Victoria: A Nuclear Century

In the next post we will return to the nuclear part of the timeline. But before we go there, the following update will concern radio technology. For those wondering, it won't involve Tesla or other people known from my previous timelines. Enjoy.
 
The Invention of the Radio


As it is with any event in history, invention of a process is seldom the responsibility of only one singular person. Radio, as we know it, has been attributed to Mahlon Loomis, however his success was a collaboration effort of many brilliant minds. Still, he did play a key role.

The Early Days

Mahlon Loomis was born July 21, 1826, in Oppenheim New York, into the family of Professor Nathan Loomis and Waitie Loomis. He was the fourth of nine children. Not a lot of details are available about Mahlon Loomis’ early life. This is unfortunate because it is often interesting to see how a young inventive mind grows. We do, however, know that he was surrounded by educated minds, as his father was a founder of the AMERICAN EPHEMERIS and NATIONAL ALMANAC. In addition to this, his older brother George, was an inventor and holder of several patents himself.

In 1836, Mahlon’s family moved to Springvale, Virginia. In September of 1848, Mahlon went to Cleveland, Ohio to partake in the study of dentistry. In 1850, he returned to Springvale to continue his dental work. For several years Mahlon spent time as a traveling dentist. During this time he went to Earlville, New York, Cambridgeport Massachusetts and Philadelphia. During this practice in Massachusetts he received a patent for a mineral plate (Kaolin ) process for the making of artificial teeth. In November of 1856, Loomis and his bride of only a few months, Achsah Ashley, settled in Washington D.C. to set up a dentistry practice.

The Start Of The Electrical Days

About 1860, Mahlon Loomis became interested in electricity, and his first application of this was an experiment in the forced increase of growth in plants. This was achieved by buried metal plates connected to an electrical current furnished by batteries.

In this same time period Mahlon became interested in using the electrical charges obtainable from the upper atmosphere by means of kites carrying metal wires. At first he planned to use this natural source of electricity to replace batteries on a telegraph circuit. It is noted in many references that this was something that was actually achieved on a telegraph line that was at leas 644 km long.

Later on, from experiments in this area, Mahlon discovered that a kite sent aloft would affect the flow of current in another kite that was some distance away from the first kite. This set him on a path of developing it as a system of wireless telegraphy for practical long distance communications.

opschemadef.jpg

Schematic of Loomis Wireless Telegraph (Kite Prototype)

Eureka!

The year is 1868, and Mahlon Loomis demonstrates to a group of Congressmen and eminent scientists a wireless "communication" system. He established two stations on separate mountains 28 to 32 km apart. At each station was made up of a galvonometer, a kite, a grid of fine copper wire gauze, and 600' of copper wire to fly the kite with. The people conducting the experiment with Loomis had their watches set, and at predetermined intervals they grounded the wire which ran through the galvanometer to the transmitting kite, causing the other instrument on the opposite mountain to register.


Loomis noted that the galvanometer of the “receiving” kite deviated at each time the “transmitting” kite was put at the mass. The experiment was repeated several times, causing the needles on the galvanometers to deflect every time the circuit was completed. The commercial possibilities of this discovery were immediately apparent. However Loomis understood quickly that it was necessary to develop a “detector” more sensitive than the galvanometer if he wanted to make transmissions on long distance without increase the surface of his grid and the size of the kite.

Sometimes, there were problems with the communications system. It seemed that if one of the kites was at the wrong height, the system would not work. This led Loomis to believe that there were different areas in the atmosphere, and depending which area you were in, would control if the communication would work or not. He also speculated that it might have something to do with the ionizing cosmic/atmospheric particle that Michael Faraday had discovered with his cloud chamber.


Mahlon Seeks the Government’s Help

Senator Charles Sumner, encouraged by a previous government grant to Samuel F.B. Morse, introduced a bill into the Senate on January 13, 1869. The "Loomis Aerial Telegraph Bill" asked for an act of incorporation for the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company, and for the appropriation of $50,000 to help perfect Loomis’s discovery and make it practical.

Loomis had proposed a system where wireless telegraph messages could be sent across the Atlantic at 1/16 the cost of what it was using a Trans-Atlantic cable. In an address to Congress, Loomis explained his system worked by: "Causing electrical vibrations or waves to pass around the world, as upon the surface of some quiet lake one wave circlet follows another from the point of the disturbance to the remotest shores, so that from any other mountain top upon the globe another conductor, which shall pierce this plane and receive the impressed vibration, may be connected to an indicator which will mark the length and duration of the vibration; and indicate by any agreed system of notation, convertible into human language, the message of the operator at the point of the first disturbance."

The bill, although gaining the support of a few Congressmen, was thought to be a fraud by many others. It was shuttled from committee to committee with much delay.


Enter Joseph Henry


The bill might have died a quiet death of committee, if it were not for the entry of a new, powerful player. Joseph Henry was born in Albany, New York to Scottish immigrants Ann Alexander Henry and William Henry. His parents were poor, and Henry's father died while he was still young. For the rest of his childhood, Henry lived with his grandmother in Galway, New York. He attended a school which would later be named the "Joseph Henry Elementary School" in his honor.

After school, he worked at a general store, and at the age of thirteen became an apprentice watchmaker and silversmith. Joseph's first love was theater and he came close to becoming a professional actor. His interest in science was sparked at the age of sixteen by a book of lectures on scientific topics titled Popular Lectures on Experimental Philosophy. In 1819 he entered The Albany Academy, where he was given free tuition. Even with free tuition he was so poor that he had to support himself with teaching and private tutoring positions. He intended to go into medicine, but in 1824 he was appointed an assistant engineer for the survey of the State road being constructed between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. From then on, he was inspired to a career in either civil or mechanical engineering.

Henry excelled at his studies (so much so, that he would often help his teachers teach science) and in 1826 was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at The Albany Academy by Principal T. Romeyn Beck. Some of his most important research was conducted in this new position. His curiosity about terrestrial magnetism led him to experiment with magnetism in general. He also showed that, when making an electromagnet using just two electrodes attached to a battery, it is best to wind several coils of wire in parallel, but when using a set-up with multiple batteries, there should be only one single long coil. The latter made the wired telegraph feasible.

His many outstanding contributions to science were rewarded with the position of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science and later the presidency of the organization was the Smithsonian Institution. As a famous scientist and now director of the Institution, Henry received visits from other scientists and inventors who sought his advice. Among them was a Loomis hoping Henry could back him in Congress.

After hearing Loomis case, and attending a demonstration of his device, Henry remembered an earlier encounter he himself had with such a phenomenon. In 1842 Henry had discovered that he could magnetize needles in a basement with an electric spark from two floors above, mostly correctly ascribing it to electromagnetic wave propagation (in an electric ether). In another experiment, he magnetized a needle by utilizing a lightning flash 13 kilometer away.

Thus Henry was more than intrigued to see, that the “induction at a distant” effect as he had called it in the 1840s was apparently powerful enough to allow for the realization of wireless telegraphy. Getting Henry’s backing was a great relief to Loomis and had two positive effects. First, no politician was willing to ridicule Loomis as a charlatan, once Joseph Henry, held a extraordinary lecture on the topic and its importance in front of Congress. Only Days later a bill was signed into law by President Grant, incorporating the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company and was appropiated a sizable starting capital by the US government.

The second positive effect was that Henry, after immersing himself into the issue, encouraged Loomis to familiarize himself with the work of James Clerk Maxwell. The later had already hypnotized the concept of electromagnetic radiation waves in his “On physical lines of force” (1862) under the name of displacement currents. This new found knowledge led him to experiment less air strata and focus more on aerial (1) designs. For a prototypes station he erected steel masts on top of wooden towers that replaced the kites of the earlier experiments and showed that maintaining fairly reliable communications for periods of months was possible. Unlike popularly thought, Loomis didn’t get rich instantly. It took the entire decade to get figure out how to get his invention competitive and profitable. Especially looking the search for a good detection/amplification device caused Loomis some headache, as well as generating stronger signals. Once he managed to do so however, he had struck (non-teeth) gold.


Notes and Sources

(1) Antenna, a word coined in OTL by Marconi.

First experimental transmission of wireless telegraph signals
(http://www.carnetdevol.org/Wireless/loomis.html)

Albert H. Gluckman: Joseph Henry's 1842 and 1843 Out-of-Doors Electrical Transmission Signal Experiments.
Princeton University

http://www.madehow.com/inventorbios/75/Joseph-Henry.html

Edward A. Sharpe: Mahlon Loomis - First Wireless Telegrapher.
Archivist SMEC 1989

Wikipedia: Joseph Henry
 
But, sorry, it's space bat for several reasons.

Alot of that has to with technogical preconditions - half tech needs the other half to work.

The budget isn't remotely enough or broad enough. You'd need to have to have a global National Science Foundation and give it a 40% budget, and have a reason to invent it two centuries early.

Remember to aak next time before writing yourself page after page. You do at least understand that there's a world of inventors, and about money.
 
But, sorry, it's space bat for several reasons.

Alot of that has to with technogical preconditions - half tech needs the other half to work.

The budget isn't remotely enough or broad enough. You'd need to have to have a global National Science Foundation and give it a 40% budget, and have a reason to invent it two centuries early.

Remember to aak next time before writing yourself page after page. You do at least understand that there's a world of inventors, and about money.

I always welcome constructive criticism. Could you please elaborate were you see any missing technological links ? So, far I am sure that every technology presented in this timeline has all the preconditions neccesary present. But of course there can always be blind spots. If you found any I am very grateful if you could share your knowledge about them :).
 
Nuclear History: Step by Step


Last time we saw some important breakthroughs in the history of atomic science. However the focus this time will lie on the diversity of challenges Faraday and his contemporaries faced.

Uranium the Glowing Gold?

Once, the usefulness of Uranium became obvious, the two major supplier Saxony and Austria-Hungary immediately forbid any exports of the material. The reason was simple. The only known use at the time was as the source for medical treatments. Getting people to travel to their spas was infinitely more profitable than simply selling their resources so others could make money. There were obviously legal and illegal exceptions but overall the policy held strong. Legally, the only way to get uranium or much more difficult radium or arminium was trough diplomatic connections. Basically gifts exchanged to strengthen or establish relations between nations and their royal households. The illegal way to get stuff was by smuggling. Stealing uranium ore and transporting it was fairly easy. Now the real hot stuff, in both a figuratively as well as literal sense were refined radium and arminium. Especially the later was priced as a source of radon gas, for lung therapy.

The discovery of atomic seed transmutation only exhiberated the problem, as breeding new super mutant plants became a lucrative, business. It was most profitable as nobody else was able to create and sell seeds, thus the incentive for keeping ccc inside the borders. It didn’t help at all that these were also the golden years of mercantilism. Ccc
Thus everybody was looking for alternate sources of radioactive metal. There were two important success stories. The first was simply the discovery of other uranium rich mines in Europe. specially the premiere powers of England and France were keen on producing their own glowing gold. Even small quantities meant gaining the prestige to be players in the new scientific field. In case of France their main source of ccc was ccc.

However for the purpose of this story, we will look at England and a certain Duke of Devonshire. William Cavendish, an heir of the vast fortune of Cavendish and also a patron of science set out to build a native uranium industry. For this endeavor he founded the “British Nuclear Radiation Company” after graduating from Cambridge in 1829 as the second best of his class and as a winner of the Smith's Prize for mathematics. Well connected, rich and highly educated he was an ideal chairman for the new enterprise; ready to make Great Britain competitive. The only question was where to find the necessary raw material. The answer was Cornwall. In the early part of the nineteenth century uranium minerals were at least a little known to exist there. William Phillips wrote in 1815, that were known a few placed that yielded “the oxyd of uranium”, namely the Carharack and St.Day mines. The biggest find however was a vein of the South Terrance mine. No matter how meager the beginning, soon the first arminum/radium refinery could be build. It utilized the local metalworking knowledge to its full extend. Thus the local town of Porthtowan became a small but important scientific hub as well as a uranium water spa. Later people would find huge mother lodes in Africa Canada and Australia but his will be a topic for another chapter.

The second important discovery was that of Thorium. In 1828, Morten Thrane Esmark found a black mineral on Løvøya island, Norway, and gave a sample to his father, Jens Esmark, a noted mineralogist. The elder Esmark was not able to identify it and sent a sample to the Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius for examination. Berzelius determined that it contained a new element. He published his findings in 1829 and named the new element Thorium after the Norse god of thunder. Most importantly it had become tradition at his point in time to test new elements on their potential radioactivity. Thorium proved to be positive, and opened new mining opportunity. What made it really sought after was the discovery that Thorium happened to be a good source of Radon, being able to substitute for the hideously expensive radium in this regard.

Recording the Moving Atoms

One of the biggest challenges in Michael Faraday’s scientific career was to find a way to accurately capture the short lived trails of moving atoms. He could write down his observation obviously, draw what he saw. But this meant two things. First that people had to just to believe him, when he saw something extraordinary, that couldn’t be replicated easily by watching the glass container. While there were skeptics, his incredibly good reputation helped in this regard. But two problems were left. He himself didn’t trust his own memory to a fault, and he also couldn’t do any good measurements or mappings of the vapor trails.

The solution was deceptively, frustratingly simple, in theory at least. The very technology that helped discover the existence of radiation would also help explore it, photography. The big problem however was that for the longest time, there was no way to reliably “fix” a picture in a short enough time. In fact real progress was only made shortly before his death, end of his career. The beginning of high speed photography might be considered to be William Henry Fox Talbot's experiment in 1851. He attached a page of the London Times newspaper to a wheel, which was rotated in front of his wet plate camera in a darkened room. As the wheel rotated, Talbot exposed a few square inches of the newspaper page for about 1/2000th of a second, using spark illumination from Leyden jars. This experiment resulted in a readable image.

Considering the extremely low sensitivity of a wet plate, called "amphyitypes", which were glass plates coated with a mixture of albumen, silver nitrate, and water (approximate ASA less than 4), and the lenses that were available (probably about f/32), this photograph was a remarkable achievement. Some further work was done in 1856 by Foucault and in 1864 by Toepler, followed by Wood and others which resulted in the development of schlieren photography or studying wavefronts and other effects of variations in transparent media.

At Woolwich Arsenal near London, experiments were conducted in 1861 using shadowgraphs to study projectiles in flight. The projectile was launched between a camera and a 100 us light source. This technique was perfected many years later by Ernst Mach in Austria and Sir Charles Boys in England. Alfred A. Pollock suggested in 1867 that it would be possible to take a series of 50 instantaneous photographs on a circular rotating plate. He suggested that when a sensitive enough film is developed, pictures of such subjects as a man walking, a dog's tailwagging, and the movement of horses and other animals could be recorded. In fact in his last interview given a few months before his death he encouraged those following in his footsteps to fill entire libraries with photos of trails in order to finally unlock the universe secrets. Faraday died in November 1867.
 
Nuclear History: Magnets; How do they work?


Last time we saw some important practical obstacles Faraday and other nuclear researcher faced. This time we discover a problem that was not merely technical but also theoretical in nature. Faraday had a lifelong fascination with magnets. To visualize magnetic forces, he imagined space around a magnet filled with a huge bundle of lines each of which, like a drawn arrow, had a definite direction, giving at any point the local direction of magnetic force. That is, the direction in which the north-seeking pole ("N pole") of a freely suspended compass needle would point, and in which a free-floating magnetic N-pole would be pushed by magnetic forces. He named them magnetic lines of force, though nowadays "magnetic field lines" is the usual term. Following his 1831 electromagnetic work, Faraday turned his attention to electrochemistry parallel to his cloud chamber exploits. The decomposition of chemical compounds was a standard test for the presence of electricity.

In his extensive use of this test, he observed phenomena contradicting Davy's theory that electrochemical decomposition occurred at the metal pole. Faraday found that decomposition occurred in the substance itself and the poles did not need to be metal. All this led Faraday to develop a new language of electrochemistry. With a number of classical scholars, notably William Whewell, Faraday introduced terms such as electrolysis, electrolyte, electrode, anode, cathode, and ion (although he said there would be little need for this last term). Faraday was thus able to enunciate his two laws of electrolysis. His second law implied that both matter and electricity were atomic in nature.

The big question was for him now, how to reconcile the results of these experiments. Faraday, even as he was proofing Dalton seemingly right, he himself remained very skeptical of “matterialism”. He realized however that Dalton’s law of definite proportions, as well as the apparent particle nature of “atoms” in his cloud chamber, indicated some sort of atomic theory. In the end he accepted both interpretations in a way as he wrote in a paper published 1845: “I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.”

In order to arrive at this point, he wanted to show that magnetism would influence atoms and light. Thus he would be able to demonstrate that any kind of force could influence any other. A light experiment with a heavy lead glass allowed him to prove his hypothesis on light, also known as the Faraday Effect Experiment. The really important experiment for us was his trials to manipulate atomic particle with magnets. The big problem was that some rather high amounts of magnetic power were needed for such experiments. Permanent magnets pretty much out. Natural, or the primitive artificial magnets of his time were simply too weak. Today we would use rare earth magnets for his experiments but those were only invented in the mid 20th century.

Thus he had to use really powerful electromagnets. Since he was the inventor of the electromagnets that meant that he couldn’t rely on previous knowledge or research. Still, corresponding with the American Inventor and Scientist Joseph Henry, creator of the world’s strongest electromagnets at the time the two came up with some remarkable designs. It allowed him to discover the electric nature of atomic particle as well as convincing him that he had been right all along that everything was some sort of interchangeable force. How this experiment exactly looked like will be shown in the next part of the series.


Notes and Sources


William Phillips (1816): “On the Oxyd of Uranium the Production of Cornwall together with a Description and Series of its Crystalline Forms”
London , England

R.A.F Penrose Jr. (1915): The Pitchblende of Cornwall.
Society of Economic Geologist, Ic.

Lincoln L. Endelman (?): A brief history of high sped photography 1851-1930

Author ?: Faraday and his "Lines of Force"

Author ?: English Chemist and Physicist 1791–1867, Michael Faraday

J. Brookes Spanner: Boscovitch’s theory and its relation to faraday’s research: an analytical approach
 
This is a creative and fascinating timeline to read!

So it seems the scientific community is aware of elemental transmutation, but haven't managed to theorize the neutron? I suppose Faraday's work will let them guess at the structure of the atom pretty quickly, and after that they might notice the mass discrepancy. It shouldn't be too long before they could discover neutron activation, either.

Beyond the observation of nitrogen-14 + alpha = oxygen + hydrogen, have they tried significant artificial transmutation?
 
Man, this TL is AWESOME! You rarely see TLs focusing on scientific PODs, and even less focusing on technological development in general. This however is a BEAUTIFUL exception.

Keep up the good work!
 
Thanks everybody for the motivating comments. For now I plan to get the basic nuclear history done before expanding on the other developments. This does mean that I'll show some how the neutron is disovered and other atomic goodies. :)
 
[FONT=&quot]Nuclear History: Greek Alphabet Soup with an Eye on Magnets[/FONT]


There are few things Faraday got criticized about, but his greatest failure if you ask people in the academic community was his more or less accidental creation of the “Greek Alphabet Soup” scientifically also known as “Nuclear Science”. In hindsight his willingness to recognize anything causing a different track in the fog as a new particle might have been a bit overenthusiastic. It becomes however very understandable once, you realize how he must have felt, almost every day he was redefining the very fundaments of the world.

The Alphabet Soup

Before we venture into some new territory here are some of the things he learned in the very beginning of his experiments. First, there seemed to exist three main particles, corresponding to the three type of high, low, lower energy emissoned by radioactive sources. Those were accordingly named alpha, beta and gamma particle. There were also mysterious cosmic particle, that were not (exclusively) originating from our sun. Some of them showed different tracks, that seemed to fall sizewise right between alpha and beta particle. Those he named mu particle. This set the precedent to name any new particle by Greek letters. It was also known, thanks to the short halftime of material like arminium, or the recently divorced thorium that those autotransmutated, while releasing energy in form of radioactivity. Fraday was also the first human to actually, visually observe an artificially induced nuclear transmutation, caused by atoms splitting into their sub-atomic particle.

All of this would have sustained dozens of Nobel Prizes in our modern times, but the story didn’t end here. As mentioned earlier Faraday was one of the first people to study electromagnetism which strengthened his holistic worldview. The fact that Dalton’s indivisible atom was itself just another agglomeration of smaller energy rich particle only underlined this argument further, in his view.
Thus he believed that with a sufficiently strong magnet, he might be able to influence these particle, as well as light waves. After all his discovery of the Faraday Effect had shown a connection between light and magnetism in 1845. He was certain something similar was possible with, at least alpha, beta and mu particle. Less certain were gamma particle which had so far proven to be stubbornly inert until hitting they were hitting a literal wall.

There was also other experimental evidence linking radioactivity and electricity. The first experiments even predating Faraday’s work. After all it was the air ionizing ability, which had allowed for the gold leaf energy to detect and measure radioactivity. Admittedly this was rather indirect as the radiation only made the air more conductive to existing electricity. More interesting in that regard was one of Faraday’s contemporary’s experiments.

Gottlieb and Mohs’ Eye opening Atomic Battery

We remember, Friedrich Mohs was the man who first isolated radium. In 1836 he was nearing his retirement, but he wasn’t willing to leave his seat at the Freiberg Academy until he solved one last mystery. Were gamma particle actually particle or some type of light. Faraday’s recent experiments more or less settled the question for alpha and beta particle but not gamma particle. After all, this slippery little bugger left no trail. In order to investigate the question he came up with an ingenious experimental design. A year ago, the German chemist Justus von Liebig had demonstrated a manufacturing process that allowed the production of glass bottles coated with a silver mirror in their interior.

If, one would stick a radium probe (on top of a wire) into such a bottle, the mirror should reflect and concentrate and reflect the entire gamma light back onto the radium probe. The effects of this should then be hopefully measurable. Interestingly enough, seventy years later such a matter contraption, invented by Nikolai Tesla, would aid in the creation of the world’s first ruby laser.

Aside from the bigger scientific controversy regarding the nature of alpha/beta/gamma rays/particle there was a far more interesting, pretty much forgotten reason for Mhos confidence. I always talk about the importance of radioactive substances as a miracle drug in its early days. However there were good reasons for people to believe this to be true. One of the most spectacular and oddly forgotten discoveries was the fact, that blind people could see radium. The background story for this is fairly simple. As we know Dr. Johann Gottlieb Eckoldt was in charge of the brand new nuclear medicine in Saxony’s Jacobshospital. As such he had contact and access to anything important being discovered by researcher such as Friedrich Mohs.

Once a sufficient amount of radium had been extracted Eckoldt began to test its effects on patients. One of them was a blind man, who had come here in the vain hope that this miracle radiation might help his eyes recover. And for a short moment that seemed to be the case.
“Our Dr. J. G. Eckoldt has found that compounds of radium produce a perception of light in the eye even when a screen is interposed between the eye and the radium com pound.
The whole of the visual field appears full of light. The same sensation of light is felt if a glass tube .containing a few centigrammes of radium chloride be pressed against the temple. If the retina be healthy they experience sensation o£ light exactly comparable to, that felt by a "sighted" person. The Dr. Eckoldt reports the case of a person who was completely blind owing to opaqueness of the corneae, yet the light, emitted by radium was, distinctly soon.” Leipziger Zeitung

Fascinating as it was, it did not really help cure blindness obviously. The sheer fascination of “seeing” the light after a long time, however still led to a healthy stream of visually impaired (sufficiently wealthy tourist) seeking out this novelty. This trend was even more exhilarated after the famous traveler Holman, praised the hospital for its innovative and unique treatment methods in his successful travelogues.

So it is no surprise that Mohs saw gamma particle as gamma rays of light. After all they did stimulate the optical nerve, somehow. Unfortunately for Mohs, while he was right, gamma particle (gamma particle are actually a super intensive form of light) they are also too penetrating for his experiment to work. What he got instead was the world’s first atomic battery. The charged particles from the radium created a flow of electricity as they moved quickly from the radium to the inside surface of the sphere. This lead to some speculation that maybe the electricity stored inside radium, found its way into the optical nervous system, stimulating it, as an alternate explanation. Soon some other electoral eye therapy followed in its wake.

Magnets


Much more successful was Faraday. His experimental results were actually supporting, rather than contradicting his points. After corresponding with Joseph Henry, who was more or less responsible for the creation of an electric industry in the USA, Faraday felt very comfortable, when he switched on the power for his super electromagnet. The device was placed neatly under the Cloud Chamber and almost immediately showed some remarkable effect. Some of the alpha and beta sub atomic particle were crossing the magnetic field slightly curved in different directions. However the magnets Faraday had were as mentioned earlier, not up to the task for more precise research. For him thou, the crucial final piece in his holistic world puzzle was completed.

The only thing left now was to develop better magnets and a way of producing quick, mass photography. Than we shall as Faraday believed fill the world’s, salons, galleries, no entire libraries with pictures of the microcosm. Thus we would finally be able to marvel at God’s creation down into its finest, most intricate detail.



Notes and Sources

NASA: Gamma Rays

Wikipedia: Justus von Liebig, Atomic Battery

F.N. Flakus (): Detecting and measuring ionizing radiation - a short history

Australian Town and Country Journal (1902): Blind People See
Sydney,

Wayne Schmidt: Cloud Chambers, How to Make and Use an Diffusion Cloud Chamber.
 
Nuclear History: Science is Magic



“Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”
Michael Faraday

Over the last few chapters we discovered what a powerful tool Faraday's cloud chamber is. This time we will see how it helped to actively reshape our world itself. We will follow the path to Steinmetz’s Cavendish Pile.

As we already know Faraday discovered three basic elements making up atoms, alpha, beta and gamma particle. The latter are actually very powerful electromagnetic waves. This fact was however not yet known. The reason is the intensity of gamma rays. Unlike other types of radiation they couldn’t be reflected by the mirrors of the time. Nor could they be shown to polarize. Thus experiments and theory hinted at them being some type of neutral particle glue, keeping the charged alpha/electron particle form repelling or collapsing (into) each other.

Obviously there were other ideas floating around, but these basic ideas constituted the common scientific knowledge of the time.

Johann Gottfried Galle and Particle Astronomy

We also already talked about Faraday’s shielding/sun eclipse experiment. Here things get interesting. One of the earliest admirers of Faraday’s Cosmic radiation experiments was Johann Gottfried Galle. Galle was born in the Papsthaus (a house in the Pabst wood) 2 km west of Radis in the vicinity of the town of Gräfenhainichen, as the first son of Marie Henriette née Pannier (1790–1839) and Johann Gottfried Galle (1790–1853), an operator of a tar oven. He attended the Gymnasium in Wittenberg and studied at Friedrich Wilhelms University Berlin from 1830 to 1833 He became a teacher at the Gymnasium in Guben, teaching mathematics and physics. Later on, he transferred to the Gymnasium in Berlin. Then he had started to work as an assistant to Johann Franz Encke in 1835 immediately following the completion of the New Berlin Observatory. Galle worked there for the next 16 years. In 1838 he discovered an inner, dark ring of Saturn. From 2 December 1839 to 6 March 1840 he discovered three new comets.

But he was also deeply fascinating by Faraday’s cloud chamber as an alternative instrument for space observation. He carefully replicated the machine and soon made an important discovery. While trying to shield his apparatus against cosmic rays coming from above he found that placing a lead plate on the top of the cloud chamber actually increased the particle he could count at a given time. In order to understand these results better, Galle played around with a variety of other shielding materials. One that surprisingly outperformed lead was the fairly recently discovered paraffin. Paraffin was a byproduct of oil refining experiments conducted by Karl von Reichenberg. Mostly used as artificial candle wax it also found its way into Europe's laboratories for its electrical inertness. For whatever reasons, slowing some high energy particle seemed to make them more visible and hence more “willing” to interact with their environment.

In 1851 Galle moved to Breslau to become the director of the local observatory, and in 1856 he became Professor of Astronomy at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University Breslau. He worked there the rest of his life. In the academic year 1875/76 he was elected Rector. His research in Breslau mostly dealt with the exact determination of planetary orbits and developed methods for calculating the height of the aurorae and the path of Meteors. He also continued his studies on cosmic particles. His research was however limited by Saxony’s strict nuclear monopoly. It forbade the export of radioactive material und harsh penalty. The monopoly was only broken up after the German unification by Chancellor Bismarck’s decree.

Julius Ludwig Weisbach and Nuclear Material Transmutation

One last important thing that was known thanks to Faradays groundwork was how nuclear transmutation apparently happened. Somehow it was possible for certain elements to absorb free alpha particle. Once a bit more suitable radioactive material was available research began “bombarding” all kinds of material with alpha particle. The best but unfortunately very rare and expensive source for such nuclear particle was Arminium.

Other alternatives were either less radioactive (Thorium), didn’t emit alpha particle at all (Uranium) or were too valuable for medical/biological research (Radium).

Some interesting stuff however was found regardless of these obstacles. The first big problem was to indentify elements that could be transformed. The first tests were made with other gases available. Then the research followed to proceed from lighter to heavier material. Soon two new problems were encountered. The first was that only trace amount of new materials were actually transmuted. The second problem was that it seemed that only some rather expensive metals were transmutable.

The man behind most of these discoveries was Julius Ludwig Weisbach. He studied at the Bergakademie in Freiberg from 1822 - 1826. After that, he studied with Carl Friedrich Gauss in Gottingen and then under Friedrich Mohs in Vienna. In 1831 he returned to Freiberg where he worked as mathematics teacher at the local Gymnasium. In 1833 he became teacher for Mathematics and Atomic Chemistry. In 1836 he was promoted to a full Professorship. In 1868 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

His two biggest breakthroughs were the discovery of artificially induced radioactivity in transmuted elements as well as the discovery of the zeta particle. The latter will be actual point of interest.

Oskar Emil Meyer and the Real Neutral Particle

Oskar Emil Meyer graduated from the Albertus-Universität Königsberg in 1860 as Dr. phil. Then he became a private teacher at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Finally in 1866 he got a full professorship at the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University Breslau, the same place were Galle worked. While he was an accomplished man he was very much overshadowed by others people in his life. There was his brother the chemist Julius Lothar Meyer who is best known for his contribution in developing the first periodic table of chemical elements and of course his even more famous student Carl P. Steinmetz.


Charles Proteus Steinmetz and the Fight against the Odds

“Indeed, the most important part of engineering work—and also of other scientific work—is the determination of the method of attacking the problem, whatever it may be, whether an experimental investigation, or a theoretical calculation. … It is by the choice of a suitable method of attack, that intricate problems are reduced to simple phenomena, and then easily solved.”
Charles Proteus Steinmetz

The first important problem Steinmetz wanted to attack in his academic career was the zeta particle. Steinmetz today is known worldwide as the “Engineer of the 20th Century” in any possible sense of the phrase. But looking at the circumstances of his early life this was far from the most likely outcome. Steinmetz was born on April 9, 1865 as Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz into a Jewish family in Breslau in the German Province of Silesia. Steinmetz suffered from dwarfism, hunchback, and hip dysplasia, as did his father and grandfather. This kept him from ever marrying, fearing that his children might inherit the disease as well. The young Steinmetz attended Johannes Gymnasium and astonished his teachers with his proficiency in mathematics and physics. Following the Gymnasium, Steinmetz went on to the University of Breslau to begin work on his undergraduate degree in 1883.

His first subject of study was astronomy with Dr. Galle. Here his fascination for the wonders of the Microcosms was awakened. Luckily, as mentioned earlier trough the German Unification of ccc, the Breslau University had gained access to nuclear material from Saxony. One of the first to benefit of Bismarck’s research decree was Oskar E.Meyer. He successfully requested some fairly large amounts of Arminium and was granted them, thanks to his excellent personal relationship with the Minster of Education and Science Friedrich Theodor Althoff.

These developments opened a great opportunity for his star pupil Steinmetz. He gained the opportunity to write his graduation thesis on Zeta particle. They were first noticed by Weisbach, during his transformation experiments with beryllium metal, he found that some powerful Gamma like particle were released when Arminium was brought into contact with beryllium powder. Steinmetz goal was to investigate this radiation in an improved, self designed cloud chamber with one of the most powerful particle sources yet used.

It was well known that Gamma particle when colliding with the walls of a cloud chamber, seemingly chipped of sub atomic particle from the targeted atoms making up these glass walls. Some recent investigations (with powerful new electromagnets) showed evidence that the particle in question were Beta particles. Thus Steinmetz reasoned that the bigger, neutral Zeta particle should be able to break of Alpha particle. Not only that, they should, being neutral, have an easier time doing so since they would not be repelled by the positive Alphas.

Under the guide of Meyer, he tested his thesis. The experiment was more than successful. Not only could Steinmetz show that Zeta particle knock out Alpha particle out of a paraffin wax foil, but also that slowing them down that way made them more “reactive” to their environment. The convenient use of paraffin as a research material was mainly thanks to the familiarity with his former teachers work. Obviously, Steinmetz graduated with a doctorate summa cum laude but not with much fanfare. Bismarck’s anti-socialist witch hunts had reached Breslau a year earlier and the police was having a throughout look into the University’s left wing culture. Thus Steinmetz fled to Zurich and later Great Britain where the last “main” chapter will end with the Grand opening of the Cavendish-Talbot Matter Transmutator.

Notes and Sources

J. P. MUNDRA, (1968): Cosmic Ray Interactions in Paraffin and Lead
Department of Physics, Presidency College, Calcutta

Wikipedia, all the scientist biographies
 
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The History of Endocrinology (Its actually pretty fun!)

The history of endocrinology is as convoluted as it is interesting. It all began with the search for a miraculous device, the pregnancy test. For a long time the most reliable method was just to wait and see. But while it might be a nice surprise to find out you’re pregnant the old-fashioned way, barfing, missing periods, having a baby women still wanted to know as early as possible whether or not they were harboring a tiny human. So how did they do it? Weirdly enough, it always comes back to pee.


Some Ancient Tests


One of the earliest, if not the earliest, home pregnancy tests came from Ancient Egypt. In 1350 BCE, women were advised to urinate on wheat and barley seeds over the course of several days; if the wheat sprouted, she was having a girl, and if the barley sprouted, a boy. If neither sprouted, she wasn’t pregnant. While the Ancient Egyptians were on to something with the wheat and barley test, they and the Ancient Greeks seem to have had a fuzzy understanding of anatomy.
Both Egyptian medical papyri and Hippocrates, lauded as the father of medicine, suggested that a woman who suspected she might be pregnant insert an onion or other strong-smelling bulbous vegetable into her vagina overnight. If her breath smelled of onions the next morning, she wasn’t pregnant; this was based on the idea that her womb was open, and wafting the oniony scent up to her mouth like a wind tunnel. If she were pregnant, then the womb would be closed, so no wind tunnel.

In the 16th century European “piss prophets” also recognized that signs of pregnancy might be found in woman’s urine. These so-called experts claimed that they could determine whether or not a woman was with child by the color and characteristics of her urine. Some also mixed urine with wine and observed the results, a test that might have seen some success, given that alcohol can react to proteins present in pregnant lady pee. Of course, these piss prophets didn’t limit their urine divination to pregnant woman; they could also, by examining urine, intuit whether the urine’s owner was suffering from any illness or disease.

The Modest Beginning of Modern Endocrinology

There were actually some more fascinating theories thrown around, but let’s get back to the start. And this is meant in more than one way. The Greater Berlin Papyrus is an important ancient Egyptian medical papyrus. It contains twenty-four pages of writing. The interesting part for us was the contents about fertility tests. It was discovered by Giuseppe Passalacqua in Saqqara, Egypt. Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia acquired it in 1827 for the Berlin Museum, where it is still housed. A copy was made and send to Jean-François Champollion who recently finished the translation of hieroglyphs with the help of the Rosetta stone.

The story might have ended here if it weren’t for the curiosity of Heinrich August David Ficinus. He was working teaching at a medical school in Dresden, Saxony. His specialty however was medical history. Even before his lectures became official in 1823, he already held them in private since 1814. Obviously he was deeply fascinated with the Berlin Papyrus and the ancient medical theories.

What he found especially interesting was their description of the wheat and barley test. For some reason the same basic idea was also known in German folk medicine of his own time. This intrigued him enough to see, if something in the female urine actually affected the grain seeds. After all it was cheap and easy enough to recreate outside his regular working hours.
As he mentioned in his publication later, it was meant to be akin to a historical reenactment, and less and actual scientific investigation. To his surprise thou, it turned out the test “worked”. Although it did not differentiate between boys and girls, the test reliably enough predicted pregnancy. In 70 percent of the time, the urine of pregnant women would cause the seeds to sprout, while the urine of non-pregnant women and men didn’t. The Ancient Egyptians, as well as the German peasants had been on to something. Fincinus concluded that the urine of pregnant woman probably contained some fertility factor. Since it worked on plant seeds, the next obvious step was to inject it into animals. These follow up studies, on rats, amphibian and rabbits showed that it indeed caused them to go into heat or ovulate.

Ancient Chinese Wisdom

All of this was certainly fascinating. Among the people who were intrigued with the potential of the newly discovered fertility/vitality factor was the Blind Traveler, James Holman. He had educated himself on the matters of medicine in Edinburgh, always looking out for a potential cure of his various illnesses. This sounded as good as any other, although nothing immediately came out of it. This changed during his visit of China. While he wasn’t particularly fond of his time there, being confided to foreigner’s quarters, he had used the time to learn and translate Chinese. Holman mainly wrote about Chinese poetry and such in his travelogue. However less well known is that he also looked into the potential of Chinese medicine. What he found was quiet baffling.

As in all other civilizations, castration was undertaken very early, in man for social reasons (eunuchism), and in animals both for medical purposes and for gastronomy, because gelded
animals were found to put on fat and to give more tender meat. The simple physigological experiment of castration thus taught the Chinese very early that the beard and other characters of virility were connected in some way with the presence of the testes. They were however not alone in the use for testes as a medical ingredients, in ancient Greece and India they were also prescribed to help with a variety of disease.

However unlike some other cultures, the discoveries influenced Chinese medical thought in a way that emphasized the reciprocal nature of organs, affecting each other. The real important breakthrough came however from the recognition of urine. The Chinese unlike Europe or many other cultures believed that the essential substances (jen chih ching chhi) were not only circulating the blood (chiching che) butals o in the urine (cho che).
The use or urine in treatment of (sexual) disorders goes back to taoist monks 200 A.D. For them sex was philosophical and medico scientific rather than ascetic in the ordinary Western sense. The first empirically useful results were however recorded much later. In the light of these early philosophical endeavor it was perfectly natural that the sediments and natural precipates of the urine should arouse great interest among the Chinese medical naturalists at an early time.

The book Holman came across was while researching some rumor about Chinese urine derivate salt therapy contained much more information than he expected. It described several highly sophisticated methods to recover "hormones" from human urine. The oldest method went back to at least the book Chihiu Shih Huan Yuan Tan (1108 A.D). It said to take ten tan or more (568 liter) of men's urine and put it in a large evaporating pan in an empty room. More elaborate descriptions followed. In the end the entire dried solids or the urine was used. Besides the obvious urates, uric acid, phosphates, sulphats and other inorganic salts, there would be sterious glucuronides and sulphates. After the simple procedure of evaporation, the active steroids were carefully sublimed out of the mix. This is possible since these hormones sublime unchanged below their melting points, at a temperature varying between 130 and 210 degree Celsius.

Since the entire solids of the evaporate urine were taken for sublimation, the process was rather messy. Thus in the next centuries methods of preparation were worked out which got rid of many of the urinary constitutes before sublimation was attempted. Aside from manipulating the temperature, and the number of stages of evaporation two other methods were recorded. One could either use saponin (from the beans of Gleditschia sinensis) or gypsum (containing calcium sulfate) to separate/ extract hormones out of the mixture.

While it was far from perfect Holman felt his translation was interesting enough to send back with a letter to his friend Dr. The latter was indeed quite impressed with the empirical fundamentals behind the oriental mystical mumbo jumbo and held a presentation on behalf of his traveling friend to the Medical Society of London. He described in detail what the ancient Chinese scholars found out investigating human urine.

These news fell on fertile ground, so to speak thanks to ccc previous work. Soon enough Europe’s medical laboratories began to study and refine the ancient Chinese medicine. One of the most interesting follow up discovery was made by Albert Günther about Xenopus laevis in 1859. This species was actually first described by François Marie Daudin in his “Histoire naturelle des rainettes, des grenouilles, et des crapauds /Natural History of Tree-frogs, Frogs and Toads’; 1802/03”. Admittedly it only contained the briefest description of what he called Bufo laevis , or ‘Crapaud lisse’ (‘smooth toad’). Based on a single preserved specimen of unknown provenance in the Museum of Natural History in Paris, his drawing (Fig. 1) is just sufficient for a modern zoologist to recognize it as Xenopus.

In the following decades, research on the taxonomy and anatomy of what appeared neither a typical frog nor a typical toad continued sporadically in the scientific centers of empire, especially London’s museums and zoo, as and when specimens were received from Africa. Here the zoologist Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf Günther made his important discovery. Günther was a German-born British zoologist, ichthyologist, and herpetologist. He graduated in medicine with an M.D. from Tübingen in 1858, the same year in which he published a handbook of zoology for students of medicine. His mother moved to England, and when he visited it in 1855, he met John Edward Gray and Professor Richard Owen at the British Museum. This led to an offer to work at the British Museum in 1857, where his first task was to classify 2000 snake specimens.

He also introduced the idea of increasing the fertility of zoo animals via the “universal fertility factor” and ongoing field of research in his native Germany. The big breakthrough came when he injected with the urine of pregnant females into Xenopus laevis. In an interview with the London times Günther explained: “Among the 295 tests which I have done so far and in which 2,112 frogs were used I have not seen one clear positive that did not indicate a pregnancy. There were a few negative results which when repeated after a fortnight became positive, but I do not think that these can be regarded as failures.”

However this didn’t cause the euphoria, interest one might expect in modern days. Above all, there is the problem of demand. Many women were aware of their menstrual cycles and familiar with the early signs of pregnancy, especially if they had already borne children. In the 19th century Britain, woman rarely called on doctors or attended antenatal clinics before the second or third trimester, so it was unusual for medical practitioners to be involved in the early stages of pregnancy. A woman who did seek out medical advice to confirm or allay her suspicions was usually told to return in a month’s time, unless ‘there was some particular reason why [she] should know’, in which case an Xenopus test might be arranged. Women who were contemplating abortion probably ‘preferred not to involve their doctor in tests’. Rather, it was commonplace for women to take steps to bring on menstruation every month, a practice they did not equate with aborting a fetus. So if neither women nor doctors relied on the laboratory to help detect pregnancy, what was the Xenopus test used for?

Crucially, the test ‘did not actually detect the presence of a live fetus’, but rather living placental tissue and so was ‘strongly positive’ for pathological growths such as hydatidiform mole or placental cancer, ‘where there was no viable fetus but plenty of chorionic epithelium.’ Conversely, a weakly positive reaction could ‘indicate danger of miscarriage’.

The other, indirect revolution was caused by the revolutionizing of the emerging field of comparative embryology. Before Günther’s discovery any potential research in frog embryo development was hampered by a lack of amphibian eggs. They had to be collected in the wild, in the spring. This meant that researchers would go and find frogs or newts, take their eggs and do a mad rush of experiments for a few weeks. They would then have to spend the rest of the year dissecting the outcome. But if one used xenopus people could get eggs whenever you wanted them. Using female urine to induce ovulation, meant laboratories could get lots of eggs, all year round. Coupled to the hardy and robust nature of the frogs, making them easy to keep, Xenopus laevis was one of the first and most ideal model organisms.

Obviously the research into Hormones branched out into many related fields but those are the fascinating beginnings of Endocrinology (in Europe).

Notes and Sources

John B. Gurdon, Nick Hopwood (2000): The introduction of Xenopus laevis into developmental biology: of empire, pregnancy testing and ribosomal genes

Rachel Nuwer (2013): Doctors Used to Use Live African Frogs As Pregnancy Tests

C.P Heidel, M. Lienert (2004): Die Professoren der Medizinischen Fakultät Carl Gustav Carus Dresden und ihre Vorgängereinrichtungen 1814-2004.

P. Ghalioungui, SH. Khalil and A. R. Ammar (1963): On an ancient Egyptian method of diagnosing pregnancy and determining foetal sex.

Giles Newton (2004): Why the frog?

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie (2013): 9 Historical Methods of Detecting Pregnancy

Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham (): Medieval Preparations of Urinary Steroid Hormones

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn (2014): The demand for pregnancy testing: The Aschheim–Zondek reaction, diagnostic versatility, and laboratory services in 1930s Britain

Wikipedia: various information
 
Great updates! I'm really enjoying this TL still, even if I have been away for some time... which brings me onto my next point. I just want to say a massive thank you, after not really getting some of what you were talking about I decided to read up on nuclear physics.

To say I fell down a wonderful rabbit-hole would be an understatement, my wanting to understand lead me from nuclear physics to quantum physics, then Buddhism, onto Stoicism and finally onto wanting to learn as much about philosophy as possible. Thanks for that! :D Not only do I now know what you were going with the TL, but I've learned a lot.

Anyway I'm rambling... back on topic: I really liked learning about Endocrinology, not sure if fun is the word I'd use, but it certainly is very interesting. Loving the story, please continue :D
 

Thank you. There are two reasons I don’t update this timeline. The first one is the practical question of handling nuclear graphite. There is some fairly pure vain graphite in Sri Lanka/Ceylon that was mined at the time but it still is a bottleneck I never imagined before I started the timeline.

This leads me to the second reasons, I stopped posting so much. I really enjoy searching, finding and learning about stuff, but unfortunately I am a bit less into writing a narrative around them. Combined with my tendency to cram every new discovery into my currently running timelines things get a bit messy.

The solution I found for now is to make separate posts on new, interesting stuff I come across instead of posting it here. This does not mean this timeline or at least a similar variation is dead. I am just not sure, how to get a straight linear story around one concept. Maybe once I found a solution to the graphite problem.
 
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