Archives June 2013

"The most important single experiment... in the history of the silicone industry." Herman Liebhafsky, GE chemist In the 1930s alternatives to natural rubber were desperately needed. Uses for rubber were increasing, but the supply—trees grown mostly in Asia—was literally being tapped out. Soon World War II made it impossible to obtain natural rubber. However, synthetic rubber had been around for a few decades. Russian Sergey Lebedev made the first fake, butadiene rubber (BR), in 1910. Since then scientists had been in a race, either to make bulk quantities of BR faster and cheaper or to discover the next great fake. That fake turned out to be the silicone rubber of American Eugene Rochow (1909-2002). Within five years of his first day at General Electric's (GE) Research Laboratory, Rochow made one of the most important materials of the modern age—silicon rubber (SR). A unique fake, Rochow's rubber was the first with more...

In 1798 Austrian actor and playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) created a print by using a press to copy an image onto paper from the smooth surface of a section of limestone. Senefelder erroneously referred to his process as chemical printing. It would go on to become the most significant innovation in printing since relief printing in the fifteenth century. Although the precise details of his discovery are vague at best, the most commonly accepted story is that, when asked by his mother to prepare a laundry list, he was unable to find a suitable piece of paper, so he used a grease pencil to write the list on the flat surface of a piece of dense Solenhofen limestone. Senefelder then at some point must Jnave observed how the greasy residue left by the pencil became absorbed and embedded into the porous limestone, retaining its ink even after having its surface more...

It is the land of Shiva and Krishna, the Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. India-my beloved country-which produced the greats of modern times in the world-has a proud place in my thoughts.  The biggest democracy, the land of temples and one of the oldest civilizations of the world, the second most populous country in the world after China, my country has produced warriors like Rana Pratap and Shivaji, leaders like Jawaharial Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar patel, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai.  In literature and science it has produced persons like Rabindra Nath Tagore, Prem Chand, Saratchandra, C.V. Raman, Jagdish Chandra Bose and Dr. Homi Bhaba.  India is a land of villages and fields. Its fields are fed by the mighty rivers like the Ganga, Yamuna, Brahmaputra, Godavari, Narmada and Kaveri. The Gangetic Valley is the most fertile region of our land. The oceans that guard her more...

Traditional grain harvesting was a laborious process, requiring separate cutting, binding, and threshing operations. Although the mechanical reaper, invented in 1831 by Cyrus McCormick, did the cutting, farmers still had to follow the machine and bind the sheaves of grain by hand. Hiram Moore created the first successful combine harvester in 1834 with the aim of speeding up the production of grain from the vast wheat lands of America. Corn and wheat spelled big money in the 1800s, but farmers had to employ dozens of farmhands in order to reap the benefits of their harvests, and this was a costly business. Moore's invention, developed in the farmlands of Michigan, succeeded in combining the two separate processes of cropping and threshing grain into one simplified, mechanically powered step. This creation, paradoxically, was both a blessing and a curse for farm workers—while it saved their backs it also cost many of them more...

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, working with an early spectrometer—a graduated glass prism—noted in 1666 that the seven rainbow colors, dispersed when white light was passed through the prism, could not be subdivided into more colors. A second breakthrough in light research occurred when German glassmaker Joseph von Fraunhofer found that the solar spectrum contained dark absorption lines of constant wavelength. Robert Bunsen (1811-1899), Professor of Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, working with Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887), used a prism spectrometer to reveal the spectral emission lines produced by elements when heated in a flame. In 1859 they became convinced that elements were uniquely characterized by their line spectra, and this led to the discovery of cesium and rubidium. The researchers also realized that the orange Fraunhofer D lines in the solar spectrum were at the same wavelength as the lines emitted by laboratory sodium. So it was more...