Chapter 58:Shaping the World: The White Technological Revolution Part Two: Electricity and to the Moon Continued from part one. Oil Wells The first commercial exploitation of natural oil, known originally as "rock oil", came in 1852, when the Canadian-German physician and geologist, Abraham Gessner, obtained a patent for producing kerosene from crude oil. The first proper oil wells were dug in Germany in 1857, but the first successful oil well dig was carried out by Edwin Drake at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, in North America in 1859. Drake's success marked the beginning of the rapid growth of the modern petroleum industry, with the scientist, George Kettering, finally distilling high octane fuel from the crude oil product. Electricity Electricity has been the harnessing power upon which almost every other advance has been based: there is now not a place on earth that this invention has not reached. The English scientist, William Gilbert, coined the word "electricity" in 1600, when he used the Greek word for "amber" to describe the phenomena in a book on the subject; The German scientist, Otto von Guericke, invented the first machine for producing an electric charge in 1672; while the contemporary French scientist Charles Du Fay was the first to distinguish between positive and negative charges in electricity; The British scientist, Joseph Priestly, in 1766, proved the law that the force between electric charges varies inversely with the square of the distance between the charges; The Italian physicist, Alessandro Volta, developed the precursor to the modern electrical battery in 1880, a breakthrough for which the unit of electricity, the Volt, was named after him; The Danish scientist, Hans Christian Oersted, discovered in 1819 that a magnetic field exists around an electric current flow; The British scientist, Michael Faraday, proved in 1831 that a current flowing in a coil of wire can induce electromagnetically a current in a nearby coil; In 1840, the British scientist, James Prescott Joule, and the German scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz, demonstrated that electric circuits obey the law of the conservation of energy and that electricity is a form of energy. The unit of energy, the Joule, is named after the Englishman; The British inventor, James Clerk Maxwell, investigated the properties of electromagnetic waves and light and developed the theory that the two are identical. Maxwell's work also provided the basis for the Italian engineer, Guglielmo Marconi, who in 1896, harnessed these waves to produce the first practical radio; The Dutch physicist, Hendrik Lorentz, developed the electron theory, which is the basis of modern electrical theory, in 1892; The American scientist, Robert Millikan, was the first to measure the charge on an electron in 1909; The widespread use of electricity as a source of power is largely due to the work of such pioneering American engineers and inventors as Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla; The transistor was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories by the American physicists Walter Houser Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Bradford Shockley. For this achievement, the three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. Shockley is noted as the initiator and director of the research program in semiconducting materials that led to the discovery of this group of devices; his associates, Brattain and Bardeen, are credited with the invention of an important type of transistor. (Shockley then devoted the rest of his life to a speaking tour which took him up and down America, in which he advocated the belief that Blacks and Whites have different Intelligence Quotas caused by their genes). Television The concept of television was pioneered by the Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1873, predicted the existence of the electromagnetic waves that would enable pictures and sound to be sent by air instead of along wire as was then currently the case. In 1873, the English scientist, Willoughby Smith, and his assistant, Joseph May, discovered photoconductivity after observing that the electrical conductivity of the element selenium changes when light falls on it. This characteristic was used in the vidicon television camera tube. Photoemission, the effect that certain substances emit electrons when exposed to light, was discovered in 1888, by the German physicist, Wilhelm Hallwachs. This effect was applied to the image-orthicon television camera tube. In 1906, the American, Lee De Forest, patented the triode vacuum tube. By 1920, the tube had been improved to the point where it could be used to amplify electric currents for television. The German engineer, Paul Nipkow, designed the first true television system in 1884, which consisted of a punched hole disk scanning in an image piece by piece into a camera with the image so scanned being transmitted to a receiver which used another spinning disk to project the image once again. Nipkow's mechanical scanner was used from 1923 to 1925 in experimental television systems developed in the United States by Charles F. Jenkins, and in England by the Scotsman and inventor, John Logie Baird, the latter developing the Nipkow disk system to the point where he is generally credited with the development of modern television. The first electronic method of scanning an image for use in conjunction with Baird's development was developed by an Englishman, A. A. Campbell-Swinton, in 1908. This was followed in the 1920s, by the American engineer, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, who devised the television camera, which converted the image captured, into an electrical signal, an image dissector. Cathode rays, or beams of electrons in vacuumised glass tubes, were first noted by the British chemist and physicist, Sir William Crookes, in 1878. By 1908, Campbell-Swinton and a Russian, Boris Rosing, had independently suggested that a cathode-ray tube (CRT) be used to reproduce the television picture on a phosphor-coated screen. The CRT was developed for use in television during the 1930s by the American electrical engineer, Allen B. DuMont. DuMont's method of picture reproduction is essentially the same as the one used today. The first public broadcasts of television were carried out in 1928 in New York, with the receivers being built by Alexander Graham Bell's company, General Electric, while the first public broadcasting of television programs took place in London in 1936. Color television was conceptualized and demonstrated by John Logie Baird in 1928, by using a Nipkow disk containing the three primary colors of light, red green and blue. The system of using the primary colors was perfected in 1953, and color television was introduced in that year. Flight The first lighter than air flights were undertaken in 1783, by two French brothers, Jacques and Joseph Montgolfier, using heated air in balloons. That same year the French physicist, Jean Francois de Rozier, made the first manned balloon flights near Paris. In 1785, the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard, accompanied by John Jeffries, an American, made the first balloon crossing of the English Channel. Sir George Cayley Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was an English inventor who developed the concept of the modern airplane, and is considered to be the founder of the science of aerodynamics. The essential form of the modern airplane, a rigid-wing structure driven by a then yet to be invented engine, was designed by Cayley in 1799. In 1808, Cayley had persuaded his coachman to man a glider he had built which was then launched: it carried the protesting employee some 275 meters (900 feet) before crashing: the first recorded flight by any person in an aircraft. Cayley then published his findings in a paper, On Aerial Navigation (1810) which earned him the title of the Father of Aviation. In this paper he laid out the basic ground rules for aviation which are still in use to this day: inclined rigid wings; rudder steering control and streamlining. Samuel Langley The first heavier than air self propelled aircraft was built in 1896, by the American inventor, Samuel Pierpont Langley. His aircraft, which he called the Aerodrome, was launched by catapult on the Potomac river in Virginia, was unmanned, but still won renown for being able to fly under its own power. Wright Brothers
The first powered manned aircraft flight was undertaken by the two American brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright. Starting with self built gliders, the Wright brothers built their first propeller in 1903 and on 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, they made the first powered airplane flights in history. Orville Wright, who manned the first powered flight, also invented the first wind tunnel in 1901 as part of the brothers' experimentation to find the correct wing shape. From then on, the design of aircraft improved by leaps and bounds, spurred on by two world wars, both of which saw the aircraft being turned to military applications with massive design improvements. Long Distance Flight In 1909, a French aviator, Louis Bleriot, crossed the English channel in an aircraft, laying the basis for the development of intercontinental flight. In 1910, the American pilot Eugene Ely took off from and landed on warships. In 1911 the US Army used a Wright brothers' biplane to make the first live bombing test from an airplane. In 1911, the American inventor and aviator Glenn Curtiss introduced the first practical seaplane. 1913 saw the first truly long distance flight from France to Egypt and the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean Sea from France to Tunisia. Commercial aviation began in January of 1914, just 10 years after the Wrights' first flight, with the first regularly scheduled passenger line in the world operating between Saint Petersburg and Tampa, Florida. The Jet Aircraft
The first jet engine was designed and built by the British engineer Sir Frank Whittle in 1937. His invention was not well received in Britain; and in less than two years, a German aeronautical engineer, Willie Messerschmidt (head of the Messerschmidt aircraft company) had produced a German jet engine. In 1939 Messerschmidt produced the first aircraft to accompany the jet engine - with the first jet flight in the world taking place in Nazi Germany that year. The Nazis thereafter maintained their lead in jet engine propulsion right through the Second World War, putting the Messerschmidt Me 262, the world's first jet fighter, into operational use in November 1944. Messerschmidt's factory also produced the unstable Me 163 Komet, which was the world's first rocket powered interceptor aircraft, which would swoop down on enemy bombers at a fantastic speed.
After the war, Messerschmidt's jet engine was studied with renewed interest, and turned to peaceful applications, with the first jet passenger aircraft entering service in the early 1950s. However it was only with the introduction of the Boeing 707 jet liner in 1958, that jet passenger aircraft finally assumed the direction by which it is known today. The 707 changed passenger flight overnight: the flying time from New York City to London, England, dropped to less than eight hours, halving the time taken by propeller driven aircraft. The Helicopter The first recorded design of a helicopter - which was never built - was by Leonardo da Vinci around the year 1500. Although Da Vinci never saw his idea take practical form, the basic idea he conceptualized formed the basis of the development of the helicopter. Many inventors tried their hand at perfecting the original Da Vinci design, but the first successful helicopter was a twin-rotor machine designed by the German engineer Heinrich Focke, which was flown in 1936 in Nazi Germany. This was followed in 1939, by the Russian-American Igor Sikorsky's single rotor helicopter which made its first flight in Ohio. After the Second World War the helicopter was refined and became highly used in both military and civilian applications. Atomic Power The British chemist John Dalton (1766-1844) is regarded as the father of atomic theory. He believed that the particles or atoms of different elements were distinguished from one another by their weights, and in 1803, published the first table of comparative atomic weights, inaugurating the quantitative atomic theory. The next great step in atomic research came in 1895, when the German scientist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, invented the technology known as X rays, with its indispensable medical uses. The French scientist, Pierre Curie, and his Polish wife, Marie, then made a number of breakthroughs in the study and research of nuclear energy, discovering the elements polonium and radium. Marie became the first scientist to isolate the pure metal radium. The British physicist, Ernest Rutherford, discovered the alpha, beta and gamma rays of radiation given off by uranium, allowing scientists to further penetrate the secrets of the atom. Rutherford established that the mass of the atom is concentrated in its nucleus and that electrons circle the nucleus, each with different electrical charges. Particle Accelerator In 1930, the American physicist, Ernest Lawrence, developed the first particle accelerator, called a cyclotron. This machine generates electrical attractive and repulsive forces that accelerate atomic particles while they are spun round in a vacuum by the electromagnetic force of a very big magnet. Nuclear Reactions In 1932, two British scientists, Sir John D. Cockcroft and Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton, were the first to use artificially accelerated particles to successfully disintegrate the nucleus of an atom. They produced a beam of protons (positive particles) which were boosted to high speed by means of a high-voltage device called a voltage multiplier. These particles were then used to bombard a lithium target to produce the desired result. Nuclear Applications It became inevitable that the advent of the Second World War would see nuclear research turned to military purposes: in both Germany and America, scientists worked feverishly to build an atom bomb. The Germans were the first to start with nuclear fission experiments - fission being the igniter for a nuclear reaction - but their efforts were seriously hampered by the large-scale bombing of their country. In America, the Italian-American scientist, Enrico Fermi, perfected nuclear fission and a team was set up to develop the atom bomb in great secrecy under the code name the Manhattan Project. The practicalities of fitting Fermi's fission device into a bomb which could be delivered by air were completed by mid 1945, and the atom bomb was used against Japan, ending the Second World War in a mushroom cloud. Electrical Power After the war, nuclear research remained primarily devoted to military weapons, but also started to have civilian applications: by the late 1950s and early 1960s, nuclear power plants had started to appear in Western Europe, America and the Soviet Union, all manufacturing electrical power for consumer consumption but also producing dangerous used fuel effluent which will remain active and dangerous for thousands of years. Space Exploration Almost all theory of space flight was worked out by three brilliant men over a period of nearly three centuries - from 1600 to 1900.
Robert Goddard
The American scientist, Dr. Robert H. Goddard, is considered to be the father of practical modern rocketry. His experiments with solid and liquid fueled rockets formed much of the basis of the development of ballistic missiles, earth-orbiting satellites, and interplanetary exploration. His first rocket launch was in 1926, in Massachusetts, and although it only flew for 2.5 seconds, it proved that rockets could work. In 1930, he launched a new rocket that reached 2,000 feet and a speed of 500 miles per hour: the first truly successful rocket. Nazi Rockets Led the Space Race The German rocket scientist, Hermann Oberth, is known as the Father of Space Travel for his ground breaking book in the 1920s called 'The Rocket into Planetary Space'. Oberth's ideas were well received by Adolf Hitler, and funding was made available to Oberth to assemble a rocket research and development team. One of the scientists that Oberth recruited was Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), later to become famous in his own right.
Von Braun's team developed the first intercontinental ballistic missile in the world: the V-2 rocket which was used to bombard Britain and Antwerp in the closing months of the Second World War. Left: The Nazi V2 rocket, designed by Wernher von Braun, was the first man made vehicle to penetrate outer space. After the end of the Second World War, Von Braun and many of his team were taken to the USA, where they developed that country's missile capability and eventually the NASA space program. Von Braun's team designed the Saturn V rocket which took men to the moon. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviets and Americans each grabbed as many of the Nazi rocket scientists as they could find. Von Braun had however arranged for the removal of 500 of his top staff and their work - 100 remaining V2 rockets - to the west, to await capture by the Americans. His gamble paid off, and he and most of his colleagues were whisked off to America to work for that country's military and later space rocket programs.
The Soviets did however manage to capture some stragglers: they in turn were taken back to Russia and put to work for the Communists, producing the first long range Soviet missiles, known as Scuds, and the first Soviet space rockets (which even kept the distinctive V2 shape). The first Soviet Satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched in 1957, followed in 1961 by the first manned spaceflight, that of Yuri Gagarin. In both cases it was a derivation of the V2 rocket which put the Soviets into space. Von Braun in America Meanwhile, in America, about two thirds of the original V2 team had been re-assembled at the White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico. Led by Von Braun and Oberth, the team continued their work and in 1950, Von Braun was transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, where for ten years he headed the Redstone missile program, becoming a naturalized US citizen in 1955. In 1958, the first American satellite was launched, using a V2 derivative rocket as its launch vehicle. After Oberth retired, Von Braun was in 1960 appointed director of development operations at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA) in Huntsville. There the original V2 rocket was redeveloped and in the form of the Redstone rocket, was used to put Alan Shepard, the first American into space in 1961. So it came to be that rockets originally developed under the Nazis were responsible for the first manned flight in space and the basis of both America and the Soviet Union's space programs. Von Braun's last great contribution to space exploration was his design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, which took the manned Apollo missions to the moon. The Saturn V rocket gained distinction in one more way; it became the only series of rockets ever developed to have worked perfectly on every launch, a record which has never been equaled before or since.
Moon Walk During the next three decades, thousands of spacecraft of all varieties were launched, mostly in earth orbit. Soon space flight then became almost routine until the first manned mission to the moon took place in 1969.
Two Americans, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were the first of earth's inhabitants to walk on another planet - they were followed by other missions, each one more remarkable than the last. All told, twelve men walked on the moon's surface and returned to earth. The emphasis was then moved to building orbiting space stations, and in 1973, the famous space station, Skylab, was launched. The Soviet Union also put up the Soyuz space stations, some of which have been used to establish long distance endurance records in space. Unmanned craft were sent out to the far corners of the universe, with some penetrating out into the open vastness of space carrying messages of greetings from earth. The next technological breakthrough was the development of a reusable space craft, and the American Space Shuttle, was born: powered by two disposable fuel tanks, the shuttle entered earth's orbit to deploy or catch orbiting satellites, and then returned to earth using its aerodynamic design to glide onto a landing strip. Political Correctness It was during the era of the development of the Space Shuttle that it dawned upon the purveyors of political correctness that the entire space program - from scientists to astronauts - had been an exclusively White affair. Objections were raised, first at the presence of some of Von Braun's original team who were still alive (one was stripped of his American citizenship and deported back to Germany, nearly 40 years after he had been invited to America by the US government), and then against the fact that there were no Non-white astronauts. Giving in to political pressure, NASA then hunted down suitable non-White astronauts to fill a politically-demanded affirmative-action program. ALMOST UNKNOWN BUT IMPORTANT In addition to the famous inventors, there are a host of others who are virtually unknown but whose contributions to modern society are no less important. James King was an American, who in 1851, patented the first washing machine to use a drum. The first electric-powered washing machines was introduced in 1908, by the Hurley Machine Company of Chicago, Illinois. Rowland Hill, a schoolmaster in England, invented the postage stamp in 1837, an act for which he was knighted. Through his efforts the first stamp in the world was issued in England in 1840. Jesse W. Reno was an American who patented the first inclined conveyor belt - or escalator - in 1891. This was followed in short order by the American inventor, Charles D. Seeberger, who added steps to the conveyor belt, creating the modern escalator. Charles Hanson Greville, an English scientist, first identified the chemical properties in natural rubber (1860), opening the way for others to start working on the development of synthetic rubbers. Finally, after research by teams of scientists in Germany and the United States, the first viable synthetic rubbers were produced in America after the Second World War. Robert W. Thompson was a Scottish inventor who, in 1845, developed the first pneumatic tyre. John Wesley Hyatt was an American who developed modern plastics in 1870, after entering a competition held by a billiard ball manufacturer looking for an alternative to ivory. Hyatt developed a method of pressure-working pyroxylin, a cellulose nitrate of low nitration that had been plasticised with camphor and an alcohol solvent. The substance, patented under the trademark Celluloid, was the first plastic. Using the same principles, numerous other types of plastics were, then, created. Leo Hendrik Baekland, a Belgian American chemist, invented Bakelite in 1906, using Hyatt's basic principle of plastics manufacture. In 1920, a breakthrough in the understanding of the nature of the molecular nature of plastics by the German chemist, Hermann Staudinger, saw the development of all modern plastics in laboratories in Germany and America shortly thereafter. Johan Vaaler was a Norwegian who invented the paper clip in 1899. Percy Spencer was an American who invented the microwave oven in the late 1950s after experiments with a magnetron, a device designed to produce short radio waves for a radar system. Claude Chappe was a Frenchman who invented the mechanical semaphore system for ships in 1792. William Murdock was an Englishman who invented practical industrial-scale gas lighting - later extended to streets in 1802. Jean Jacques Dony was a Belgian who was the first person to produce an extract of zinc in 1805. Friedriech Woehler was a German who in 1827 was the first to produce an extract of aluminum from clay. Nicolas Appert was a Frenchman who developed the technique for the sterilization of tinned food in 1809. Benjamin Delessert was a Frenchman to extract sugar from beet sugar in 1812. Arsitide Berges was a Frenchman who installed the first hydro-electric station in the world in France in 1870. Henri Sainte-Claire was a Frenchman who started the first industrial aluminum production in 1854. Ernest Solvay was a Belgian who started the first industrial soda production in 1861. Hilaire de Charbonnet was a Frenchman who invented artificial silk in 1884. Charles Tellier was a Frenchman who invented the modern fridge in 1867. Percy Gilchrist and Sidney Thomas were two Englishmen who jointly extracted the first phosphorus from iron in 1875. PLT Heroult in France and CM Hall in America, independently produced aluminum by electrolysis in 1866. Eugene Turpin was a Frenchman who invented Melinite in 1892. Herman Dresser was a German chemist who invented Aspirin in 1893. Frederick Hopkins was an Englishman who discovered the existence of vitamins in 1912. Racial Implications As the reader can see, it is no exaggeration to say that there is almost nothing in any modern society which has not been invented by a member of the White race at some stage in history. It is truly no exaggeration to say that White technological know-how has physically shaped the very earth itself - this despite the Whites being an absolute minority of the globe's population. Part One: Early Inventions and Firearms All material (c) copyright Ostara Publications, 1999. Re-use for commercial purposes strictly forbidden. | ||||||||||||||
