Update time! This one's a tech update, and has some big hints about the society of the future in the TL. Added footnotes.
Science and Technology #2
Elemental Discoveries:
The nineteenth century was a time of great scientific advancement in the fields of chemistry. As such, during this era came the discovery of many new elements and ways to detect and organoize the list of elements. Using new methods to isolate and identify individual elements that had evolved with the Industrial Revolution, scientists in Europe were able to discover many new elements that gave further insight into the similarities between properties of certain elements and led to the first standard classification of all known elements.
The major elemental discoveries that occurred during this period were made largely by a few scientists using the new technique of spectral analysis. The main scientists to use this method were German chemist Robert Bunsen and English chemist William James Herschel[1] while Herschel was a doctoral student of Bunsen's at the University of Göttingen. Together, Herschel and Bunsen pioneered the method of examining the emission lines of compounds to determine their constituent elements, and thus discovered four new elements in the 1860s. They isolated the alkali metals bunsenium and herschelium[2] through their blue spectral lines in 1862. Thallium was discovered by Bunsen and Herschel in 1865. After the European Wars broke out in 1866, Herschel left Göttingen to continue his education in Great Britain. In 1867, Bunsen identified a fourth element which exhibited a dark blue spectral line. The element was named borussium[3] because of this dark blue color and the recent conquest of the city of Gottingen by Prussia.
Along with all the new elements being discovered, some scientists began noticing similar properties between certain groups of elements. Scientists such as Swedish chemist August Kekule started to try to come up with ways to categorize the known elements in a standard table that would easily display the similar elements and would provide an easy way to classify all the elements that had been discovered. Kekule published his version of what is now the periodic table of elements in 1870. It was organized by ordering the elements by their relative masses and putting elements with similar properties in the same column. With this method of organization, the discovered elements formed seven roughly neat columns and formed the basis for the table we use today.
The Viennese Scientific Exodus:
For much of the 19th century, the city of Vienna and the University of Vienna had been the pinnacle of scientific thought in the Austrian Empire and one of the major locations of scientific discovery and advancement in Europe at the time. However, the fall of the Habsburg dynasty after the European Wars and the rise of the Viennese Workers' State led to several important scientists leaving Austria to other countries in Europe.
Most of the brilliant minds who left Vienna in the 1870s went to Germany where they continued their work at the larger universities in Berlin, Göttingen, Munich, and Heidelberg. Geologist Ferdinand Zirkel went to the University of Berlin where he later would travel on topographical surveys of the African Great Lakes and ascend Mount Kilimandscharo. Botanist Rudolf Schrödinger[4] and physicist Johann Mendel continued their work at the University of Munich.
The Communication Revolution:
The most influential technological advancements in the 1870s and 1880s, however, were in the field of communication. The growth in use of the telephone in Italy and France during the 1860s inspired Nikola Tesla to work on communications technology. Tesla left for Rome in 1871 after only a year at the University of Vienna, and stayed in Italy for fifteen years before leaving for the United States. From 1888 to 1899, Tesla pioneered innovations in telephone communication and led Union Telegraph and Telephone, the United States' oldest telephone company. Tesla's chairing of UT&T helped to expand the lines owned by the company throughout the entire country from its original network in the Northeast of the country. By 1900, UT&T had become a communications giant within the United States.
Along with the telephone, the invention and innovations made related to the typewriter also led to the revolution in communication in the early 20th century. Much as the telephone allowed individuals to speak to each other over long distances, the typewriter allowed much easier and faster writing up and printing of documents. The typewriter standardized many of the grammatical conventions in the American language today, and gradually led to the informal adoption of American for most government and business transactions in the United States. Additionally, the typewriter allowed women to enter the workforce en masse for the first time as many women began their careers as typists transcribing dictated messages.
Around the turn of the century, several inventors combined the ideas behind the telephone and the typewriter to create machines that could receive messages from afar and immediately transcribe the message onto a sheet of paper. These became known as teletype machines, and were originally used primarily by news networks and stock exchanges to maintain updates of real time information from around the world. In the Great War, the militaries of the world adapted the teletype machine for general communication to relay tactical and strategic information from the front lines. After the Great War, companies took advantage of the communications infrastructure created during this time and began serving individual teletype machines that allowed two individuals to send typed messages instantly from one location to another.
[1] Grandson of William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus. In OTL William James Herschel did some pioneering work with fingerprinting.
[2] Bunsenium = caesium, herschelium = rubidium
[3] Borussium = indium
[4] Rudolf is the father of Erwin Schrödinger
