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.