Difference engine

The Jacquard loom used punched cards
     to control a sequence of operations.
     so that changing the cards changed the pattern.
It was not a great leap for Charles Babbage
     to store programs on punch cards
     that controlled the operations of his Difference Engine.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Even though some of the mechanics had been invented before him, and even though his ideas would not become practical for a hundred years, Babbage’s engine was revolutionary.

The Difference Engine was designed to approximate the solutions of polynomial functions using Newton’s method of divided differences for the construction of astronomical and mathematical tables. This machine was cranked by hand.

The Analytical Engine, in contrast, was designed as a general-purpose Turing-complete machine.

Ada Lovelace wrote her program to calculate the sequence of Bernoulli numbers as an illustration for her translation of Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on the Analytical Engine.

See also in The book of science:

• 2400 BCE—1820 CE—Computing devices
• 1614—Logarithms—John Napier
• 1822—Difference engine—Charles Babbage
• 1946—Computer—Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John von Neumann
• 1946—ENIAC—John Grist Brainerd, John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Charles Babbage” on wikipedia
• “Difference engine” on wikipedia
• “Analytical engine” on wikipedia
• “Ada Lovelace” on wikipedia
• “Federico Luigi Conte di Menabrea” on wikipedia
• “Basile Bouchon” on wikipedia
• “Jacques de Vaucanson” on wikipedia
• “Jacquard loom” on wikipedia

Deciphering hieroglyphics

Christians who feared Egypt’s demonic past
     eradicated the hieroglyphic script
     before the end of the fourth century.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian language evolved into Coptic,
     which had its own script called ‘Demotic.’
     Arabic displaced all this in the eleventh century.

For centuries, no one knew that hieroglyphics
     were both acrophonic and pictographic.
People thought these glyphs were arcane symbols
     of pagan wisdom or devil worship.
They didn’t know that Coptic
     was a direct descendant of Egyptian.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Champollion was an incredible linguist. He knew Coptic by the age of 16. By the age of 20, “he could also speak Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Amharic, Sanskrit, Avestan, Pahlavi, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Persian, and Ge'ez in addition to his native French.”

The fact that knowledge of the relation between Egyptian and Coptic was lost for centuries is an example of the destructiveness of religious bigotry, culturalism, and nationalism.

Egyptian hieroglyphics retain their occult, mystical, and magical connotations in Western culture. The Rosicrucians, for example, borrow Egyptian mysteries (as well as Greek and Druidic).

See also in The book of science:

• 1647-1678—Philosophical language—Francis Lodwick, Thomas Urquhart, George Dalgarno, Thomas Wilkins, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• 1839-1887—International auxiliary language—Joseph Schipfer, Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve, Jean Pirro, Johann Martin Schleyer, L. L. Zamenhof
• 2018—Shɑrpεn—Tom Sharp

Thermoelectric effect

Thomas Johann Seebeck discovered
in an electric circuit with a junction of two metals
that heating or cooling one side of the junction
resulted in an electric current
that deflected the arrow of a compass.

Seebeck thought he had discovered
a thermomagnetic effect, but Hans Christian Ørsted
observed that the magnetic deflection
was a result of the generated current,
and coined the term thermoelectricity.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Thomas Johann Seebeck and Hans Christian Ørsted are examples of remote partners, one to discover the phenomenon in 1821, and the other to explain it in 1834. The thermoelectric effect is also known as the Seebeck effect.

See also in The book of science:

• 1756—Pyroelectricity—Franz Ulrich Theodor Aepinus
• 1805-1876—Vapor-compression refrigeration—Oliver Evans, Jacob Perkins, John Gorrie, Alexander Twining, James Harrison, Ferdinand and Edmond Carré, Carl von Linde
• 1820—Electromagnetism—Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday
• 1827—Ohm’s law—Georg Ohm
• 1834—Peltier effect—Jean Charles Athanase Peltier
• 1864—Maxwell’s equations—James Clerk Maxwell
• 1880,1881—Piezoelectricity—Pierre Curie, Jacques Curie, Gabriel Lippmann
• 1920—Ferroelectricity—Joseph Valasek
• 1922,1926—Absorption refrigerator—Baltzar von Platen, Carl Munters, Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Thomas Johann Seebeck”
• “Hans Christian Ørsted”
• “Thermoelectric effect”
• “Thermocouple”
• “Thermopile”
• “Thermoelectric cooling”

Electric conductivity

Humphry Davy experimented with powerful direct currents
from an adjustable battery of voltaic cells at the Royal Society
consisting of two thousand double plates of zinc and copper
in various mixtures of water and nitrous and sulfuric acids.

In a series of experiments to determine the relations
of different conductors to the magnetism produced by electricity,

Humphry Davy found that induced magnetism
was not affected by the electrification of the magnetized metal,
or by its agitation in the case of liquid mercury in a glass tube,
or by whatever was used to conduct the electricity.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Cavendish’s “electric fluid” model was not far off considering that electrons would not be discovered until 1897.

Cavendish measured conductivity by how much of a shock it gave him. Davy measured resistance by how much a conducting wire would heat oil that it was submerged in, and he measured electromagnetism by how much iron filings the electromagnet would pick up.

Both Cavendish and Davy discovered that temperature effects conductivity.

See also in The book of science:

• 1745-1746—Leyden jar—Ewald Georg von Kleist, Pieter van Musschenbroek
• 1747—Electric charge—Benjamin Franklin
• 1756—Pyroelectricity—Franz Ulrich Theodor Aepinus
• 1827—Ohm’s law—Georg Ohm
• 1833,1843—Wheatstone bridge—Samuel Hunter Christie, Charles Wheatstone
• 1857—Geissler tube—Heinrich Geissler
• 1871—Resistance thermometer—Carl Wilhelm Siemens
• 1878—Bolometer—Samuel Pierpont Langley
• 1899—Loading coil—Oliver Heaviside, George Ashley Campbell, Mihajlo Pupin
• 1901—Disappearing-filament pyrometer—Ferdinand Kurlbaum, Ludwig Holborn, Harmon Northrup Morse
• 1902—Hot wire barretter—Reginald Fessenden

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Henry Cavendish”
• “Humphry Davy”
• “Electrical resistivity and conductivity”

Electromagnetism

Small particles act together as a wave.
Singly, sent through a slit one by one,
     each contributes to a beautiful pattern.

Scientists Ørsted, Ampère, Faraday—
	Danish, French, British—

—noticed a compass needle deflected
     near a wire carrying a current,
     the first discovery of the relationship
     between electricity and magnetism

—found that two electric wires magnetically attract
     when the currents flow in the same direction
     and created the first galvanometer
          to measure the flow of electricity

—demonstrated the first electric motor,
     created the first electric transformer
     and the first electric generator

More poems . . .

Commentary

The development of the field of electromagnetism is a good example of how scientists extend each others’ work, even working in different countries.

The strong interaction, the weak interaction, gravitation, and electromagnetism are the four fundamental interactions in nature. So many modern devices depend on electromagnetism (such as the telephone, radio, computers, wireless communications), but, even more profoundly, without electromagnetism there would be no light nor heat; atoms and molecules would not hold together and would not interact chemically with each other.

See also in The book of science:

• 1600—Magnetism—William Gilbert
• 1747—Electric charge—Benjamin Franklin
• 1791,1820—Galvanometer—Luigi Galvani, Hans Christian Ørsted, Johann Schweigger
• 1785—Coulomb’s law—Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
• 1778,1845—Diamagnetism—Sebald Justinus Brugmans, Michael Faraday
• 1804—Platinum group metals—William Hyde Wollaston, Smithson Tennant
• 1808—Atomic theory—John Dalton
• 1821,1834—Thermoelectric effect—Thomas Johann Seebeck, Hans Christian Ørsted
• 1827—Ohm’s law—Georg Ohm
• 1831—Faraday’s law of induction—Michael Faraday
• 1831—Electric generator—Michael Faraday
• 1834—Peltier effect—Jean Charles Athanase Peltier
• 1836—Faraday cage—Michael Faraday
• 1864—Maxwell’s equations—James Clerk Maxwell
• 1888—Ampere balance—William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
• 1896—Radio—Guglielmo Marconi
• 1897—Electron—Joseph John Thomson
• 1900—Quanta—Max Planck, Albert Einstein
• 1911—Superconductivity—Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
• 1946—Dynamo theory—Walter M. Elsasser
• 1948—Quantum electrodynamics—Hans Bethe, Julian Schwinger, Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman

Readings:

• “Hans Christian Ørsted” on wikipedia
• “André-Marie Ampère” on wikipedia
• “Michael Faraday” on wikipedia
• “Electromagnetism” on wikipedia; in particular, the “History of the theory” has more detail.

Wave optics

Sound waves vibrate longitudinally,
that is, along the direction they travel.

Thomas Young proposed
that light waves were mainly longitudinal.

But Augustin-Jean Fresnel
worked with François Arago

to establish the laws of interference
between rays of polarized light,

and realized, in order to explain polarization,
that light waves were entirely transverse.

More poems . . .

Commentary

These laws about light waves were not obvious; Fresnel and Arago were brilliant experimenters and made clever prisms and filters to superimpose parallel and orthogonally polarized rays of light. Fresnel is also famous for a prism, the Fresnel rhomb, that converts linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light.

See also in The book of science:

• 1669—Birefringence—Rasmus Bartholin
• 1678,1816—Huygens—Fresnel principle—Christiaan Huygens, Augustin-Jean Fresnel
• 1800—Wave nature of light—Thomas Young

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Augustin-Jean Fresnel”
• “François Arago”
• “Wave optics”
• “Fresnel-Arago laws”
• “Photon polarization”
• “Fresnel lens”
• “Fresnel rhomb”

Aethrioscope

How cold is the sky?
If you really want to know,
you can make an aethrioscope.

Put a differential thermometer
in a parabolic metallic cup
over a tall hollow pedestal.

Screen one bulb from the sky
and place the second bulb
at the focus of the cup.

When you expose the cup,
the radiative effect contracts the air
in the first bulb to pull the mercury up.

More poems . . .

Commentary

The radiative effect would let a device like a aethrioscope, exposed to a clear night sky, act as a heat sink to help drive a Stirling engine.

See also in The book of science:

• 1816—Stirling engine—Robert Stirling
• 1878—Bolometer—Samuel Pierpont Langley

Readings in wikipedia:

• “John Leslie”
• “Aethrioscope”

Selenium

Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn
owned a chemical plant that produced sulfuric acid
by the “lead chamber” process.

Berzelius was professor in chemistry and pharmacy
at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Gahn was chemist for the Swedish Board of Mines.

They found a red precipitate in the lead chambers
that burned with a smell like horseradish.

It was like tellurium, named for the Earth,
so they named it selenium for the Moon.

More poems . . .

Commentary

That red stuff that grows on your leftovers in the back of your refrigerator—you might want to have it analyzed. Don’t ignore the element of chance.

See also in The book of science:

• Index of elements
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Jöns Jacob Berzelius”
• “Johan Gottlieb Gahn”
• “Selenium”
• “Lead chamber process”
• “Photoconductivity”
• “Timeline of chemical element discoveries”

Cadmium

POEM_HERE

More poems . . .

Commentary

People who ate rice irrigated by water from the Jinzū River reported the problem in 1912. The cause was not confirmed to be cadmium poisoning until 1968.

See also in The book of science:

• Index of elements
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Karl Samuel Leberecht Hermann”
• “Friedrich Stromeyer”
• “Johann Christoff Heinrich Roloff” (in Esperanto)
• “Cadmium”
• “Itai-itai disease”
• “Timeline of chemical element discoveries”

Lithium

José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva
discovered a lithium aluminium phyllosilicate crystal
in a mine on the island of Utö, Sweden, in 1800,
but he didn’t know it contained a new element

which Johan August Arfwedson determined in 1817.
Arfwedson let Jöns Jacob Berzelius name
after the Greek for “stone,”
but they weren’t able to isolate the element

which William Thomas Brande did in 1821
using electrolysis of lithium oxide.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Lithium may yet provide a cure for what ails us, or at least for what ails our planet. Lithium air batteries could theoretically provide five to fifteen times the specific energy of lithium-ion batteries, competing well with gasoline and diesel.

See also in The book of science:

• Index of elements
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev

Readings in wikipedia:

• “José Bonifácio de Andrada”
• “Johan August Arfwedson”
• “William Thomas Brande”
• “Jöns Jacob Berzelius”
• “Lithium”
• “Petalite”
• “Lithium soap”
• “Lithia water”
• “Lithium-air battery”
• “Timeline of chemical element discoveries”

Germ layers

You can learn a lot from chicken eggs.
For the early stages of embryonic development
there’s no visible difference
between a chicken and a human.

After close study, I suppose, cracking
a lot of eggs, Heinz Christian Pander,
considered by many to be the founder of embryology,
discovered that gastrulation produces three cell layers.

More poems . . .

Commentary

The phrase “ontogeny recaptitulates phylogeny” expresses the idea that the development of embryos repeats the evolutionary stages of the species; however, evolution of a new creature is more interesting than the accumulation of changes to the end of its ancestor’s development. Eggs are single-cells but animal eggs are not the same as single-celled organisms; they contain only half the chromosomes of the mother.

See also in The book of science:

• 1669—Epigenesis—Jan Swammerdam
• 1826—Eggs and embryos—Karl Ernst von Baer
• 1952—Nerve growth—Rita Levi-Montalcini, Stanley Cohen

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Heinz Christian Pander”
• “Germ layer”
• “Blastula”
• “Gastrulation”
• “Embryogenesis”
• “Embryology”
• “Ploidy”

Kater’s pendulum

Calculating the precise length of a pendulum
     is difficult because
a pendulum is constructed of multiple materials
     and the masses of its parts
are not uniform.

But Christaan Huygens proved
     that a pendulum’s center of oscillation
is interchangeable with its pivot point;
     that is, if you interchange their positions,
the pendulum will have the same period.

Huygens also gave the formula
     that relates the length and period of a pendulum
to the force of gravity, so Gaspard de Prony realized
     you could use this formula and the length of a pendulum
to calculate the local force of gravity.

Independently, Henry Kater had the same realization
     but also built and refined the reversible pendulum
with reversible pivot blades
     and showed how to use it to calculate
the local force of gravity.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Kater’s pendulum was so commonly used to measure the strength of the gravitational field that instead of expressing the value in units of acceleration, distance per second squared, scientists expressed the value as the length of the seconds pendulum.

Jean Richer was the first to discover, in 1671, that gravity did not have the same magnitude over the surface of the earth. This was 244 years before Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

See also in The book of science:

• 1657—Pendulum clock—Christiaan Huygens
• 1671—Gravimetry—Jean Richer
• 1687—Principia Mathematica—Isaac Newton
• 1915—General relativity—Albert Einstein

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Christiaan Huygens”
• “Gaspard de Prony”
• “Henry Kater”
• “Kater’s pendulum”
• “Seconds pendulum”

Stirling engine

With a heat source on one end
and a heat sink on the other,
gas in chambers, and two pistons
     can move a wheel.

With a wheel mechanically powered,
two pistons can compress and expand a gas
to move heat from one end
     to another.

More poems . . .

Commentary

The Stirling engine is an “external combustion engine”; its inside is completely sealed; its operation requires an external source of heat.

An alpha-type Stirling engine has two cylinders and two pistons. A beta-type Stirling engine has one cylinder, one piston, and a gas displacer. A gamma-type Stirling engine has two cylinders, one piston, and a gas displacer.

See also in The book of science:

• 1678-1876—Internal combustion engine—Jean de Hautefeuille, Christiaan Huygens, Denis Papin, François Isaac de Rivaz, Nicéphore Niépce, Claude Niépce, Samuel Brown, William Barnett, Eugenio Barsanti, Felice Matteucci, Étienne Lenoir, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, Nikolaus Otto, Eugen Langen
• 1765—Steam engine—James Watt
• 1818—Aethrioscope—John Leslie
• 1847—Laws of thermodynamics—Benjamin Thompson, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, James Prescott Joule, Rudolf Clausius

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Robert Stirling”
• “Stirling engine”
• “External combustion engine”
• “Fluidyne engine”
• “Applications of the Stirling engine”

Electrical telegraph

Many people realized
electricity could be used
to communicate over distances.

People tried using
a wire for each letter and digit
and detecting a charge on the other end of the wires
using pith balls or bubbles produced in tubes of acid.

Francis Ronalds made the first working telegraph
using pulses of static electricity on a single wire
to turn a dial marked with the letters and digits
and standard phrases.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Much has been written about the importance of the telegraph in the United States. And today ham radio operators continue the tradition of communicating in Morse code.

See also in The book of science:

• 1876—Telephone—Alexander Graham Bell
• 1896—Radio—Guglielmo Marconi

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Francis Ronalds”
• “Carl Friedrich Gauss”
• “Wilhelm Eduard Weber”
• “David Alter”
• “Samuel Morse”
• “Alfred Vail”
• “William Fothergill Cooke”
• “Charles Wheatstone”
• “Electrical telegraph”
• “Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph”

Prout’s hypothesis

The atomic weights
     of the first fifty or so elements
seemed to be whole number multiples
     of the atomic weight of hydrogen,

so William Prout asked what if hydrogen
     were the only fundamental atom
and other elements were actually
     groupings of hydrogen?

More poems . . .

Commentary

Others proposed even more outlandish theories about the structure of the atom, including plum puddings, cubes, knots, and tiny planetary rings or solar systems. Prout’s hypothesis was a persuasive approximation of reality; Francis W. Aston was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1922 partly for the “whole-number rule,” a refinement of Prout’s hypothesis that took the existence of isotopes into account.

See also in The book of science:

• 1808—Atomic theory—John Dalton
• 1897—Electron—Joseph John Thomson
• 1913—Atom—Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr
• 1916—Chemical bond—Gilbert N. Lewis
• 1922—Isotope—Francis William Aston, Frederick Soddy
• 1932—Neutron—James Chadwick

Readings in wikipedia:

• “William Prout”
• “Prout’s hypothesis”
• “Ernest Rutherford”
• “Whole number rule”

Fossil sequences

William Smith, surveyor and civil engineer,
independently discovered and first illustrated
     how fossils can be used to identify geological strata
     under the fields and pastures,
          valleys, hills, and mountains.

Carefully documenting layers of sediments
     in the channels of the new canals,
     coal pits, road and railway cuttings,
     quarries and escarpments,
identifying rock outcrops,
     their inclinations and distributions,
and matching them up according to the fossils in them,
     Smith was able to map actual strata
          and predict the rest
     over large areas of England, Wales,
          and parts of Scotland.

He published one of the earliest
     detailed large-scale geological maps,
The Geological Map of England and Wales
     showing “the courses and continuity
     of the strata in their order of superposition.”

More poems . . .

Commentary

William Smith was a surveyer and civil engineer, but he is best known for his work as a geologist. He is known as the founder of stratigraphy the father of English geology, but he was recognized for his work only late in life.

Working at Mearns Pit at High Littleton, part of the Somerset coalfield, Smith took an interest in the inclination and succession of strata and surmised that the pattern could be traced eastward and northward across England. His subsequent work as an surveyor's assistant and as an employee of the Somersetshire Coal Canal Company, and later his travels in his private practice as an engineer gave him opportunity to learn more. He was the first to correlate each strata with the fossils that it contained, or as he wrote, the “fossils peculiar to itself.” He published the first large-scale geological map of Britain.

“Peculiarities of the strata” is a title of one of Smith's illustrations, from which the whole of this poem borrows names of strata and fossils and descriptions of materials produced from the strata. Many of the names of the strata were invented by Smith and are still in use today. The layered details above represent Smith’s great breadth of geological knowledge.

I have always been fascinated by glimpses of the masses that underly the surface of this land on which we build and plant.

See also in The book of science:

• 1565—Fossils—Conrad Gessner
• 1569—Mercator projection—Gerardus Mercator
• 1669—Stratigraphy—Nicolas Steno
• 1670—Palynology—Nehemiah Grew, Robert Kidston
• 1859—Origin of species—Charles Darwin
• 1909—Burgess shale—Charles Doolittle Walcott
• 1929—Geomagnetic reversals—Motonori Matuyama

Readings:

• “William Smith (geologist)” on wikipedia
• William ‘Strata’ Smith on the Web” at the University of New Hampshire Earth Sciences
• “Somerset Coal Canal” on wikipedia
• “Stratigraphy” on wikipedia

Metronome

Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel invented the metronome,
     weighting a pendulum
          on both sides of the pivot.
The next year,
     Johann Maelzel added a scale
          and patented it.
In 1817, Ludwig van Beethoven, a friend of Maelzel,
     added metronome markings
          to one of his compositions.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Poème symphonique makes no statement about the clockwork universe or the universality of entropy. It’s fun to listen to today because of the complex rhythms that a simultaneous multiplicity of different intervals may create.

See also in The book of science:

• 1657—Pendulum clock—Christiaan Huygens

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel”
• “Johann Maelzel”
• “Metronome”
• “Poème symphonique”
• “Fluxus”

Spectral lines

In the gaseous atmosphere of the sun
each element absorbed
     a different combination of wavelengths leaving
its own pattern of dark lines visible
     in the spectroscope
that Joseph von Fraunhofer in Bavaria built
     using his famous achromatic lenses.

Peering through a small scope
     mounted to calibrate a circular scale
     von Fraunhofer counted 574
and measured the wavelengths of 324
     spectral lines.

A pure scientific observation
began a sequence of inspirations
resulting in a practical tool
     for chemical and astronomical
     analysis.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Joseph von Fraunhofer was an orphan apprenticed to a glassmaker. His workhouse collapsed and he was buried in the rubble, but he was rescued by Prince Maximilian Joseph, who subsequently ensured that Joseph was treated better and could continue his education.

Early opticians ground their own lenses; von Fraunhofer constructed his own furnace, invented and made his own glass, designed and built machines for grinding and polishing lenses, and designed his own optical instruments. He designed and built telescopes and microscopes, and he invented the spectroscope.

Like the other glassmakers of his time, he was poisoned by heavy metal vapors and died young.

The absorption lines in the solar spectrum are still named Fraunhafer lines.

See also in The book of science:

• 1804—Platinum group metals—William Hyde Wollaston, Smithson Tennant
• 1855—Bunsen burner—Robert Bunsen, Peter Desaga
• 1859—Analytical spectroscopy—Robert Bunsen, Gustav Kirchhoff

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Joseph von Fraunhofer”
• “Spectrometer”
• “Achromatic lens”

Chemical nomenclature

Chemical notation began with alchemists
who associated each known metal with a planet
and so used the planetary symbols for them.

In 1787, Antoine Lavoisier proposed
naming compounds by class and species,
similar to Linnaeus’s system for plants and animals.

After 1808, the state of art for describing
chemical elements and their compounds
were diagrams using John Dalton’s circular symbols.

Today, the International Union
of Pure and Applied Chemistry maintains
modern rules and standards for chemical nomenclature.

This system began with a proposal
by Jöns Jacob Berzelius suggesting
instead of diagrams, using letters and numbers—

the letters to be based on the Latin names
of the elements, and the numbers
to show their proportions in a compound.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Humphry Davy’s name for potassium is from “potash,” which is from the fact that it was obtained from leaf or wood ashes in a pot. It might seem arbitrary; however, the origin of kalium in Latin is similar. Kalium is from Arabic al qalīy, which means “plant ashes.” The origin of language is association, or, as Ezra Pound claimed, all language is buried metaphor.

See also in The book of science:

• 1808—Atomic theory—John Dalton
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Jöns Jacob Berzelius”
• “Chemical nomenclature”
• “Symbol (chemistry)”

Mohs scale

Relative hardness of minerals
is easy to determine with a scratch test,

a means described by Theophrastus
in his treatise On Stones around 300 BCE,

but not formalized until 1812
when Friedrich Mohs proposed

a non-linear ordinal scale
of mineral hardness

from 1, represented by talc,
to 10, represented by diamond.

More poems . . .

Commentary

I have known about the Mohs scale since college, but have never before been introduced to other hardness scales and measuring devices. Here is where common knowledge diverges from technical knowledge. Reading about hardness testing technology affirms my feeling that spending a modest amount of time studying a subject can qualify a normal person as an expert.

See also in The book of science:

• 1669—Stratigraphy—Nicolas Steno
• 1670—Palynology—Nehemiah Grew, Robert Kidston

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Friedrich Mohs”
• “Mohs scale of mineral hardness”
• “Scratch hardness”
• “Sclerometer”
• “Brinell scale”
• “Janka hardness test”
• “Meyer hardness test”
• “Rockwell scale”
• “Shore durometer”
• “Vickers hardness test”
• “Knoop hardness test”
• “Leeb rebound hardness test”
• “Schmidt hammer”
• “Persoz pendulum”
• “List of cheeses”
• “List of French cheeses”

Iodine

It was an accident, but
Bernard Courtois realized
he had found something new,
an element that no one else
had previously described.

Courtois was processing
seaweed for sodium carbonate,
but he added too much acid,
making a cloud of purple vapor
that crystallized on cold surfaces.

Courtois gave samples
to Ampère and Gay-Lussac,
who confirmed the discovery,
and Ampère gave some to Davy,
who named it iodine.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Iodine is named after the color of its violet vapor. Tincture of iodine for topical application (2% in ethanol and water) had more of a rusty color.

See also in The book of science:

• Index of elements
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Bernard Courtois”
• “Iodine”
• “Tincture of iodine”
• “Timeline of chemical element discoveries”

Avogadro constant

The number of particles in a mole of any element
The number of particles in twelve grams of carbon-12
6.022140857 × 10 to the 23rd power (give or take 0.000000074 x 1023)

     In 1909, Jean Baptiste Perrin determined its value
     and named it after Amedeo Avogadro.

More poems . . .

Commentary

The value of the Avogadro constant is a very large number even though it’s a count of a small quantity of incredibly small things.

See also in The book of science:

• 1774—Conservation of mass—Antoine Lavoisier
• 1834—Laws of electrolysis—Michael Faraday
• 1834—Faraday efficiency—Michael Faraday
• 1908—Brownian motion—Robert Brown, Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein, Jean Baptiste Perrin

Readings in wikipedia:

• “Amedeo Avogadro”
• “Jean Baptiste Perrin”
• “Avogadro constant”
• “Loschmidt constant”
• “Boltzmann constant”
• “Faraday constant”
• “Mole (unit)”

Acquired characteristics

Jean-Baptiste
     Pierre Antoine
          de Monet,
               Chevalier
                    de la Marck.

More poems . . .

Commentary

Lamarck’s name itself, showing his Christian, French, and aristocratic heritage, is symbolic of acquired characteristics, which is ironic because we know that genetic characteristics of children are not acquired by their parents during their lives.

Using the development of a giraffe’s neck as an example of besoin is ironic in light of the reason that Lamarck had to leave the French army. Seventeen years old, having shown bravery and leadership under fire in the Pomeranian War, he was promoted on the spot to the rank of officer, whereupon one of his comrades “playfully lifted him by the head,” causing inflamation of the lymph nodes and a complicated and lengthy treatment.

Lamarck contributed to our theory of evolution two ideas that are true:

1. Individuals lose characteristics that they do not use and gain characteristics that are useful.
2. Individuals inherit the characteristics of their ancestors.

Lamarck was one of the first to realize that evolution is governed by natural laws, and his work gave us the first cohesive theory of evolution.

Darwin’s concept of “survival of the fittest” has eclipsed Lamarck’s concept of besoin. Natural selection works without wants or needs; evolution is purely a materialistic game of chance. Considered merely as a description of evolutionary change, besoin is appealing. It is appealing to consider a specie’s needs over time in its successful adaption to a changing environment and competition. However, besoin is romantic and ignores the fact that evolutionary change doesn’t have a moral cause, that it does not achieve progress toward a higher state, and that the individual has no role in winning the race.

See also in The book of science:

• 1735—Naming species—Carl Linnaeus
• 1796—Comparative anatomy—Georges Cuvier, John Hunter
• 1834—Cro-Magnons—Édouard Lartet, Louis Lartet
• 1842—Dinosaur—Richard Owen
• 1856—Neanderthal man—Hermann Schaaffhausen
• 1859—Origin of species—Charles Darwin
• 1860—Archaeopteryx—Richard Owen, Thomas Henry Huxley
• 1918—Neo-Darwinism—Ronald Fisher, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, Sewall Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky
• 1923—Crop diversity—Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov

Wikipedia has articles on both Lamarck and Lamarckism, his theory of evolution:

• “Jean-Baptiste Lamarck” on wikipedia
• “Lamarckism” on wikipedia
• Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould is an excellent resource for understanding the mechanisms of evolution.

Atomic theory

invisible & irreducible
atoms remained controversial
since Democritus in the fifth century

until John Dalton
     seeing that common chemical processes
     produced elements in fixed proportions—
          so much hydrogen per oxygen in water
          so much oxygen per carbon in carbon dioxide

claimed that
     chemical elements are made of atoms
     atoms of the same element have the same weight
     atoms of different elements have different weights
     atoms combine in only small
          whole-number ratios to form molecules
          (which he called “compound atoms”)
     and atoms cannot be created or destroyed
          (by chemical processes).

More poems . . .

Commentary

Before we had atomic force microscopes, the existence of atoms and molecules had to be deduced from chemical experiments.

Dalton was the first to assemble the evidence into a complete theory, and the first to prepare a table of the atomic weights of known elements and molecules. As a poet, I am impressed that he invented an alphabet to symbolize the elements and molecules. These are more interesting and artistic than the two-letter chemical symbols based on the Greek that we use today.

My editorial insertion is the parenthetical “(by chemical processes)” in the list of Dalton’s claims, since we know now that an atom may be destroyed.

Around 1787, Dalton rediscovered George Hadley’s theory about trade winds. In 1801 he published a book on English grammar. Dalton suffered a less common form of color-blindness, deuteranopia, and was the first to describe and explain color blindness, proposing that it was due to a discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball, which was wrong. In his honor color blindness is sometimes called Daltonism, and the unit of atomic mass the dalton.

See also in The book of science:

• 1661—Chymistry—Robert Boyle
• 1662—Boyle’s law—Richard Towneley, Henry Power, Robert Boyle
• 1735—Trade winds—George Hadley
• 1774—Conservation of mass—Antoine Lavoisier
• 1815—Prout’s hypothesis—William Prout
• 1851—Foucault’s pendulum—Léon Foucault
• 1864—Maxwell’s equations—James Clerk Maxwell
• 1865—Benzene ring—August Kekulé
• 1869—Periodic table—Dmitri Mendeleev
• 1908—Brownian motion—Robert Brown, Ludwig Boltzmann, Albert Einstein, Jean Baptiste Perrin
• 1911—Superconductivity—Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
• 1922—Isotope—Francis William Aston, Frederick Soddy
• 1913—Atom—Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr
• 1932—Neutron—James Chadwick
• 1942—Nuclear fission—Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, Otto Robert Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Enrico Fermi
• 1956—Visual phototransduction—George Wald

You can find lots of information about John Dalton and atomic theory:

• “John Dalton” on wikipedia, including the chart of elements from Dalton’s A New System of Chemical Philosophy
• The Robinson Library biography of John Dalton