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Introduction
What makes a great scientist? Some believe that it the quantity of innovative work that a
scientist produces, whereas others would argue that it is how relative the creation or discovery is
to people’s lives that make a scientist deserving of praise. While there may never be one agreed
upon criterion for determining the greatest of the greats, the following chapters will outline,
arguably, the three greatest scientists of the 20th century: Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee and
Percy Spencer.
One of the most renowned scientists of the early 20th century, and possibly of all time,
was the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Voted Person of the Century by Time
Magazine, Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity and founding of relativistic
cosmology are only a few of the numerous contributions he made to the scientific world.
Towards the end of the 20the century, Tim Berners-Lee, physicist and computer scientist,
emerged with his World Wide Web. Berners-Lee revolutionized the way the world
communicates by taking the Internet, a system devised by the United States military, the
Transmission Control Protocol, and Internet Protocol and creating the Hyper Text Markup
Language, the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, and Universal Resource Locators to form a world-
wide computer system that allowed all types of computers globally to interact and share
information.
Forever changing the cooking world, Percy Spencer’s microwave oven was invented in
the 1940s. Though he never lived to see his invention produced for the mass market, his creation
became a household staple by the end of the 20th century. With the Women’s Liberation
Movement and more women entering the workforce, the microwave, and its ability to produce
quickly heated and reheated meals, eased women’s dual role of career woman and homemaker.
Throughout the 20th century, a number of scientists have made a significant impact on the
way people view the world, the way people are treated for diseases, and the way people approach
mathematic and scientific puzzles. In the following chapters we will observe three scientists who
have clearly left their mark on the 20th century.
Albert Einstein
By Nadia Cadogan
There is one man in particular who made a great contribution to the 20th century. When
we think of scientist and thinkers who took us beyond ideas and revolutionary breakthroughs he
is the first to come to mind. Albert Einstein has explored the ideas about space, time and
mathematics. Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist and made many contributions to the
science of physics. Einstein is best known for his theories of special and general relatively
which revolutionize the way we view science today.
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm Germany. He was the son of
Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch. In 1880, the Einstein family moved to Munich where his
father and uncle founded an electric company. There Hermann and Pauline welcomed a
daughter, Maria Einstein in 1881. Albert and Maria had a relatively good relationship despite his
lack of child play. While other children occupied their time with games he enjoyed much quieter
activities such as puzzles, building complex structures with his toys and house building with
cards. Even as a young child his sister Maria saw something special in Albert. (2007, Isaacson)
At the age of 5, questions regarding Albert’s developmental abilities led to believe he had
a slight disorder. His ability to systemize was far greater than his ability to empathize. But for
Einstein he was able to identify with one thing in particular that would change his life. One sick
day, his father brought him a compass, a navigational instrument used for determining direction
relative to the earth’s magnetic poles and he was infatuated. The compass created a sense of
question that motivated him throughout his life. “I can still remember or at least I can remember
that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me” (Isaacson, p.13) It was at that
point Einstein would develop a lifelong devotion to field theories as a way to express nature.
The thing that mesmerized Albert about the compass was the fact that the magnetic needle
moved about by some hidden force rather than by a force of movement such as touch or contact.
Albert’s childhood education began at a Catholic elementary school where he was
mastered all subjects in particle mathematics and science. By twelve, he learned Euclidean
geometry and later began to study calculus. In his early teens he attended the Luitpold
Gymnasium where a teacher taught him Greek and Latin poetry and European culture. To avoid
military services at the age sixteen, he withdrew from the Gymnasium and obtained a medical
certificate and traveled to Pavia to join his family after departing from Munich. (1997,
Goldsmith)
Albert’s plans were to then to take the entrance examination to the Swiss Federal
Polytechnical School in Zurich, one of the top institutions for science education. Become a
Swiss citizen by the age of twenty-one and finally land a career as a teacher or an engineer.
Those plans came to reality in 1895 when Einstein traveled to Zurich for the entrance
examination. Unfortunately he failed but scored extremely high in two sections physics and
mathematics which got the attention of a physics professor who invited him to sit in his class. In
the mean while he obtained a Swiss high school certificate. (1997, Goldsmith)
In 1896, Einstein passed the entrance examination and enrolled in a curriculum that
would certify him as a high school teacher specializing in mathematics and physics. Four years
later in 1990 Albert sat for the final examination that would qualify him as a physics or
mathematics teacher and passed. It was unfortunate that he did not receive an offer of an
assistantship with the institution. While becoming a citizen in 1901, he spent two years
searching for his first real job. (1997, Goldsmith)
The year of 1905 were known as the “Wonder Year” for Einstein, he published four great
papers all within a few months in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik. The first
paper “On a Heuristic Viewpoint of the Generation and Conversion of Light” explained the
discovery of Max Planck, a German physicist who developed the concept of quantum mechanics.
Planck assumed that energy was made up of individual units called “quanta.” Einstein theorized
that not just the energy, but the radiation itself was quantized in the same manner. “Its
suggestion that light comes not just in waves but in tiny packets quanta of light that were later
dubbed “photons” spirits us into strange scientific mists that are far murkier, indeed more
spooky, than even the weirdest aspects of the theory relativity.”(Isaacson, p. 94) The example
that explained this theory is imagine a proton striking a metal surface, that proton gives all of its
energy to the electron, a stable subatomic particle that knocks it loose increasing the intensity of
light so by adding more photons of the same energy to the light beam more electrons become
loose.
Einstein’s paper “A New Determination of Molecule Dimensions,” explored how the
behaviors of tiny particles are reflected in clear and obvious experiments. “The physical
phenomena observed in liquids have thus far not served for the determination of molecule sizes”
(Isaacson p.102) He proved this by using viscosity, which is how much resistance a liquid offers
to an object that tries to move through it for example sugar and water. If you dissolve sugar in
water, the liquid’s viscosity increases as it get thicker. He was able to come up with two
equations solving for both the size of the sugar molecule and the number of them in the water.
This thesis although did not land him a job, but it was one of his useful papers used in many
career fields.
To follow was the paper “Brownian Motion” which explored statistical mechanics. He
explained the phenomena, known as the Brownian motion, which is why small particles
suspended in a liquid such as water are observed to jiggle around. As a result he proved that
atoms and molecules do exist as physical objects. “it will be shown that, according to the
molecular-kinetic theory of heat, bodies of a microscopically visible size suspended in liquids
must, as a result of thermal molecular motions, perform motions of such magnitudes that they
can be easily observed with a microscope” (Isaacson p. 104)
Through knowledge and experimental data this was something that could actually be tested. He
actually did not attempt to prove the Brownian motion, instead he explained the existence of
molecules and then calculated exactly what would happen if small particles were floating in
liquid. (2007, Isaacson)
After 1905, Einstein continued working in all the areas discussed above which shortly
lead to his theory of relativity. Relativity is a simple concept which claims the fundamental laws
of physics are the same whatever your state of motion. Relating this idea to space and time,
Einstein adopted a new concept. His theory described the effects of relative motion on the
properties of matter. The theory of relativity refers to two different elements of the same theory
general relativity and special relativity. (2007, Isaacson)
Einstein’s paper on special relativity titled, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
proved the non-existence of both ether and absolute motion. Since all evidence suggested that
“the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics posses no properties corresponding
to the idea of absolute rest…” (Goldsmith, p.67) he suggested that in physics we no longer
accept the idea of absolute motion. So without an absolute reference things could only be
understood in terms of their relationship to one another and nobody’s able to say who’s moving
and who isn’t. There are two important things about systems in relative motion to consider, the
laws of mechanics are the same for any uniformly moving system and it’s helpful to be able to
correlate systems moving with respect to each other.
Also demonstrated by the special relativity theory is the speed of light is the universal
speed limit. “According to the equation, the faster an object moves, the more it contracts, and
the more time slows until at the speed of light the thing has contracted itself out of existence and
time has stopped.” (Goldsmith p.73) At this point there is no way of measuring speed since time
as at a halt. Time is constant but only for systems at rest relative to one another.
Einstein’s forth paper “Does an Object’s Inertia Depend upon its Energy Content” dealt
with the famous equation, E=MC2. Energy equals mass times the speed of light. This equation
described the relationship between mass and energy. He proved that any increase in energy of a
body must lead to a corresponding increase in its mass, these increases being related by a factor
C2, where c represents the velocity of light squared. The mass of a body does reflect its energy
content and shows that there is a huge amount of energy represented in the smallest amount of
mass. Although these two quantities have their own laws of conservation, Einstein managed to
combine the two into one. (1997, Goldsmith)
Years later Einstein realize his special relativity theory was incomplete. Between the
years of 1915-1916 he worked his hardest developing the general relativity theory. General
relativity focused on the effects of forces, the pushes or pulls that produce accelerations. In 1916
the theory was published under the title “The Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity.”
Which can be describes in two phrases; gravity bends space and bent space determines the
motions of objects. The Suns gravitational force bends space, more noticeably at smaller
distances from the Sun and by lesser amounts at greater distances. So we can conclude, the light
ray will reach Earth from a slightly different direction than it would if the Sun did not exist.
Einstein’s theory showed us another way of imaging how gravity affects objects. (1997,
Goldsmith)
In conclusion, Albert Einstein died in Princeton, NJ on April 18, 1955. He devoted his
life in search of ways to help explain the universe in more useful and simpler theories. In his
lifetime he accomplished numerous achievements and was recognized for his many contributions
to the science of Physics. Despite critiques from many Physicists and Philosophers he proved to
be one of the greatest scientists of all time.
References:
1). http://www.ssqq.com/archive/alberteinstein.htm
2). Goldsmith, Dr. Donald and Libbon, Robert. (1997). “The Ultimate Einstein.” New York:
Byron Press Multimedia Books.
3). Isaacson, Walter. (2007). “Einstein: His Life and Universe.” New York: Simon & Schuster
Tim Berners-Lee
By Alexandru Baiasu
Introduction
In the 20th century, there were many great scientific achievements, from Watson and
Crick’s decoding DNA to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. While there will
probably never be a consensus on the three greatest scientists of that century of innovation, one
way to evaluate scientists is on the number of people directly impacted by their inventions or
discoveries and the vision and goal behind their creations. Tim Berners-Lee, physicist and
computer scientist, is arguably one of the three greatest scientists of the 20th century because he
began his work with an aim of connecting people and computers on a global level, and he
succeeded in making the World Wide Web a user-friendly system that is now used in
households, classrooms, and businesses around the world on a daily basis.
The Original Internet
About thirty years before the World Wide Web became a reality, its precursor, the
Internet came into being. The Internet began as a military project. During the Cold War, on
October 15, 1957, the Soviets launched the satellite Sputnik and initiated the ‘space race.’ The
U.S. government, fearing the chaos and catastrophe of a nuclear attack, started the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was a group of scientists charged with “finding a way
for the military and scientific community to survive such an attack (Gaines, 2002, p. 13) of
atomic weapons. In order for these scientists, located in all areas of the country, to connect and
work in close communications, a network of scientific computers, ARPANET, was created at the
end of 1969 (Gaines, 2002, p. 13). The ARPANET network directly connected all the ARPA
computers using dial-up telephone lines. In theory, if the connection between two cities was
destroyed during a nuclear attack, the messages could be rerouted through the phone lines of
other cities, hence, providing the security for a potential attack that the government was seeking.
The problem with ARPANET was that many of the scientific computers worked on varying
types of operating systems making it impossible to communicate directly (De Angelis, 2005, p.
109). In order to solve this dilemma, each of the larger scientific computers was connected to a
smaller gateway computer that was able to communicate with the other gateway computers at
other institutions.
In addition to ARPANET, satellite networking (SATNET) and packet radio were also
valuable networks in both the scientific and military communities (Gaines, 2002, p. 14).
However, these two networks lacked the gateway computers to connect to the ARPANET
network. In 1973, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn proposed to the government the “Protocol for
Packet Network Intercommunication” (Gaines, 2002, p. 14), which described an innovative way
for computers to send messages. In the new method, a computer that was sending a message
would contact the receiving computer and let it know that a message was being sent. Then, the
computer sending the message would breakdown the message into small parts, each having a few
words of the message packaged in an electronic envelope or ‘packet.’ “Each packet was
numbered, addressed to the computer that would receive it, and sent out over the telephone lines.
Any of the computers along the ARPANET that would receive the packet would read its address
and send it along until it finally reached its destination” (Gaines, 2002, pp. 14-15). Cerf and
Kahn’s Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) allowed for ARPANET, SATNET, and radio
packets to communicate (Hauben, 2009).
In 1978, TCP was separated into two sections (Stewart, 2009). The TCP was used to
separate messages into sections and place them in electronic packets, and the new Internet
Protocol (IP) was utilized to address the packages, like when sending a letter, and ensure the
messages’ arrival at their final destinations in their entirety. This system called TCP/IP was used
for all network communications for all computer systems and was later incorporated into Tim
Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, which is how TCP/IP is still used in internet communications
today. Though the internet continued to grow, with The National Science Foundation, NASA,
and the Department of Energy using the system, and the Domain Name System of the .com
and .net addresses being completed in 1984, the internet was still primarily a military program
that was, for the most part, abandoned in 1989. However, Tim Berners-Lee rediscovered the
internet and brought it to the global level, creating the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web
Born on June 8, 1955, to parents who had met while members of a team that programmed
one of the first commercial computers, the Ferranti Mark I, Tim Berners-Lee was exposed to
computers at an early age. While earning his degree in physics at Queen’s College, Oxford in the
1970s, Berners-Lee “built a real computer using an early microprocessor and an old TV set” (De
Angelis, 2005, p. 111). After completing college, in 1980 Berners-Lee accepted a position at the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. CERN was a
physics laboratory that brought together the great scientists of Europe to work on various
projects. Though CERN had a permanent staff, the majority of scientist kept desks at the center,
but only worked there for limited periods of time, continuing to return to research at their home
institutions. Berners-Lee was hired as an independent contractor to aid in the development of a
new computerized control system for the Organization’s particle accelerator.
While at CERN, Berners-Lee developed a program he named Enquire, which allowed
him to keep track of the people he met, projects upon which he was working, and anything else
that he needed to remember. Enquire created hyperlinks between documents, connecting pieces
of information that seemed unrelated. When one clicked on the hyperlink, more information
would pop up on that specific person or subject. Each page was an index card, or node,
connected by links, but the only way a person could find information was by browsing from the
original start page. Berners-Lee wrote Enquire “in the programming language Pascal, which was
common, but it ran on the proprietary Norsk Data SINTRAN-III operating system, which was
pretty obscure” (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 11). When Berners-Lee left CERN, when his contract was
finished, Enquire was lost. However, when Berners-Lee returned to CERN in 1984, he decided
to rebuild Enquire and began to experiment with other programs, such as Tangle, which
attempted to allow a user to ask a computer a question and the computer would be able to
produce a relevant answer, similar to the recently developed Wolfram Alpha, which “uses its
built-in algorithms and a growing collection of data to compute the answer based on a new kind
of knowledge-based computing” (Wolfram Alpha LLC—A Wolfram Research Company, 2009).
Though Tangle was a failure, Berners-Lee said, “it was not the end of my desire to represent the
connective aspect of information” (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 13).
In many books about Berners-Lee, the development of the World Wide Web is presented
as a rapid occurrence. In Ann Gaines’ Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide
Web, Gaines describes the primary developmental phase of the Web as a 3-month process and
Gina De Angelis and David J. Bianco’s Computers: Processing the Data extends the time period
to six months. However, in Berners-Lee’s own book, Weaving the Web: the Original Design and
Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor, Berners-Lee attempts to dispel many of
the myths and misrepresentations attributed to his work and the creation of the World Wide Web.
Rather than a quick invention based on his original Enquire program, Berners-Lee explains that
the World Wide Web was an evolving idea that began in his youth with his search for a better
way for people to connect. In the book, Berners-Lee elaborates on the invented programs and
system to reveal his thought process and intentions to the reader. Through his book, one is able
to comprehend that the World Wide Web was not the result of a scientist stumbling on a
discovery or a project made for a simple aim that grew beyond its intended purpose. According
to Berners-Lee:
Inventing the World Wide Web involved my growing realization that there was a power in
arranging ideas in an unconstrained, weblike way. And that awareness came to me through
precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the
swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous
offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled. It was a process of accretion, not the linear
solving of one well-defined problem after another. (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 3)
Berners-Lee was a great visionary who set out to make the World Wide Web a global
phenomenon, a means by which the world could connect and share information, and pursued his
ambition even when the majority of the scientific and computer community would not support
him. Berners-Lee sought a company that could implement his ideas. When no one wanted to, he
began working on the World Wide Web at CERN.
In his quest to create a system that allowed for the communication between all computers
and networks, Berners-Lee realized that he “would have to create a system with common rules
that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all” (Berners-
Lee, 14). Starting his work on his NeXT computer, Berners-Lee chose hypertext, developed in
1945 by Vannevar Bush (Alesso, 2006, p. 64), as the model for his program. His intention was to
combine the external links of Enquire with hypertext and the Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
program, which he had developed earlier to aid in communications between different computers
and networks. He also realized that the system had to be decentralized for a large number of
people to use it, so that people did not have to request access from an administrator to begin
utilizing the system. Unlike the original Enquire, where a user could only access different nodes
from the starter page, in this system, any node would have to be able to link to any other node.
In the early stages of development, the World Wide Web acted more as a word processor
with hyperlinks. Users could read documents, edit them, and do many word processing actions.
An advocate of the Internet, one of Berners-Lee’s mentors at CERN, Ben Segal, awakened
Berners-Lee to the possibility of using the internet and the TCP/IP protocols (Berners-Lee, 2000,
p. 17). Later, Berners-Lee created the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). “HTML files are
simple text files with special tags added to let a web browser know how to format the document
properly” (De Angelis, 2005, p. 115). HTML allows the created document to tell the user’s
browser how the document should be displayed. The browser then reads the tags and correctly
displays the document. The key to HTML is its adaptability. One of Berners-Lee’s first browsers
was developed by Nicola Pellow, a math student from England and intern at CERN (Berners-
Lee, 2000, p. 29). Pellow formed a browser that assumed as little as possible so that the interface
could work with any computer.
Now having both a browser and document formatting language, Berners-Lee developed a
Web server, the first of which was launched in 1990 as ‘info.cern.ch.’ The browser was able to
contact the server and request a document, and the server was able to send the requested
document. He then wrote the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which was the language that
computers would use to communicate on the internet. Though the HTTP was Berners-Lee’s rules
for interaction between computers, he also allowed articles transmitted by File Transfer Protocol
(FTP) available in hypertext pages, thus, adding more information to the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee still needed to further help a browser find files on the server. “In order for
the browser to contact a server and ask for a document, it has to know at least three pieces of
information: which server to contact, which document to ask for, and what protocol the server
used” (De Angelis, 2005, p. 116). Berners-Lee was able to combine this information into one
address, the Universal Resource Identifier (URI), which was the outline for the addresses of
documents. Today, URIs are called Universal Resource Locators (URLs). URLs name the
protocol, which is HTTP, then, they list the server that contains the document, last, they identify
the file that must be retrieved. URLs enable users to locate a multitude of information with ease.
On the original internet, while there were many information sources online, each needed
a different program to access it. “E-mail needed a mail program. USENET newsgroups needed a
newsreader. If you wanted to download a file, you needed a File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
program” (De Angelis, 2005, p. 109). Berners-Lee revolutionized the way people could access
information by providing users one tool to move from one kind of document to another and
instantly access different links of new data.
In Berners-Lee’s own words, “The people of the Internet built the Web, in true grassroots
fashion” (Berners-Lee, 2000, p. 47). Rather than keeping the copyrights to the World Wide Web
and making money off the system, he realized that the only way for the system to be global was
for it to be free, so he relinquished his rights to the programs and system he had developed. After
Berners-Lee’s promoting the World Wide Web at CERN, in May 1991, Paul Kuntz brought the
World Wide Web back to Stanford University’s Linear Accelerator Program (Gaines, 2002, p.
35). The system slowly began to grow in popularity, first in the scientific and hyperlink
followers communities. New users would inform Berners-Lee of their pages and would give him
suggestions on improving the system. Berners-Lee encouraged the development of Web
browsers by users. Closest to ones used today was Mosaic, developed by Marc Andreeson and
Eric Bina at the University of Illinois’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA), which was first available in 1993 (De Angelis, 2005, p. 119). Mosaic could be used on
Apple and IBM-compatible PCs and allowed for the use of color in texts and in the backgrounds
of pages. Mosaic was the precursor to Netscape Navigator.
When one compares the spread of the World Wide Web to the dispersal of other
technologies, such as the telephone, its expansion is unprecedented and truly incredible. Over the
summer of 1991, one hundred communications were made over the World Wide Web, in 1994
more than 10,000 computers around the world used the Web, and by 2001, hundreds of millions
of computers were using the system (Gaines, 2002, p. 14).
Tim Berners-Lee Today
Today Tim Berners-Lee continues his work on the World Wide Web as the 3Com
Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment at the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
At MIT he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Professor in the
Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK (MIT,
ERCIM, Keio, 2009). In November of 2009, at the UN-facilitated Internet Governance Forum
(IGF), Berners-Lee announced the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which will serve
as an incubator "leading transformative programs to advance the Web as a medium that
empowers people to bring positive change" (Anderson, 2009).
One of Berners-Lee’s most recognized roles is his heading The World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), which is “an international community that develops standards to ensure the
long-term growth of the Web” (MIT, ERCIM, Keio, 2009). Today, the W3C team is designing
Semantic Web, which is the next generation of Web architecture. “The objective of the Semantic
Web architecture is to provide a knowledge representation of linked data in order to allow
machine processing on a global scale. This involves moving the Web from a repository of data
without logic to a level where it is possible to express logic through knowledge representation
systems” (Alesso, 2006, p. 68). The aim of the Semantic Web is to change the Web, as it now
exists, so that resources can be interpreted more easily by both intelligent agents and programs.
Thus, as Tim Berners-Lee enters into the 21st century, he is moving beyond his original creation,
the World Wide Web, and is looking ever forward to new methods of information sharing and
innovative ways for people and computers to interact and connect.
Conclusion
In March of 1999, Time Magazine listed Tim Berners-Lee as one of the 100 Most
Important People of the 20th Century (Quittner, 1999), and there are few who would question
Berners-Lee’s impact on the speed and manner by which people are able to communicate, share
information, and access data. Whether it is a student in South Africa researching for a class
project or a mother in Alabama using MapQuest to find directions to her child’s soccer game, a
large portion of the world uses the World Wide Web on a daily basis. We have become so
attached to it that we now have it on our cellular phones. Tim Berners-Lee can be considered one
of the three greatest scientists of the 20th century because of the number of people his invention
has touched, the World Wide Web’s global reach, and the high daily frequency of people’s use
of his creation. With his current work on the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee may end up on the
list of most important people of the 21st century as well.
Works Cited
Alesso, P. H. (2006). Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Godel, and Turing. Hoboken: Wiley-Interscience.
Anderson, J. Q. (2009, November 6). Tim Berners-Lee launches "WWW Foundation" at IGF 2009. Ars Technica.
Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor. New York: HarperBusiness.
De Angelis, G. a. (2005). Computers: Processing the Data. Minneapolis: The Oliver Press, Inc.
Gaines, A. (2002). Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web. Bear: Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.
Hauben, M. (2009, December 2). Behind the Net - The untold history of the ARPANET. Retrieved December 2, 2009, from History of ARPANET: http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~acc/docs/arpa.html
MIT, ERCIM, Keio. (2009, December 3). W3C. Retrieved December 3, 2009, from W3C: www.w3.org
MIT, ERCIM, Keio. (2009, December 1). W3C. Retrieved December 1, 2009, from W3C: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee
Quittner, J. (1999, March 29). The Most Important People of the Century. Time Magazine .
Stewart, B. (2009, November 30). TCP/IP Internet Protocol. Retrieved November 30, 2009, from Livinginternet.com: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_tcpip.htm
Wolfram Alpha LLC—A Wolfram Research Company. (2009, March 5). Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine. Retrieved December 5, 2009, from Wolfram Alpha: www.wolframalpha.com
Percy Spencer
By Shoham Zohar
Percy Spencer was born on July 9 1894, in Howland Maine. His father past
away when he was an infant and his mother abandoned him. He lived Maine with
is aunt and uncle who raised him. When he was a teenager he was intrigued by the
growing use of electric power and worked as an electric installer. Percy worked in
a mill as an apprentice at the age of twelve. When he turned eighteen Percy joined
the navy were he started to work on radios. After the navy he started working for
wireless specialty apparatus. This company made commercial and military radio
equipment. Eventually wireless specialty apparatus became RCA. In 1920 Percy
finally found his place in Raytheon Company, were he became an expert on tube
design. “the depression years on 1929-1339 were difficult. Raytheon survived
with Percy Spencer’s new line of transmitting tubes”(Earls10). His major
contributions were the mass production of the magnetron and microwave oven,
which he invented in 1946 by accident.
While working for the Raytheon Company Percy discovered a more efficient way to
manufacture magnetrons. In 1941, magnetrons were being produced at a small rate per year.
Spencer created a simpler magnetron that could be mass produced.
The result was a magnetron that replaced precision copper bars with lamina and replaced
soldered internal wires with a simple solid ring.
This allowed for magnetrons to be produced at a large rate per year. Percy Spencer was
already known as an electronics genius, and toured one of his laboratories at the Raytheon
Company. He stopped momentarily in front of a magnetron, the power tube that drives a radar
set. “Percy felt A strange sensation, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket started
to melt”(Flatow57). So he was interested and went to get popcorn to check his curiosity.
Spencer watched as the kernels pop into popcorn. From this simple experiment, Spencer and
Raytheon developed the microwave oven. The first microwave oven weighed 750 pounds and
stood five feet, six inches. At first, it was used exclusively in Restaurants, and commercial
places. But culinary experts quickly noticed the oven's shortcomings. Meat did not turn brown,
French fries turned white and floppy. The other problem was the size of the first microwave,
standing at 5 feet tall and weighing about seven hundred and fifty pounds.
In fact, it took decades after the invention of the microwave oven for it to be refined to a
point where it would be useful to the average consumer. Today, Percy Spencer's radar boxes pop
popcorn in millions of homes around the world. Technological advances and further
developments led to a microwave oven that
was polished and priced for the consumer kitchen. However, there were many myths and fears
surrounding this new electronic. By the seventies, more and more people were finding the
benefits of microwave cooking to outweigh the possible risks, and none of them were dying of
radiation poisoning, going blind, or becoming impotent. As fears faded, a swelling wave of
acceptance began filtering into the kitchens of America and other countries. Myths were melting
away, and doubt was turning into demand.
On September 8 1970 Percy Spencer passed away at the age of seventy six. He never had
a chance to see his microwave oven expand into one of Americas fasts growing appliance. By
1975, sales of microwave ovens would, for the first time, exceed that of gas ranges. “The
following year, a reported 17% of all homes in Japan were doing their cooking by microwaves,
compared with 4% of the homes in the United States the same year”(lee85). It was not long
before microwave ovens were in the kitchens of over nine million homes in the America. The
United States cooking habits were drastically changed by the time and energy saving
convenience of the microwave oven. When the first microwave was on the market it was sold at
over one thousand dollar. Once considered a luxury, the microwave oven had developed into a
practical necessity for a fast paced world.
So the microwave oven was invented by Percy Spencer. Today it’s used in the world’s
fast food business more than in a classic home. McDonalds, burger king, even your
neighborhood Applebee’s use microwaves for an easier faster way to cook food. This
transformation from an oven to microwave may have made everything faster but not taster.
When you try to reheat pizza in the oven rather than the microwave what happens? The bread in
the pizza comes out of the microwave soggy and rough, but after worming pizza in the oven it
comes out nice and crispy.
“In 1999 Percy Spencer was inducted into the national inventors hall of fame”(Earls13).
He was inducted for High Efficiency Magnetron Patent Number two million four hundred eight
thousand two hundred thirty five. He became Senior Vice President and a member of the Board
of Directors at Raytheon, “receiving one hundred fifty patents during his career”( Earls13).
Because of his accomplishments, Percy was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal by the
U.S. Navy and has a building named after him at Raytheon.
1.Earls, R, Alan. Edward, E, Robert. Raytheon Company the first sixty years:2005
2. Flatow, Ira.They all laughed: Harper Collins publishing: 1992
3.Lee,H, Thomas. Planar Microwave Engineering: A Practical Guide to Theory, Measurement,
and Circuits: Cambridge university press:2004
Conclusion
As we have observed, each scientist mentioned has made his own special contribution to
the scientific world. Percy Spencer allowed restaurants and homes to cook and reheat at rapid
speeds, Albert Einstein revolutionized scientific perspective and knowledge through his theories
of relativity and other works in physics, and Tim Berners-Lee took the Internet and transformed
it into a global phenomenon, allowing different types of computers around the world to
communicate, share data, and access information with his World Wide Web.
Looking to the 21st century, Tim Berners-Lee is already working on the next generation
of Web communications with his Semantic Web, each year a new microwave oven is produced
with greater technology and features, and Steven Hawking continues to produce amazing
research in the realm of physics. One can only imagine what kind of awe-inspiring scientific
achievements will occur as we move forward into this next century of discovery.
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