the hunt for more efficiency and lower costs, in 1913 Ford introduced the moving assembly belts into his plants, which enabled an enormous increase in production. The concept and its development came from employees. Sales passed 250,000 in 1914. By 1916, as the price dropped to $360 for the basic touring car, sales reached 472,000. Using the consumer price index, this price was equivalent to $7,828.08 in 2015 dollars.
By 1918, half of all cars in America were Model T's. Until the development of the assembly line, which mandated black because of its quicker drying time, Model Ts were available in other colors, including red. After the assembly line was set up, all cars were black. Ford advertised that customers can have a car painted any color that they wanted…so long as it was black. The design was fervently promoted and defended by Ford, and production continued as late as 1927. The final total production was 15,007,034. This record stood for the next 45 years. This record was achieved in 19 years from the introduction of the first Model T.
President Woodrow Wilson asked Ford to run as a Democrat for the United States Senate from Michigan in 1918. Although the nation was at war, Ford ran as a peace candidate and a strong supporter of the proposed League of Nations. Ford was defeated in a close election. Henry Ford turned the presidency of Ford Motor Company over to his son Edsel Ford in 1918. Henry retained final decision authority and sometimes reversed his son's decisions. Henry started another company, Henry Ford and Son, and made a show of taking himself and his best employees to the new company; the goal was to scare the remaining holdout stockholders of the Ford Motor Company to sell their stakes to him before they lost most of their value. He was determined to have full control over strategic decisions. The ruse worked, and Henry and Edsel purchased all remaining stock from the other investors, thus giving the family sole ownership of the company.
By the mid-1920s, sales of the Model T began to decline due to rising competition. Other auto makers offered payment plans through which consumers could buy their cars, which usually included more modern mechanical features and styling not available with the Model T. Despite urging from Edsel, Henry refused to incorporate new features into the Model T or to form a customer credit plan.
By 1926, sagging sales of the Model T finally convinced Henry to make a new model. He pursued the project with a great deal of technical expertise in design of the engine, chassis, and other mechanical necessities, while leaving the body design to his son. Edsel also managed to prevail over his father's initial objections in the inclusion of a sliding-shift transmission. The result was the successful Ford Model A, introduced in 1927 and produced through 1931, with a total output of more than 4 million. Subsequently, the Ford company adopted an annual model change system similar to that recently pioneered by its competitor General Motors and which continued to be followed by automakers 50 years after Ford died. Not until the 1930s did Ford overcome his objection to finance companies, and the Ford-owned Universal Credit Corporation became a major car-financing operation. Ford did not believe in accountants. He amassed one of the world's largest fortunes without ever having his company audited under his administration.
Ford was a pioneer of "welfare capitalism", designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men per year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers. Ford astonished the world in 1914 by doubling the salaries of his workers to $5 per day wage which is equivalent to $120 per day in 2016 dollars. The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs.
Detroit was already a high-wage city, but competitors were forced to raise wages or lose their best workers. Ford's policy proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the local economy. He viewed the increased wages as profit-sharing linked with rewarding those who were most productive and of good character. The profit-sharing was offered to employees who had worked at the company for 6 months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking, gambling, and deadbeat dads. The Social Department used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing."
Ford's incursion into his employees' private lives was highly controversial, and he soon backed off from the most intrusive aspects. By the time he wrote his 1922 memoir, he spoke of the Social Department and of the private conditions for profit-sharing in the past tense, and admitted that:
"Paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees' private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, often special help; and all this ought to be rendered for decency's sake. But the broad workable plan of investment and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of payment."
In addition to raising the wages of his workers, Ford also introduced a new, reduced workweek. In 1926, the Ford Motor Company's factory workers switched to a 5-day 40-hour workweek. Ford had made the decision to boost productivity, as workers were expected to put more effort into their work in exchange for more leisure time, and because he believed decent leisure time was good for business, since workers would actually have more time to purchase and consume more goods.
"It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege."
Ford was adamantly against labor unions. He thought they were too heavily influenced by some leaders who, despite their apparent good motives, would end up doing more harm than good for workers. Most wanted to restrict productivity as a means to foster employment, but Ford saw this as self-defeating because, in his view, productivity was necessary for any economic prosperity to exist.
He believed that productivity gains that made unnecessary certain jobs would nevertheless stimulate the larger economy and thus grow new jobs elsewhere, whether within the same corporation or in others. Ford also believed that union leaders had a perverse incentive to foment perpetual socio-economic crisis as a way to maintain their own power. Meanwhile, he believed that smart managers had an incentive to do right by their workers, because doing so would maximize their own profits. Ford did acknowledge, however, that many managers were basically too bad at managing to understand this fact. But Ford believed that eventually, if good managers such could fend off the attacks of misguided people from the left and the right (i.e., both socialists and reactionaries), the good managers would create a socio-economic system wherein neither bad management nor bad unions could find enough support to continue existing.
To forestall union activity, Ford promoted Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Edsel - who was president of the company - thought Ford had to come to some sort of collective bargaining agreement with the unions because the violence, work disruptions, and bitter stalemates could not go on forever. But Henry, who still had the final veto in the company on a de facto basis even if not an official one, refused to cooperate. For several years, he kept Bennett in charge of talking to the unions that were trying to organize the Ford Motor Company. Henry's purpose in putting Bennett in charge was to make sure no agreements were ever reached.
The Ford Motor Company was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the United Auto Workers union (UAW). A sit-down strike by the UAW union in 1941 closed the River Rouge Plant. A distraught Henry Ford was very close to following through with a threat to break up the company rather than cooperate, but his wife told him she would leave him if he destroyed the family business. In her view, it would not be worth the chaos it would create. Henry complied with his wife's ultimatum, and even agreed with her in retrospect. Overnight, the Ford Motor Company went from the most stubborn holdout among automakers to the one with the most favorable UAW contract terms.
Ford, like other automobile companies, entered the aviation business during WWI, building Liberty engines. After the war, it returned to auto manufacturing until 1925, when Ford acquired the Stout Metal Airplane Company. Ford's most successful aircraft was the Ford 4AT Trimotor, often called the "Tin Goose" because of its corrugated metal construction. It used a new aluminum–copper alloy for corrosion resistance and strength. The plane was similar to Fokker's V.VII-3m, and some say that Ford's engineers surreptitiously measured the Fokker plane and then copied it. The Trimotor first flew in 1926, and was the first successful U.S. passenger airliner, accommodating about 12 passengers in a rather uncomfortable fashion. 199 Trimotors were built before it was discontinued in 1933, when the Ford Airplane Division shut down because of poor sales during the Great Depression.
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. In most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. The depression originated in the United States, after a fall in stock prices and became worldwide news with the stock market crash. Between 1929-1932, worldwide GDP fell by an estimated 15%. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of WWII.
Ford opposed war, which he viewed as a terrible waste. Ford opposed America's entry into WWII and continued to believe that international business could generate the prosperity that would head off wars. Ford insisted that war was the product of greedy financiers who sought profit in human destruction. In 1939 he went so far as to claim that the torpedoing of U.S. merchant ships by German submarines was the result of conspiratorial activities undertaken by financier war-makers. The financiers to whom he was referring was Ford's code for Jews. He had also accused Jews of fomenting WWI.
Ford sponsored a weekly newspaper that published strongly anti-semitic views. At the same time, Ford had a reputation as one of the few major corporations actively hiring black workers, and was not accused of discrimination against Jewish workers or suppliers. He also hired women and handicapped men at a time when doing so was uncommon.
Despite his opposition to war, Ford continued to do business with Nazi Germany, including the manufacture of war materiel. Beginning in 1940, with the requisitioning of between 100 and 200 French POWs to work as slave laborers, at Ford-Werke GmbH, a German car manufacturer and a subsidiary of Ford of Europe, which in turn is a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The number of slave laborers grew as the war expanded.
When the German company Rolls-Royce sought a U.S. manufacturer as an alternative source for the Merlin engine used on fighter airplanes, Ford first agreed to do so and then reneged. He lined up behind the war effort when the U.S. entered in late 1941. Once the U.S. entered the war, Ford directed the Ford Motor Company to construct a vast new purpose-built factory to build the B-24, the heavy bomber airplanes used extensively in WWII. It was the largest assembly line in the world at the time. At its peak in 1944, it built 650 B-24s per month, and by 1945 Ford was completing each B-24 in eighteen hours, with one rolling off the assembly line every 58 minutes. Ford produced 9,000 B-24s, half of the 18,000 total B-24s produced during the war.
When his son Edsel Ford died prematurely in 1943, Henry Ford nominally resumed control of the company, but a series of strokes in the late 1930s had left him increasingly debilitated, and his mental ability was fading. Ford was increasingly sidelined, and others made decisions in his name. The company was in fact controlled by a handful of senior executives.
Edsel's widow led an ouster and installed her son, Henry Ford II, as president. The young man took full control, and purged the company of its old executives in 1947 when Ford died at age 86.
H. G Wells was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, including even 2 books on war games. He is best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called a "father of science fiction".
During his own lifetime, however, he was most prominent as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of Utopian works and foresaw the advent of airplanes, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering.
Wells's earliest specialized training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often sympathizing with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he wrote little science fiction, while he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of journalist.
Herbert George Wells was born in England. His father was a former domestic gardener, and a shopkeeper and professional cricketer. His mother was a former domestic servant. An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper. The stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. His father managed to earn a meager income, but little of it came from the shop and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket.
A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he started reading books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access. They also stimulated his desire to write. Later that year he entered a private school.
In 1877, his father fractured his thigh. The accident effectively put an end to his career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income. No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations. From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a tailor. He worked a 13-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.
Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother being a Protestant and his father a freethinker. When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid, one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, they lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a tailor and also, later, as a chemist's assistant. Fortunately for Herbert, there was nearby a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, and the works of Daniel Defoe. This was the beginning of Herbert George Wells's venture into literature.
Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, studying biology. He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society. At first approaching the subject through Plato's Republic, he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society which was advocating reformist views.
After teaching for some time, Wells found it necessary to supplement his knowledge relating to educational principles and methodology and entered college to become a teacher. It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology.
Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without a source of income. His aunt invited him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of accommodation. During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel. He would later go on to court her. To earn money he began writing short humorous articles for journals. His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book-length work, and he published his first novel, "The Time Machine", in 1895.
In 1891, Wells married his cousin Mary. The couple agreed to separate in 1894 when he fell in love with one of his students Jane. With his wife Jane's consent, Wells had affairs with a number of women. One of the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and sketches. One common location for these was the end-papers and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries and his current romantic interests. Some of his early novels, called "scientific romances", invented several themes now classic in science fiction. He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including Kipps and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period.
One of Wells's major contributions to the science fiction genre was his approach, which he referred to as his "new system of ideas". In his opinion, the author should always strive to make the story as credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader knew certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas as something that could really happen, referred to as "the plausible impossible" and "suspension of disbelief". While neither invisibility nor time travel was new in speculative fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the readers were not familiar with. He conceived the idea of using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle.
He claimed that a science fiction story should contain only a single extraordinary assumption. Being aware the notion of magic as something real had disappeared from society, he, therefore, used scientific ideas and theories as a substitute for magic to justify the impossible.
"As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention."
His biggest prophetic "hit" was in "The World Set Free" which described a nuclear weapon. Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives, but which "continue to explode" for days on end.
"Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. but they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands".
In 1932, the physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reaction Leó Szilárd read "The World Set Free", the same year Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron. He claimed that the book made a great impression on him.
Wells also wrote nonfiction. Wells's first nonfiction bestseller was "Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" (1901). When originally serialized in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders.
Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits. It has trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs. It describes moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom. It foresees the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union.
His bestselling work, "The Outline of History", began a new era of popularized world history. It was very popular among the general population and made Wells a rich man. Many other authors followed with "Outlines" of their own in other subjects. Wells followed his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, "A Short History of the World", a history book praised by Albert Einstein.
From quite early in his career, he sought a better way to organize society and wrote a number of Utopian novels. They usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realize a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war, or a world council of scientists taking over.
This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. He also portrayed the rise of fascist dictators. By 1906, Wells was 40 years old and his influence was wider than any other living English writer. Wells contemplated the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as "The Island of Doctor Moreau". Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, "When the Sleeper Wakes", which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. "The Island of Doctor Moreau" is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals eventually returns to England. Like Gulliver on his return, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilized beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.
In 1933, Wells predicted in "The Shape of Things to Come" that the world war he feared would begin in 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true with the outbreak of WWII. Prior to 1933, Wells's books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication. By 1933, he had attracted the attention of German officials because of his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and in 1933, Wells's books were burned by the Nazi youth and his works were banned from libraries and bookstores. Wells, as president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN's refusal to admit non-Aryan writers to its membership.
Wells's literary reputation declined as he spent his later years promoting causes that were rejected by most of his contemporaries as well as by younger authors whom he had previously influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as "too sane to understand the modern world".
In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organization of knowledge and education: "World Brain" including the essay "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia". Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles who performed a famous radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds". Wells admitted his surprise at the widespread panic that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his "more obscure" titles.
Wells died when he was 79.
Wells's contemporary political impact was limited, excluding his fiction's positivist stance on the leaps that could be made by physics towards world peace. As a junior minister, Churchill borrowed lines from Wells for one of his most famous early landmark speeches in 1906, and as Prime Minister the phrase "the gathering storm", used to describe the rise of Nazi Germany, written by Wells in "The War of the Worlds", which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians. Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably his most influential work, "The Rights of Man", laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death.
His efforts regarding the League of Nations became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent WWII, which itself occurred towards the very end of his life and only increased the pessimistic side of his nature.
Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in 2 different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of 5 Nobel Prizes.
The establishment of the Polish state can be traced back to 966AD, when Mieszko I converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented its longstanding political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Poland adopted Europe's first written national constitution in 1791. More than a century after the Partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Poland regained its independence in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles. In 1939, WWII started with the invasion of Poland by Germany, followed by the Soviet Union invading Poland. More than 6 million Polish citizens perished in the war. In 1947, the Polish People's Republic was established as a satellite state under Soviet influence. In the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1989, most notably through the emergence of the Solidarity movement, the sovereign state of Poland reestablished itself as a presidential democratic republic.
Curie studied at Warsaw's clandestine Floating University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. The Floating University was an underground educational enterprise that operated in Warsaw. The purpose of this and similar institutions was to provide Polish youth with an opportunity for an education within the framework of traditional Polish scholarship, when that collided with the ideology of the governing authorities. Such underground institutions were important in the national effort to resist Germanization under Prussian and Russification under Russian occupation. In the communist People's Republic of Poland, the Floating University also known as the Flying University provided educational opportunities outside government censorship and control of education.
Marie Curier shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity, a term that she coined techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and her discovery of 2 elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of tumors using radioactive isotopes. While a French citizen, she never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element that she discovered - polonium, which she isolated in 1898 - after her native country.
Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, in the Russian partition of Poland. On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes through patriotic involvements in Polish national uprisings aimed at restoring Poland's independence. This condemned the subsequent generation, including Marie, her elder sisters and her brother, to a difficult struggle to get ahead in life. Her father taught mathematics and physics, subjects that Marie was to pursue, and was also director of 2 Warsaw gymnasiums for boys. After Russian authorities eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish schools, he brought much of the laboratory equipment home, and instructed his children in its use.
Her father was eventually fired by his Russian supervisors for pro-Polish sentiments, and forced to take lower-paying posts; the family also lost money on a bad investment, and eventually chose to supplement their income by lodging boys in the house. Marie's mother operated a prestigious Warsaw boarding school for girls; she resigned from the position after Marie was born. Maria's father was an atheist; her mother a devout Catholic. Her mother died of tuberculosis in 1878, when Marie was 10 years old. Unable to enroll in a regular institution of higher education because she was a woman, she and her sister became involved with the clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution of higher learning that admitted women students.
Marie made an agreement with her sister, that she would give her financial assistance during her sister's medical studies in Paris, in exchange for similar assistance 2 years later. Marie took a position as governess: first as a home tutor in Warsaw; then for 2 years as a governess with a family who were relatives of her father. While working for the latter family, she fell in love with their son, a future eminent mathematician. His parents rejected the idea of his marrying the penniless relative. Marie's loss of the relationship was tragic for both.
At the beginning of 1890, when she was 23, Marie's sister - who a few months earlier had married a Polish physician and social and political activist - invited Marie to join them in Paris. Marie declined because she could not afford the university tuition; it would take her a year and a half longer to gather the necessary funds. She was helped by her father, who was able to secure a more lucrative position again. All that time she continued to educate herself, reading books and exchanging letters. She tutored, studied at the Flying University, and began her practical scientific training in a chemical laboratory run by her cousin who had been an assistant in Saint Petersburg to the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.
She left Poland for France. In Paris, she briefly found shelter with her sister and brother-in-law before renting an attic closer to the university, in the Latin Quarter, and proceeding with her studies of physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the University of Paris, where she enrolled. She subsisted on her meager resources, suffering from cold winters and occasionally fainting from hunger. She studied during the day and tutored evenings, barely earning her keep. In 1893, when she was 26, she was awarded a degree in physics and began work in an industrial laboratory. Meanwhile, she continued studying at the University of Paris, and with the aid of a fellowship she was able to earn a second degree the next year.
Marie had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of various steels. That same year Pierre Curie entered her life; it was their mutual interest in natural sciences that drew them together. Pierre was an instructor at the School of Physics and Chemistry. They were introduced by a Polish physicist who had learned that Marie was looking for a larger laboratory space, something that Pierre had access to. Though Pierre did not have a large laboratory, he was able to find some space for Marie where she was able to begin work.
Their mutual passion for science brought them increasingly closer, and they began to develop feelings for one another. Eventually Pierre proposed marriage, but at first Marie did not accept as she was still planning to go back to her native country. Pierre, however, declared that he was ready to move with her to Poland, even if it meant being reduced to teaching French. Meanwhile, for the 1894 summer break, Marie returned to Warsaw, where she visited her family. She was still laboring under the illusion that she would be able to work in her chosen field in Poland, but she was denied a place at Kraków University because she was a woman. A letter from Pierre convinced her to return to Paris to pursue a Ph.D.
At Marie's insistence, Pierre had written up his research on magnetism and received his own doctorate in 1895; he was also promoted to professor. A contemporary quip would call Marie, "Pierre's biggest discovery”. In 1895 they were married. Marie's dark blue outfit, worn instead of a bridal gown, would serve her for many years as a laboratory outfit. They shared 2 pastimes: long bicycle trips, and journeys abroad, which brought them even closer. In Pierre, Marie had found a new love, a partner, and a scientific collaborator on whom she could depend.
In 1895, Roentgen discovered the existence of X-rays, though the mechanism behind their production was not yet understood. In 1896, a year later, Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted rays that resembled X-rays in their penetrating power. He demonstrated that this radiation, unlike phosphorescence, did not depend on an external source of energy but seemed to arise spontaneously from uranium itself. Influenced by these 2 important discoveries, Marie decided to look into uranium rays as a possible field of research for a thesis.
She used an innovative technique to investigate samples. 15 years earlier, her husband and his brother had developed a version of the electrometer, a sensitive device for measuring electric charge. Using Pierre's electrometer, she discovered that uranium rays caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity. Using this technique, her first result was the finding that the activity of the uranium compounds depended only on the quantity of uranium present. She hypothesized that the radiation was not the outcome of some interaction of molecules but must come from the atom itself. This hypothesis was an important step in disproving the ancient assumption that atoms were indivisible.
In 1897, when she was 30, her daughter was born. To support her family, Curie began teaching. The Curies did not have a dedicated laboratory. Most of their research was carried out in a converted shed next to the School of Physics and Chemistry. The shed, formerly a medical school dissecting room, was poorly ventilated and not even waterproof. They were unaware of the deleterious effects of radiation exposure due to their continued unprotected work with radioactive substances. The School did not sponsor her research, but she received subsidies from metallurgical and mining companies and from various organizations and governments.
Curie's systematic studies included 2 uranium minerals, pitchblende and torbernite also known as chalcolite. Her electrometer showed that pitchblende was 4 times as active as uranium itself, and chalcolite twice as active. She concluded that, if her earlier results relating the quantity of uranium to its activity were correct, then these 2 minerals must contain small quantities of another substance that was far more active than uranium. She began a systematic search for additional substances that emit radiation, and by 1898 she discovered that the element thorium was also radioactive. In 1898, the Curies weighed out a 100g sample of pitchblende and ground it with a pestle and mortar. They did not realize at the time that what they were searching for was present in such minute quantities that they would eventually have to process tons of the ore.
Pierre was increasingly intrigued by her work. By mid-1898 he was so invested in it that he decided to drop his work on crystals and to join her. In 1898, Curie and her husband published a joint paper announcing the existence of an element which they named "polonium", in honor of her native Poland, which would for another 20 years remain partitioned among 3 empires, Russian, Austrian, and Prussian. A half year later, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named "radium", from the Latin word for "ray". In the course of their research, they also coined the word "radioactivity".
To prove their discoveries beyond any doubt, the Curies sought to isolate polonium and radium in pure form. Pitchblende is a complex mineral; the chemical separation of its constituents was an arduous task. The discovery of polonium had been relatively easy; chemically it resembles the element bismuth, and polonium was the only bismuth-like substance in the ore. Radium, however, was more elusive; it is closely related chemically to barium, and pitchblende contains both elements. By 1898 the Curies had obtained traces of radium, but appreciable quantities, uncontaminated with barium, were still beyond reach. The Curies undertook the arduous task of separating out radium salt by differential crystallization. From a ton of pitchblende, one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride was separated in 1902.
Between 1898-1902, the Curies published, jointly or separately, a total of 32 scientific papers, including one that announced that, when exposed to radium, diseased, tumor-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells. In 1900, Curie became the first woman faculty member and her husband joined the faculty of the University of Paris. In 1902 she visited Poland on the occasion of her father's death.
In 1903, when she was 36, Curie was awarded her doctorate from the University of Paris. The couple were invited to the Royal Institution in London to give a speech on radioactivity. Being a woman, she was prevented from speaking, and Pierre alone was allowed to. Meanwhile, a new industry began developing, based on radium. The Curies did not patent their discovery and benefited little from this increasingly profitable business.
The same year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Becquerel. At first, the Committee intended to honor only Pierre and Becquerel, but one of the committee members and an advocate of woman scientists, a Swedish mathematician alerted Pierre to the situation, and after his complaint, Marie's name was added to the nomination. Marie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Curie and her husband declined to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person; they were too busy with their work, and Pierre, who disliked public ceremonies, was feeling increasingly ill. As Nobel laureates were required to deliver a lecture, the Curies finally undertook the trip in 1905. The award money allowed the Curies to hire their first laboratory assistant. Following the award of the Nobel Prize, and galvanized by an offer from the University of Geneva, which offered Pierre a position, the University of Paris gave Pierre a professorship and the chair of physics, although the Curies still did not have a proper laboratory. Upon Pierre's complaint, the University of Paris relented and agreed to furnish a new laboratory, but it would not be ready until 1906.
In 1904, Curie gave birth to their second daughter. She later hired Polish governesses to teach her daughters Polish and sent or took them on visits to Poland. In 1906, Pierre was killed in a road accident. Walking across a street in heavy rain, he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and fell under its wheels, causing his skull to fracture. Curie was devastated by her husband's death. The physics department of the University of Paris decided to retain the chair that had been created for Pierre and to offer it to Marie. She accepted it hoping to create a world-class laboratory as a tribute to Pierre. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
In 1910, Marie Curie isolated pure radium metal. It had a half-life of 1690 years. She never succeeded in isolating polonium, which was a lot more fleeting with a half-life of only 138 days. She also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions that was eventually named for her and Pierre: the “curie”. International recognition for her work had been growing to new heights, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, honored her a second time, with the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This award was "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." She was the first person to win or share 2 Nobel Prizes, and remains alone with Linus Pauling as Nobel laureates in 2 fields each.
A delegation of celebrated Polish men of learning encouraged her to return to Poland and continue her research in her native country. Curie's second Nobel Prize enabled her to persuade the French government into supporting the Radium Institute, built in 1914, where research was conducted in chemistry, physics, and medicine. A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression and a kidney ailment. For most of 1912 she avoided public life. She returned to her laboratory after a break of about 14 months.
During WWI, Curie saw a need for field radiological centers near the front lines to assist battlefield surgeons. After a quick study of radiology, anatomy, and automotive mechanics she procured X-ray equipment, vehicles, auxiliary generators, and developed mobile radiography units. She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and set up France's first military radiology center, operational by late 1914. Assisted at first by a military doctor and by her 17-year-old daughter, Curie directed the installation of 20 mobile radiological vehicles and another 200 radiological units at field hospitals in the first year of the war. Later, she began training other women as aides.
In 1915 Curie produced hollow needles containing 'radium emanation', a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as radon, to be used for sterilizing infected tissue. She provided the radium from her own one-gram supply. It is estimated that over a million wounded soldiers were treated with her X-ray units. Busy with this work, she carried out very little scientific research during that period. In spite of all her humanitarian contributions to the French war effort, Curie never received any formal recognition of it from the French government.
Curie visited Poland for the last time in early 1934. A few months later she died from her long-term exposure to radiation. The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were not known at the time of her work, which had been carried out without the safety measures later developed. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket, and she stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the faint light that the substances gave off in the dark. Curie was also exposed to X-rays from unshielded equipment while serving as a radiologist in field hospitals during the war. Although her many decades of exposure to radiation caused chronic illnesses including near blindness due to cataracts and ultimately her death, she never really acknowledged the health risks of radiation exposure.
Because of their levels of radioactive contamination, her papers from the 1890s are considered too dangerous to handle. Even her cookbook is highly radioactive. Her papers are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing. The result of the Curies' work was epoch-making. Radium's radioactivity was so great that it could not be ignored. It seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and therefore forced a reconsideration of the foundations of physics. On the experimental level the discovery of radium provided men like Ernest Rutherford with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the atom. As a result of Rutherford's experiments with alpha radiation, the nuclear atom was first postulated. In medicine, the radioactivity of radium appeared to offer a means by which cancer could be successfully attacked.
If Curie's work helped overturn established ideas in physics and chemistry, it has had an equally profound effect in the societal sphere. To attain her scientific achievements, she had to overcome barriers that were placed in her way because she was a woman, in both her native and her adoptive country. She was known for her honesty and moderate life style. Having received a small scholarship in 1893, she returned it in 1897 as soon as she began earning her keep. She gave much of her first Nobel Prize money to friends, family, students, and research associates.
Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process, so that the scientific community could do research unhindered. She insisted that monetary gifts and awards be given to the scientific institutions she was affiliated with rather than to her. She and her husband often refused awards and medals. Albert Einstein reportedly remarked that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian biologist and physician. He is noted for having distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups. He also discovered the polio virus in 1909. He is recognized as the father of transfusion medicine.
Karl Landsteiner was born in 1868 in Vienna, Austria to a journalist father. His father died when Karl was 6 years old. Karl Landsteiner was a bright student who was allowed to study medicine when he was merely 17 years old. He acquired a degree in medicine from the University of Vienna. Landsteiner envisioned that the future of medicine was in research, so he preferred to become a research scientist rather than an ordinary medical practitioner. He took up the study of medicine at the University of Vienna and wrote his doctoral thesis in 1891 when he was 23. While still a student he published an essay on the influence of diets on the composition of blood.
From 1891-1893, Landsteiner studied chemistry and concentrated on the mechanism of immunity and the nature of antibodies. Karl Landsteiner was the first biologist to identify different blood types and to sort out blood into groups. Before him, scientists thought that the blood of every person was the same. Blood transfusion was often considered dangerous. When it did not work, it was believed that the blood from the donor “clumped together” in the recipient’s body and resulted in his death. Landsteiner demonstrated that there are certain differences in the structure of human blood types.
In 1900 Karl Landsteiner discovered that the blood of 2 people under contact clumps together, and in 1901 he found that this effect was due to contact of blood with blood serum. As a result, he succeeded in identifying the 4 blood groups A, B, AB and O. Landsteiner also found out that blood transfusion between persons with the same blood group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells, whereas this occurred between persons of different blood groups. Based on his findings, the first successful blood transfusion was performed.
- A can receive blood from A or AB or O, but not from B.
- B can receive blood from B or AB or O but not from A.
- AB, referred to as universal recipients can receive blood from all other blood groups.
- O can receive blood only from O. It is referred to as universal donor because it can donate to all other groups.
These donor-recipient relationships arise due to the fact that type O blood possesses neither antigen of blood group A nor of blood group B. Therefore, the immune systems of persons with blood group A, B or AB do not refuse the donation. Further, because persons with blood group AB do not form antibodies against either the antigens of blood group A or B, they can accept blood from persons with these blood groups, and from persons with blood group O.
In 1930 Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in recognition of these achievements. After WWI, Vienna and the new republic of Austria as a whole was in a desolate economic state, a situation in which Landsteiner did not see any possibilities to carry on with his research work. He decided to move to the Netherlands and accepted a post as prosector, to prepare a body for dissection by students, or to dissect them as demonstrations. In order to improve his financial situation, he also took a job in a small factory, producing old tuberculin - an extract from tuberculosis bacteria used in skin testing to identify a tuberculosis infection. He also published a number of papers. Yet working conditions proved to be not much better than in post-war Vienna. So Landsteiner accepted the invitation that reached him from New York to work for the Rockefeller Institute. He arrived there with his family in 1923. Throughout the 1920s Landsteiner worked on the problems of immunity and allergy.
Landsteiner converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1890. In 1937 Landsteiner took legal action against an American publisher who had included him in the book “Who's Who in American Jewry”, claiming that in future, it will be detrimental to me to emphasize publicly the religion of my ancestors. Karl Landsteiner was a notoriously private person who disliked publicity and rarely gave interviews and speeches, although much in demand. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1929.
Landsteiner died of a heart attack while still performing his duties at his laboratory at the age of 75.
Orville Wright along with his older brother Wilbur was an American aviator, engineer, inventors, and aviation pioneer who invented, built and flew the world's first successful airplane. Along with his brother, they made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in 1903. The brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not the first to build and fly experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible.
The brothers' fundamental breakthrough was their invention of 3-axis control, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft effectively and to maintain its equilibrium. Previous attempts had only 2-axis control. The pitch for steering the plane up and down and the yawl for steering the plane left and right. The brothers added a third axis of control called the roll that made the plane stable in winds. This method became the standard on fixed-wing aircraft of all kinds. From the beginning of their aeronautical work, the Wright brothers focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control as the key to solving "the flying problem". This approach differed significantly from other experimenters of the time who put more emphasis on developing powerful engines. Using a small home-built wind tunnel, the Wrights also collected more accurate data than any before, enabling them to design and build wings and propellers that were more efficient than any before. Their first U.S. patent did not claim invention of a flying machine, but rather, the invention of a system of aerodynamic controls that manipulated a flying machine's surfaces by rudders and flaps.
They gained the mechanical skills essential for their success by working for years in their shop with printing presses, bicycles, motors, and other machinery. Their work with bicycles in particular influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle like a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. From 1900 until their first powered flights in late 1903, they conducted extensive glider tests that also developed their skills as pilots. Their bicycle shop employee became an important part of the team, building their first airplane engine. The brothers were excellent self-taught engineers who could run a small company, but they did not have the business skills or temperament to dominate the growing aviation industry.
Orville's father was of Dutch ancestry and his mother was of Swiss ancestry. They had 7 children. In elementary school, Orville was given to mischief and was once expelled. In 1878 his father, who traveled often as a bishop of a local church brought home a toy helicopter based on an invention of a French aeronautical pioneer. It was about a foot long made of paper, bamboo and cork with a rubber band to twirl its rotor. Orville and Wilbur played with it until it broke, and then built their own. In later years, they pointed to their experience with the toy as the spark of their interest in flying.
In 1886 Wilbur was struck in the face by a hockey stick while playing an ice-skating game with friends, resulting in the loss of his front teeth. He had been vigorous and athletic until then, and although his injuries did not appear especially severe, he became withdrawn. He had planned to attend Yale. Instead, he spent the next few years largely housebound. During this time he cared for his mother who was terminally ill with tuberculosis, read extensively in his father's library. Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business in 1889, having designed and built his own printing press with Wilbur's help. Wilbur joined the print shop, and the brothers launched a weekly newspaper. A year later, they converted the paper to a daily.
Capitalizing on the national bicycle craze spurred by the invention of the safety bicycle with both front and back wheel the same size and its substantial advantages over the penny-farthing design with a large front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel. In 1892 the brothers opened a bicycle repair and sales shop and in 1896 began manufacturing their own brand. They used this endeavor to fund their growing interest in flight. The brothers decided to practice gliding in order to master the art of control before attempting motor-driven flight.
They were convinced that a reliable method of pilot control was the key to successful and safe flight. At the outset of their experiments they regarded control as the unsolved third part of "the flying problem". They believed sufficiently promising knowledge of the other 2 issues, wings and engines, already existed. On the basis of observation, Wilbur concluded that birds changed the angle of the ends of their wings to make their bodies roll right or left. The brothers decided this would also be a good way for a flying machine to turn to "bank" or "lean" into the turn just like a bird and just like a person riding a bicycle, an experience with which they were thoroughly familiar. Equally important, they hoped this method would enable recovery when the wind tilted the machine to one side. They puzzled over how to achieve the same effect with man-made wings and eventually discovered wing-warping.
The brothers patented a system of Wing warping for lateral (roll) control of a fixed-wing aircraft. It consisted of a system of pulleys and cables to twist the trailing edges of the wings in opposite directions. Many birds use wing warping to achieve control. In practice, since most wing warping designs involved flexing of structural members, they were difficult to control and liable to cause structural failure. Ailerons had begun to replace wing warping as the most common means of achieving lateral control as early as 1911.
Other aeronautical investigators regarded flight as if it were not so different from surface locomotion, except the surface would be elevated. The idea of deliberately leaning, or rolling, to one side seemed undesirable. Some investigators sought the elusive ideal of "inherent stability", believing the pilot of a flying machine would not be able to react quickly enough to wind disturbances to use mechanical controls effectively. The Wright brothers, on the other hand, wanted the pilot to have absolute control. For that reason, their early designs made no concessions toward built-in stability such as the wings of the plane sloping upwards. They deliberately designed their 1903 first powered flyer with drooping wings, which are inherently unstable, but less susceptible to upset by gusty cross winds.
In 1899 Wilbur put wing warping to the test by building and flying a biplane kite with a 1.5m wingspan. When the wings were warped, or twisted, one end of the wings produced more lift and the other end less lift. The unequal lift made the wings tilt, or bank: the end with more lift rose, while the other end dropped, causing a turn in the direction of the lower end. The warping was controlled by 4 cords attached to the kite, which led to 2 sticks held by the kite flyer, who tilted them in opposite directions to twist the wings.
In 1900 the brothers went to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina which promised favorable weather, to begin their manned gliding experiments. The Wrights based the design of their kite and full-size gliders on work done in the 1890s by other aviation pioneers. They adopted the basic design of the biplane hang glider ("double-decker" as the Wrights called it), which flew well in the 1896 experiments and used aeronautical data on lift. The Wrights designed the wings with camber, a curvature of the top surface. The brothers did not discover this principle, but took advantage of it. The better lift of a cambered surface compared to a flat one was first discussed scientifically 100 years before.
Wilbur did all the gliding until 1902 to protect his younger brother Orville from harm. The brothers flew the glider for only a few days in 1900 at Kitty Hawk. In the first tests, Wilbur was aboard while the glider flew as a kite not far above the ground with men below holding tether ropes. Most of the kite tests were unpiloted, with sandbags or chains and even a local boy as ballast. They tested wing-warping using control ropes from the ground. The glider was also tested unmanned while suspended from a small homemade tower. Wilbur, but not Orville, made about a dozen free glides on only a single day. For those tests the brothers trekked 6 km to a group of sand dunes.
Although the glider's lift was less than expected, the brothers were encouraged because the craft's front elevator worked well and they had no accidents. However, the small number of free glides meant they were not able to give wing-warping a true test. Hoping to improve lift, they built the 1901 glider with a much larger wing area and made dozens of flights for distances of 15-122 meters. The glider stalled a few times, but the parachute effect of the forward elevator allowed Wilbur to make a safe flat landing, instead of a nose-dive. These incidents wedded the Wrights even more strongly to the canard design wherein a small fore-wing is placed forward of the main wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. The glider produced only about one-third the lift calculated. Wilbur remarked to Orville that man would not fly in a thousand years.
They built a 1.8m wind tunnel in their shop and conducted systematic tests on 200 miniature wings of many shapes and airfoil curves, followed by detailed tests on 38 of them. An important discovery was the benefit of longer narrower wings. Such shapes offered much better lift-to-drag ratio than the broader wings the brothers had tried so far. With this knowledge the Wrights designed their 1902 glider. Using another crucial discovery from the wind tunnel, they made the airfoil flatter, reducing the camber and reducing the upper curvature of the wing. With characteristic caution, the brothers first flew the 1902 glider as an unmanned kite, as they had done with their 2 previous versions. Rewarding their wind tunnel work, the glider produced the expected lift. It also had a new structural feature: a fixed, rear vertical rudder, which the brothers hoped would eliminate turning problems.
The improved wing design enabled consistently longer glides, and the rear rudder prevented adverse yaw so effectively that it introduced a new problem. Sometimes when the pilot attempted to level off from a turn, the glider failed to respond to corrective wing-warping and persisted into a tighter turn. The glider would slide toward the lower wing, which hit the ground, spinning the aircraft around. The Wrights called this "well digging". Orville apparently visualized that the fixed rudder resisted the effect of corrective wing-warping when attempting to level off from a turn. The brothers then decided to make the rear rudder movable to solve the problem. They hinged the rudder and connected it to the pilot's warping "cradle", so a single movement by the pilot simultaneously controlled wing-warping and rudder deflection.
Tests while gliding proved that the trailing edge of the rudder should be turned away from whichever end of the wings had more drag and lift due to warping. The opposing pressure produced by turning the rudder enabled corrective wing-warping to reliably restore level flight after a turn or a wind disturbance. Furthermore, when the glider banked into a turn, rudder pressure overcame the effect of differential drag and pointed the nose of the aircraft in the direction of the turn, eliminating adverse yaw. In short, the Wrights discovered the true purpose of the movable vertical rudder. Its role was not to change the direction of flight as a rudder does in sailing, but rather, to aim or align the aircraft correctly during banking turns and when leveling off from turns and wind disturbances. The actual turn, the change in direction, was done with roll control using wing-warping. The principles remained the same when ailerons superseded wing-warping.
With their new method the Wrights achieved true control in turns for the first time in 1902, a major milestone. They made between 700-1,000 glides, the longest lasting 26 seconds and covering 189.7m. Hundreds of well controlled glides after they made the rudder steerable convinced them they were ready to build a powered flying machine. Thus did 3-axis control evolve: wing-warping for roll (lateral motion), forward elevator for pitch (up and down) and rear rudder for yaw (side to side). In 1903, the Wrights applied for their famous patent for a "Flying Machine", based on their successful 1902 glider. Applying the system of 3-axis flight control on the 1902 glider was more significant than the addition of power to the 1903 Flyer.
The brothers used spruce as their preferred material for construction. It was a strong and lightweight wood. They used muslin a cotton fabric of plain weave for surface coverings. They also designed and carved their own wooden propellers, and had a purpose-built gasoline engine fabricated in their bicycle shop. They thought propeller design would be a simple matter and intended to adapt data from shipbuilding. However, their library research disclosed no established formulae for either marine or air propellers, and they found themselves with no sure starting point. They discussed and argued the question, sometimes heatedly, until they concluded that an aeronautical propeller is essentially a wing rotating in the vertical plane. On that basis, they used data from more wind tunnel tests to design their propellers. The finished blades were just over eight feet long, made of three laminations of glued spruce. The Wrights decided on twin "pusher" propellers with the propeller mounted behind their respective engines and counter-rotating to cancel torque.
The Wrights wrote to several engine manufacturers, but none met their need for a sufficiently lightweight powerplant. They turned to their shop mechanic who built an engine in just 6 weeks in close consultation with the brothers. To keep the weight low enough, the engine block was cast from aluminum, a rare practice for the time. The engine had a primitive version of a carburetor to blend fuel with air and had no fuel pump. Gasoline was gravity-fed from the fuel tank mounted on a wing strut into a chamber next to the cylinders where it was mixed with air. The fuel-air mixture was then ignited and vaporized by heat from the crankcase, forcing it into the cylinders. The propeller drive chains, resembling those of bicycles, were supplied by a manufacturer of heavy-duty automobile chains.
Their first powered test flight happened on the 121st anniversary of the first test flight that the Montgolfier brothers had done, in 1782.
The Montgolfier brothers were paper manufacturers from France best known as inventors of the hot air balloon. The brothers invented a process to manufacture transparent paper. The brothers constructed a globe-shaped 10m diameter balloon that weighed 225kg. It was made of sackcloth also called burlap, a plain woven fabric made from the skin of the jute plant. It had 3 thin layers of paper inside. A reinforcing fish net of cord covered the outside of the envelope. In collaboration with the wallpaper manufacturer, the brothers constructed a 12m diameter balloon made of taffeta, a plain woven fabric made from silk. They coated it with a varnish of alum, an aluminum sulfate salt for fireproofing. The balloon was sky blue and decorated with golden flourishes, signs of the zodiac, and suns. There was some concern about the effects of flight into the upper atmosphere on living creatures. The inventors send a sheep, a duck, and a rooster aloft first.
The Wrights sent a telegram about the flights to their father, requesting that he "inform press." However, the Dayton Journal refused to publish the story, saying the flights were too short to be important. The flights did not create public excitement and the news soon faded. After their poor showing local newspapers virtually ignored them for the next year and a half.
The Wrights were glad to be free from the distraction of reporters. The absence of newsmen also reduced the chance of competitors learning their methods. The Wrights made a decision to begin withdrawing from the bicycle business so they could concentrate on creating and marketing a practical airplane. This was financially risky, since they were neither wealthy nor government-funded. Their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney not to reveal details of their machine.
The first flights in 1904 revealed problems with longitudinal stability, solved by adding ballast and lengthening the supports for the elevator. They suffered many hard landings, often damaging the aircraft and causing minor injuries. Making an unassisted takeoff, Wilbur finally exceeded their best effort with a flight of 400m. Then they decided to use a weight-powered catapult to make takeoffs easier.
In 1904, Wilbur flew the first complete circle in history by a manned heavier-than-air powered machine, covering 1,244m in about 90 seconds. The Wrights scrapped the battered and much-repaired aircraft, but saved the engine, and in 1905 built a new airplane, the Flyer III. After Orville suffered a bone-jarring and potentially fatal crash, they rebuilt the Flyer with the forward elevator and rear rudder both enlarged and placed several feet farther away from the wings. They also installed a separate control for the rear rudder instead of linking it to the wing-warping "cradle" as before. Each of the 3-axes,pitch, roll and yaw, now had its own independent control. These modifications greatly improved stability and control, enabling a series of 6 dramatic "long flights" of nearly 40 minutes covering 40 km. The long flights convinced the Wrights they had achieved their goal of creating a flying machine of "practical utility" which they could offer to sell.
A report to Scientific American magazine was turned down. As a result, the news was not widely known outside Ohio, and was often met with skepticism. The local reporters somehow missed one of the most important stories in history as it was happening near their doorstep. A few newspapers published articles about the long flights, but no reporters or photographers had been there. The lack of splashy eyewitness press coverage was a major reason for disbelief.
The Wright brothers were certainly complicit in the lack of attention they received. Fearful of competitors stealing their ideas, and still without a patent, they refused to fly anywhere unless they had a firm contract to sell their aircraft. They wrote to the U.S. government, then to Britain, France and Germany with an offer to sell a flying machine, but were rebuffed because they insisted on a signed contract before giving a demonstration. They were unwilling even to show their photographs of the airborne Flyer. The American military, having recently funded a plane to be built by the nation's foremost scientist—only to see it plunge twice into the Potomac River "like a handful of mortar", was particularly unreceptive to the claims of 2 unknown bicycle makers from Ohio. Thus, doubted and scorned, the Wright brothers continued their work in semi-obscurity, while other aviation pioneers entered the limelight.
In 1906 skeptics in the European aviation community had converted the press to an anti-Wright brothers stance. European newspapers, especially those in France, were openly derisive, calling them bluffers and stating in 1906 that "the French would make the first public demonstration of powered flight". The Wright brothers made no flights at all in 1906 and 1907. They spent the time attempting to persuade the U.S. and European governments that they had invented a successful flying machine and were prepared to negotiate a contract to sell such machines. They also experimented with a pontoon and engine setup in hopes of flying from the water. These experiments proved unsuccessful.
Replying to the Wrights' letters, the U.S. military expressed virtually no interest in their claims. The brothers turned their attention to Europe, especially France, where enthusiasm for aviation ran high, and journeyed there for the first time in 1907 for face-to-face talks with government officials and businessmen. They also met with aviation representatives in Germany and Britain. Their contracts required them to fly with a passenger, so they modified the 1905 Flyer by installing two seats and adding upright control levers. After flying solo 7 minutes, Wilbur suffered his worst crash when—still not well-acquainted with the 2 new control levers—he apparently moved one the wrong way and slammed the Flyer into the sand at 80 km/h. He emerged with only bruises and a cut nose, but the accident destroyed the plane.
The brothers' contracts with the U.S. Army and a French syndicate depended on successful public flight demonstrations that met certain conditions. The brothers had to divide their efforts. Wilbur sailed for Europe and Orville stayed to fly near Washington, D.C. Facing much skepticism in the French aeronautical community and outright scorn by some newspapers, Wilbur began official public demonstrations in 1908. His first flight lasted only one minute 45 seconds, but his ability to effortlessly make banking turns and fly a circle amazed and stunned onlookers, including several pioneer French aviators. Wilbur made a series of technically challenging flights, including figure-eights, demonstrating his skills as a pilot and the capability of his flying machine, which far surpassed those of all other pioneering aircraft and pilots of the day. The French public was thrilled by Wilbur's feats and flocked to the field by the thousands, and the Wright brothers instantly became world-famous. Former doubters issued apologies and effusive praise.
Orville followed his brother's success by demonstrating another nearly identical Flyer to the United States Army by making the first hour-long flight. On a subsequent flight, an Army lieutenant rode along as his passenger, serving as an official observer. A few minutes into the flight at an altitude of about 30m, a propeller split and shattered, sending the Flyer out of control. The lieutenant died and Orville was badly injured. Deeply shocked and upset by the accident, Wilbur determined to make even more impressive flight demonstrations setting new records for altitude and duration. For a time Wilbur became world famous sought after by royalty, the rich, reporters and the public. The kings of Great Britain, Spain and Italy came to see Wilbur fly.
Wilbur made many more public flights, giving rides to a procession of officers, journalists and statesmen. He trained 2 French pilots, then transferred the airplane to the French company. The Wrights went to Italy where Wilbur assembled another Flyer, giving demonstrations and training more pilots. An Italian cameraman climbed aboard and filmed the first motion picture from an airplane. After their return to the U.S., the brothers were invited to the White House where President Taft bestowed awards upon them. Dayton followed up with a lavish 2-day homecoming celebration. In 1909, the brothers completed the proving flights for the U.S. Army, meeting the requirements of a 2-seater able to fly with a passenger for an hour at an average of speed of 65km/h and land undamaged. Wilbur flew circling the Statue of Liberty and making a 33-minute flight up and down the Hudson River alongside Manhattan in view of up to one million New Yorkers. These flights solidly established the fame of the Wright brothers in America.
In 1910, back at Huffman Prairie, Orville piloted 2 unique flights. First, he took off on a 6-minute flight with Wilbur as his passenger, the only time the Wright brothers ever flew together. They received permission from their father to make the flight. They had always promised they would never fly together to avoid the chance of a double tragedy and to ensure one brother would remain to continue their experiments. The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue concerning their patent stifled their work on new designs, and by 1911 Wright airplanes were considered inferior to those of European makers. Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the U.S. entered WWI no acceptable American-designed airplanes were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines. The lawsuits damaged the public image of the Wright brothers, who were generally regarded before this as heroes. Critics said the brothers were greedy and unfair and compared their actions unfavorably to European inventors, who worked more openly. Supporters said the brothers were protecting their interests and were justified in expecting fair compensation for the years of work leading to their successful invention.
In mid-1910, the Wrights changed the design of the Wright Flyer, moving the horizontal elevator from the front to the back and adding wheels although keeping the skids as part of the undercarriage unit. It had become apparent by then that a rear elevator would make an airplane easier to control, especially as higher speeds grew more common. There were not many customers for airplanes, so in the spring of 1910 the Wrights hired and trained a team of salaried exhibition pilots to show off their machines and win prize money for the company. The Wright Company transported the first known commercial air cargo in 1910 by flying 2 bolts of dress silk 100km in an hour with the cargo strapped in the passenger's seat. The silk was cut into small pieces and sold as souvenirs.
Between 1910-1916 the Wright Brothers Flying School trained 115 pilots who were instructed by Orville and his assistants. In 1913 a series of fatal crashes of Wright airplanes bought by the U.S. Army called into question their safety and design. The death toll reached 11, half of them in the Wright model C. All 6 model C Army airplanes crashed. They had a tendency to nose dive, but Orville insisted that stalls were caused by pilot error. He cooperated with the Army to equip the airplanes with a rudimentary flight indicator to help the pilot avoid climbing too steeply. A government investigation said the Wright C was "dynamically unsuited for flying", and the American military ended its use of airplanes with "pusher" type propellers in which the engine was located behind the pilot and likely to crush him in a crash.
Neither brother married. Wilbur once quipped that he did not have time for both a wife and an airplane. Following a brief training flight he gave to a German pilot in Berlin in 1911, Wilbur never flew again. He gradually became occupied with business matters for the Wright Company and dealing with different lawsuits. Upon dealing with the patent lawsuits, which had put great strain on both brothers,
Wilbur spent the next year before his death traveling, where he spent a full 6 months in Europe attending to various business and legal matters. Wilbur urged American cities to emulate the European - particularly Parisian - philosophy of apportioning generous public space near every important public building. He was also constantly back and forth between New York, Washington and Dayton. All of the stresses were taking a toll on Wilbur physically. Orville would remark that he would "come home white". He became ill on a business trip and died of typhoid fever at age 45.
Orville succeeded to the presidency of the Wright Company upon Wilbur's death. Sharing Wilbur's distaste for business but not his brother's executive skills, Orville sold the company in 1915. Orville made his last flight as a pilot in 1918 when he was 47 years old. He retired from business and became an elder statesman of aviation, serving on various official boards and committees. Orville expressed sadness in an interview years later about the death and destruction brought about by the bombers of WWII.
"We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the earth. But we were wrong ... No, I don't have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I do the destruction it has caused. I feel about the airplane much the same as I do in regard to fire. That is, I regret all the terrible damage caused by fire, but I think it is good for the human race that someone discovered how to start fires and that we have learned how to put fire to thousands of important uses."
Orville died at age 77, 35 years after his brother, following his second heart attack, having lived from the horse-and-buggy age to the dawn of supersonic flight.
Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Many consider him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday born 80 years before Rutherford was born. In early work, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive half-life - the time required for a quantity of material to be reduced to half its initial value. He proved that radioactivity involved the nuclear transmutation of one chemical element to another. This work was done at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. In 1908, when he was 37, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances. 3 years later, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus. 6 years after that, he conducted research that led to the first "splitting" of the atom in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered the proton.
Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand. His mother was a school teacher and his father was a farmer. They immigrated to New Zealand from Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing 2 years of research during which he invented a new form of radio receiver, he traveled to England for postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge. He was among the first of the 'aliens' - those without a Cambridge degree allowed to do research at the university, under the inspiring leadership of J. J. Thomson, and the newcomers aroused jealousies from the more conservative members of the Cavendish fraternity. With Thomson's encouragement, he managed to detect radio waves 800m away and briefly held the world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected, though when he presented his results at the British Association meeting in 1896, he discovered he had been outdone by another lecturer, by the name of Marconi.
During WWI, he worked on a top secret project to solve the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897. Hearing of Becquerel's experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, discovering 2 types that differed from X-rays in their penetrating power. Continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and ray in 1899 to describe the 2 distinct types of radiation.
- In alpha decay, an atomic nucleus emits an alpha particle, equivalent to a helium nucleus which consists of 2 protons and 2 neutrons.
- In beta decay, an atomic nucleus emits a beta particle, a high-energy high-speed electron when a neutron decays in the atomic nucleus.
Rutherford then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances. He found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its "half-life" 11.5 minutes in this case.
In 1902, he produced a "Theory of Atomic Disintegration" to account for all the experiments. Up till then atoms were assumed to be the indestructible basis of all matter and although Curie had suggested that radioactivity was an atomic phenomenon, the idea of the atoms of radioactive substances breaking up was a radically new idea. Rutherford demonstrated that radioactivity involved the spontaneous disintegration of atoms into other types of atoms, one element spontaneously being changed to another.
In 1903, when he was 32, Rutherford considered a type of radiation discovered in 1900, as an emission from radium, and realized that this observation must represent something different from his own alpha and beta rays, due to its very much greater penetrating power. Rutherford therefore gave this third type of radiation the name of gamma ray. Gamma rays are penetrating electromagnetic radiation of a kind arising from the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei and consists of high-energy photons.
6 years later, he demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil. It was Rutherford's interpretation of this data that led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911 - that a very small charged nucleus, containing much of the atom's mass, was orbited by low-mass electrons.
10 years after that, he became the first person to deliberately transmute one element into another. In this experiment, he had discovered peculiar radiations when alphas were projected into air, and narrowed the effect down to the nitrogen, not the oxygen in the air. Using pure nitrogen, Rutherford used alpha radiation to convert nitrogen into oxygen through the nuclear reaction 14N + α → 17O + proton.
The proton was not then known. In the products of this reaction Rutherford simply identified hydrogen nuclei, by their similarity to the particle radiation from earlier experiments in which he had bombarded hydrogen gas with alpha particles to knock hydrogen nuclei out of hydrogen atoms. This result showed Rutherford that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen nuclei and by inference, probably other nuclei as well. Such a construction had been suspected for many years on the basis of atomic weights which were whole numbers of that of hydrogen. Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei.
Because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter. Thus, Rutherford postulated the hydrogen nucleus to be a new particle in 1920, which he dubbed the proton.
In 1921, when he was 50, while working with Niels Bohr who postulated that electrons moved in specific orbits, Rutherford theorized about the existence of neutrons, which could somehow compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons by causing an attractive nuclear force and thus keep the nuclei from flying apart from the repulsion between protons. The only alternative to neutrons was the existence of "nuclear electrons" which would counteract some of the proton charges in the nucleus, since by then it was known that nuclei had about twice the mass that could be accounted for if they were simply assembled from hydrogen nuclei each containing only one proton. But how these nuclear electrons could be trapped in the nucleus, was a mystery.
11 years later, in 1932, Rutherford's theory of neutrons was proved by his associate James Chadwick, who recognized neutrons immediately when they were produced by other scientists and later, by himself when he bombarded beryllium with alpha particles. In 1935, Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. Rutherford's research, and work done under him as laboratory director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the essential nature of radioactive decay as a nuclear process. Rutherford's team, using natural alpha particles, demonstrated induced nuclear transmutation, and later, using protons from an accelerator, demonstrated artificially-induced nuclear reactions and transmutation. Because of this, Rutherford has become to be known as the father of nuclear physics.
Rutherford died too early to see Leó Szilárd's idea of controlled nuclear chain reactions come into being. However, a speech of Rutherford's about his artificially-induced transmutation in lithium, printed in 1933, was reported by Szilárd to have been his inspiration for thinking of the possibility of a controlled energy-producing nuclear chain reaction. Rutherford's speech touched on the 1932 work of his students in "splitting" lithium into alpha particles by bombardment with protons from a particle accelerator they had constructed. Rutherford realized that the energy released from the split lithium atoms was enormous, but he also assumed that the energy needed for the accelerator, and its essential inefficiency in splitting atoms in this fashion, made the project an impossibility as a practical source of energy.
Rutherford's speech in part, read:
“We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine. But the subject was scientifically interesting because it gave insight into the atoms”.
He died from a hernia when he was 66 years old and was honored by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey.
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate. He wrote “Principia Mathematica”, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, the theory of knowledge and metaphysics.
Russell mostly was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly is gone, and welcomed with enthusiasm world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during WWI. Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticized Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950 Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell was born in England into one of the most prominent influential and liberal aristocratic families in the United Kingdom. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist.
His paternal grandfather, the Earl Russell, had been asked twice by Queen Victoria to form a government, serving her as Prime Minister in the 1840s and 1860s. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty. They established themselves as one of the leading British Whig families, who were liberal Protestants and participated in every great political event from the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536-40 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688-89 and the Great Reform Act in 1832.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of the heiress to the throne, Mary with the Dutch Prince of Orange, William. William`s successful invasion of England with a fleet and army led to his ascension of the English throne as William III of England jointly with his wife Mary II of England, James's daughter. James's overthrow began modern English parliamentary democracy. The Bill of Rights 1689 has become one of the most important documents in the political history of Britain and never since has the monarch held absolute power. The Great Reform Act of 1832 reformed electoral laws to make them more democratic.
By the time Bertrand was 4 years old he was placed in the care of his staunchly Victorian paternal grandparents. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died 2 years later and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell, was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.
The countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family, and successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas. She accepted Darwinism and supported Irish Home Rule. Her influence on Bertrand Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life. Her favorite Bible verse, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” became his motto. The atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression, and formality. Bertrand learned to hide his feelings.
Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. His keenest interests were in religion and mathematics, and that only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was 11 years old he was introduced to the work of Euclid, the Greek mathematician who was born 323BC and became to be regarded as the "father of geometry". During these formative years he spent his spare time reading. Russell claimed that beginning at age 15 he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found very unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and that there is no life after death.
Russell won a scholarship to Trinity College in Cambridge, and commenced his studies. He quickly distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating 5 years later. He met an American Quaker girl when he was 17 years old. He became a friend of her family. They knew him primarily as “Lord John's grandson” and enjoyed showing him off and he traveled with them to the continent. It was with them that he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and was able to climb the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed. Finally, at the age of 18, he became an atheist.
He soon fell in love with their puritanical daughter and contrary to his grandmother's wishes, married her in 1894. He was 22 years old. Their marriage began to fall apart 7 years later when it occurred to him while he was cycling, that he no longer loved her. She asked him if he loved her and he replied that he did not. Russell also disliked his mother-in-law, finding her controlling and cruel. It was to be a hollow shell of a marriage and they finally divorced in 1921, when he was already 39, after a lengthy period of separation lasting over 20 years.
During this period, Russell had passionate and often simultaneous affairs with a number of women.
Russell began his published work in 1896 with “German Social Democracy”, a study in politics that was an early indication of a lifelong interest in political and social theory. He started an intensive study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1898 he wrote “An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry” which discussed non-Euclidean geometry where surfaces were curved.
At the age of 29, Russell underwent what he called a sort of mystic illumination, after witnessing a friend's wife suffering unbearably. He found himself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty... and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. The experience only lasted a few minutes, but at the end, he had become a completely different person.
2 years later, he published “The Principles of Mathematics”, a work on foundations of mathematics that advanced a thesis of logic - that mathematics and logic are one and the same. The 3-volume “Principia Mathematica” along with the earlier “The Principles of Mathematics” made Russell at age 40 world-famous in his field.
During the WWI, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916 he was dismissed from Trinity College because of his activities. The Trinity incident resulted in Russell being fined which he refused to pay in hopes that he would be sent to prison. His books were sold at auction. He later treasured his copy of his King James Bible that was stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police".
A later conviction for publicly lecturing against inviting the US to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side resulted in 6 months' imprisonment in 1918. While in prison, Russell read enormously and wrote the book “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” and began the work for "Analysis of Mind". He found prison in many ways quite agreeable as he had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, and no interruptions to his work. Russell was reinstated in 1919, resigned in 1920 and became a professor again in 1944-1949. In 1920, Russell traveled to Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He wrote a 4-part series of articles, titled "Soviet Russia - 1920". He met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him. He found Lenin disappointing, sensing an impish cruelty in him and comparing him to an opinionated professor. He wrote a book “The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from the UK, all of whom came home thinking well of the régime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds.
Russell's lover Dora, a British author, feminist and socialist campaigner, visited Russia independently at the same time. In contrast to his reaction, she was enthusiastic about the revolution. Russell, accompanied by Dora, visited Peking to lecture on philosophy for a year. He went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path. Dora was 6 months pregnant when the couple returned to England in 1921. Russell arranged a hasty divorce from his first wife to marry Dora 6 days after the divorce was finalized. Russell supported his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics, and education to the layman. Russell's marriage to Dora grew increasingly tenuous, and it reached a breaking point over her having 2 children with an American journalist. They separated in 1932 and finally divorced. In 1936, at age 64, Russell married his third wife Patricia, who had been his children's governess.
Russell opposed rearmament against the rising threat of Nazi Germany, but in 1940 he changed his view. He concluded that Adolf Hitler taking over all of Europe would be a permanent threat to democracy. In 1943, he adopted a stance toward large-scale warfare accepting that even though war was always a great evil, in some particularly extreme circumstances, it was the lesser of 2 evils.
Russell participated in many broadcasts over the BBC on various topical and philosophical subjects. By this time Russell was world-famous outside academic circles, frequently the subject or author of magazine and newspaper articles, and was called upon to offer opinions on a wide variety of subjects, even mundane ones. En route to one of his lectures Russell was one of 24 survivors among a total of 43 passengers of an airplane crash in 1948. He said he owed his life to smoking since the people who drowned were in the non-smoking part of the plane. “A History of Western Philosophy” published in 1945 when he was 73, became a best-seller and provided Russell with a steady income for the remainder of his life.
Russell expressed support for Zionism and he came gradually to see that, in a dangerous and largely hostile world, it was essential to Jews to have some country which was theirs, some region where they were not suspected aliens, some state which embodied what was distinctive in their culture.
In a speech in 1948, Russell said that if the USSR's aggression continued, it would be morally justified to go to war to prevent the Russians from possessing an atomic bomb, because if the USSR had no bomb the West's victory would come more swiftly and with fewer casualties than if there were atom bombs on both sides.
In 1952 at age 80, Russell was divorced by Patricia, with whom he had been very unhappy and married his fourth wife Edith soon after the divorce. They had known each other since 1925. They remained together until his death.
In 1956, immediately before and during the Suez Crisis, Russell expressed his opposition to what he viewed as European imperialism in the Middle East. He viewed the crisis as another reminder of what he saw as a pressing need for a more effective mechanism for international governance, and to restrict national sovereignty to places such as the Suez Canal area where general interest is involved. The Suez Crisis was an invasion of Egypt in late 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. The aims were to regain Western control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian President Nasser from power. After the fighting had started, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations forced the 3 invaders to withdraw. The episode humiliated Great Britain and France and strengthened Nasser.
At the same time the Suez Crisis was taking place, the world was also captivated by the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent crushing of the revolt by intervening Soviet forces. Russell attracted criticism for speaking out fervently against the Suez war while ignoring Soviet repression in Hungary, to which he responded that he did not criticize the Soviets because there was no need to as most of the so-called Western World was fulminating. Although he feigned a lack of concern, at the time he was disgusted by the brutal Soviet response, and he expressed approval for a declaration of support for Hungarian scholars shortly after Soviet troops had already entered Budapest. In 1957 Russell wrote an article addressing US President Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Khrushchev, urging a summit to consider the conditions of co-existence. Khrushchev responded that peace could indeed be served by such a meeting.
Russell suggested that:
- all nuclear-weapons testing and constant flights by planes armed with nuclear weapons be halted immediately, and
- negotiations be opened for the destruction of all hydrogen bombs, with the number of conventional nuclear devices limited to ensure a balance of power.
He proposed that Germany be reunified and that a neutral zone be established in Central Europe, consisting at the minimum of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with each of these countries being free of foreign troops and influence, and prohibited from forming alliances with countries outside the zone.
In the Middle East, Russell suggested that the West avoid opposing Arab nationalism, and proposed the creation of a United Nations peacekeeping force to guard Israel's frontiers to ensure that Israel was protected from aggression and prevented from committing it.
He also suggested Western recognition of the People's Republic of China, and that it be admitted to the UN with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
In 1963 Russell became increasingly vocal in his disapproval of the Vietnam War, and felt that the US government's policies there were near-genocidal. In 1964 he was one of 11 world figures who issued an appeal to Israel and the Arab countries to accept an arms embargo and international supervision of nuclear plants and rocket weaponry. In 1965 he tore up his Labor Party card because he suspected Harold Wilson's Labor government was going to send troops to support the United States in Vietnam.
In 1962 Russell played a public role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In an exchange of telegrams with Soviet leader, Khrushchev assured him that the Soviet government would not be reckless. After JFK's assassination in 1963, Russell rallied support from other noteworthy and left-leaning compatriots to form a “Who Killed Kennedy Committee”. Russell spent the 1950s and 1960s engaged in political causes primarily related to nuclear disarmament and opposing the Vietnam War. The 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto was a document calling for nuclear disarmament and was signed by 11 of the most prominent nuclear physicists and intellectuals of the time.
In 1967, Russell worked with Jean-Paul Sartre and many other intellectual figures to form the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal to investigate the conduct of the United States in Vietnam. He wrote a great many letters to world leaders during this period.
In 1969 he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged torture and genocide by the United States in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The following month, he protested to Alexei Kosygin over the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union of Writers.
In 1970 Russell issued a statement condemning Israel's aggression in the Middle East, and in particular, Israeli bombing raids being carried out deep in Egyptian territory as part of the War of Attrition. He called for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War borders.
Shortly after, Russell died of influenza at his home at the age of 98.
Political and social activism occupied much of Russell's time for most of his life. Russell remained politically active almost to the end of his life, writing to and exhorting world leaders and lending his name to various causes. Russell argued for a scientific society, where war would be abolished, population growth would be limited, and prosperity would be shared. He suggested the establishment of a single supreme world government able to enforce peace, claiming that the only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation. Russell was an active supporter of the Homosexual Law Reform Society. In "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday" Russell wrote:
"I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them”.
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