Posts Tagged ‘The Future Then’
Archive Gallery: 10 Renowned Scientists Make Their PopSci Debut
Early appearances by Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Ernest Rutherford, and other notable 20th-century scientists
One of our first notable contributors was the father of the telephone himself, Alexander Graham Bell. You'd think he'd be a busy man, but in between racing to the patent office and tinkering with his devices, Bell found the time to write a lengthy article about using tellurium selenium alloys to produce high-quality sound. If that process sounds a little arcane, don't worry -- Bell provided illustrations for clarity.
As much as we hoped to see a piece written by Albert Einstein, it turns out that most prominent scientists declined to contribute entire articles to us after the turn of the century. Chances are, they were too preoccupied with spending their Nobel Prize winnings to hammer out essays for consumer magazines.
On the other hand, it's hard to resist the charms of a glowing secondhand account. After spending a day with Tesla, our journalist said, "To talk with Dr. Tesla is to become acquainted with an extraordinary life packed with adventure into uncharted realms of knowledge." Elsewhere in the article, his glee practically radiates off the page.
Given the number of innovators who cropped up in the past 138 years, we couldn't include every historical figure featured on our pages. But do a quick search through our and see if you don't find at least one ode to your favorites.
Click through our to see the earliest PopSci cameos by Albert Einstein, Robert H. Goddard, Marie Curie, and more eminent scientists from the 20th century.
Archive Gallery: The Best of Biomimicry
How caterpillars, seagulls and winged sycamore seeds became tanks, airplanes and helicopters.
We realized a long, long time ago--centuries, perhaps even thousands of years before the publication of Popular Science, shocking as that sounds--that nature provides the best . We've borrowed canals from beavers, towers from termites and reflectors from cat's eyes. More recently, George de Mestral patented Velcro in the 1940s after seeing how burrs stuck on the fur of his dog. Although the words "bionics," "biomimetics," and "biomimicry" became popular only after the 1960s, history shows that nature has always provided ideas on solving everyday problems. Our don't go back to the time of Leonardo da Vinci and his bird-like flying machines, but we can take you to the late 19th century, where we applied those same principles for building our first practical airplanes.
To prepare for their flight at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers studied the movements of pigeons to figure out how they stayed aloft when they were heavier than air. Their success inspired scores of successors to improve on the airplane by studying various facets of nature. One of Orville Wright's pupils caught and stuffed seagulls to examine their wingspan. His gull plane, which could reportedly take off and land in your backyard, actually resembled a seagull (see above photo). Meanwhile, two French inventors examined whirling sycamore seeds in an effort to apply those same motions, reversed, to a hovering helicopter.
Some examples are more literal than others. Frank Lloyd Wright based his designs for the SC Johnson & Sons research laboratory on a tree, but on the outside, it looks a typical imposing minimalistic structure. On the other hand, Barney Connett's fish submarine actually looks like a fish - scales, bulging eyes, paddle tail and all.
Some bio-inspired concepts have yet to be invented. In the 1960s, the US Army commissioned several university professors to conduct research on the motor skills of animals in hope of applying those same abilities to tanks. Tanks that gallop like horses or jump like grasshoppers -- sounds monstrous, doesn't it? But imagine how life would change if we could achieve that.
Click through our to read about tanks and caterpillars, eels and boats, and other technologies that were directly influenced by nature.
Archive Gallery: Early Visions of Human Spaceflight
To commemorate last week's historic Shuttle launch, we've compiled a sentimental collection of manned spaceflight stories from the PopSci archive
Ironically enough, the past can look a whole lot like a distant tomorrow when you study it through our . So until NASA can afford to send humans back into space, let's reminisce on the agency's golden age by flicking through our most dazzling space features.
In 1919, we'd hardly begun the golden age of aviation, let alone the age of space travel, but we couldn't look to the skies without wondering what it would be like to break through the atmosphere and soar among the stars. Illustrations from that period depict crew members floating in zero gravity while sporting the typical aviation garb: pilot caps, bomber jackets, and leather boots.
Forty years down the road, astronauts started looking more like they do today. Space technology progressed so quickly between those decades that if we continued at that rate, we'd likely have visited Mars by now. Consider how NASA sent a man to the moon just eleven years after it was founded. After the first manned moon landing, Dr. Wernher von Braun predicted that civilians would travel to space by the late 1970s. President Nixon's formal endorsement of the Space Shuttle program further convinced him that humans would never by able to stay put on land.
"The old argument over manned vs. unmanned space flight would thus simply disappear," von Braun wrote in 1972. "With manned, reusable shuttles providing cheaper transportation into orbit than any other system, the shuttle will corner the space-transportation market."
Those sentences might be a little sad in retrospect, but , there's no reason to conclude that that the end of manned spaceflights marks the end of NASA. With endeavors like Juno's mission to Jupiter and MSL's rocket to Mars, it's clear that progress endures and people prevail, albeit with their feet on the ground.
Click through our to read about Apollo 11, the Space Shuttle's debut, and the various musings of Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Archive Gallery: Going Deep With Vintage Submersibles
The four-wheeled diving car, the world-famous Bathysphere, the farming sub, and more underwater craft from decades past
By definition, submersibles lack the autonomy, power, and size of submarines. Most of the vehicles covered in this gallery couldn't function unless they were tethered to a surface ship. While Edwin Link dreamed of using submersible to facilitate week-long "camp outs" under the sea, these vehicles were barely equipped for comfortable living. But for the purposes of exploration, leisure, and even undersea farming, they were perfect (well, as perfect as technology back then would allow).
Appearance-wise, early submersibles shared more in common with land vehicles than military submarines. Early diving cars were squarish, had four wheels, and lacked windows. One even came with a large crane for harvesting sea sponges. This all changed in 1928 when Otis Barton convinced naturalist William Beebe that a small spherical vessel was best suited for resisting the ocean's crushing pressure. Six years later, Beebe and Barton set a diving record when their Bathysphere descended 3,028 feet, making Beebe the first marine biologist to study deep-sea wildlife in its natural surroundings.
Naturally, the Bathysphere's renown drove Beebe's peers to emulate his success. Auguste Piccard, who had previously set an altitude record while ballooning, developed an interest in adapting balloon technology for undersea vehicles. The result? A spherical cabin suspended from an enormous buoyancy device containing 10,000 gallons of aviation gasoline. Piccard's work reaped an incredible reward just two decades later, when his son Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh became the first (and so far, only) men to reach Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the world's oceans.
to read about the Bathysphere, the "U-Drive U-Boat," and other submersibles from decades past.
Archive Gallery: PopSci’s Most Sensational World War II Headlines
Tank killers, nightmares for Hitler, bombed-out volcanoes and more explosive ideas from World War II-era PopSci.
First, let's go back three years earlier to 1942, when the Germans unveiled their 88-mm tank gun in Libya and Egypt. After the American and British press acknowledged its spectacular showing, we ran a story to assure our readers that our weaponry could vanquish the Nazi troops any day. "American Guns Do Not Lack a Punch, They Are -- Tank Killers With a Wallop!" we proclaimed.
Like "Tank Killers," "Nightmares to Order for Hitler" coasted on the nation's optimism for an Allied victory. Other features, such as a spread titled "This is How a Defenseless America Could Be Invaded" reflect the apprehension Americans felt while watching footage of bombings in Europe and the Pacific.
If there's one feature that still holds up today, it's an illustrated narrative titled "Yankee Ingenuity Licks Prison-Camp Hardships." Here, Major William Orris describes how he and his fellow POWs survived in a Luftwaffe prison camp by fashioning kitchen devices out of old cans and tin sheets--a combination of The Great Escape and MacGuyver, if you will, but more importantly, a compelling story about how simple gadgetry directed these men toward a certain future.
Click through our to read about the decoy tanks, the kamikaze fighters, and one geologist's plans to bomb Japan's volcanoes.
Archive Gallery: How the Space Age Influenced Design
A colorful look at how America's obsession with space travel led to rocket-shaped vehicles, parabola-shaped buildings, and swiveling television sets
While historians generally date the Space Age back to Sputnik's launch in 1957, our captivation with space travel began much earlier. Comic books, TV programs, and furniture borrowed components from science fiction, while businesses lured customers by incorporating futuristic elements in their buildings. The trendiness of the aesthetic both stimulated and exploited our enthusiasm for the future, culminating into a quick turnover for consumer products and a greater movement toward materialism.
Plenty of Space Age buildings might have already been demolished (because let's face it, populuxe hasn't aged very well), but it's almost impossible to avoid the so-called Googie motif in our . How could we not cover the era with gusto, being a science magazine and all? Our gallery begins in 1951, where we published the dream car designs of Ford employees. All looked as if they were half-rocket, half car; unfortunately, none made it to the production line. On a happier note, swivel-mounted television sets gave living rooms a Jetsons-like quality, oval picturephones debuted in New York, and esteemed Googie architect John Lautner built his octagonal Chemosphere above the San Fernando Valley.
In spite of our optimism, we knew it could be awhile before commercial space flight became available. But no matter. We had plenty of saucer-shaped buildings and domed cars to tide us over.
Click through our for a colorful look at how Space Age design made its way into the pages of PopSci.
Archive Gallery: In Defense of Evolutionary Theory
How we covered the Scopes Monkey Trial, the discovery of Java Man, the Piltdown Man hoax, and milestones in the history of evolutionary theory
We begin in 1923, when Dr. E.E. Free published his serial "The Story of Man and His World," which was essentially a primer on evolutionary processes. In his essay on our "monkey ancestry," Free discussed how human and primates descended from a common ape-like ancestor before branching into our respective species. According to Free's studies, mankind descended from lemur-monkeys that migrated to Asia from Central America. Over millions of years, he eventually moved down from the trees and onto the ground, where he learned to handle tools.
Free's ideas took a turn for the outrageous six years later, when he proposed that "cosmic rays" (or high-energy photons) accelerated evolution while passing through Earth's atmosphere. Although this idea was less popular than his other contributions to our magazine, which meticulously examined the physical traits humans share with other animals, Free's ideas nonetheless reflected the public's thirst for answers on how life began.
From then on, much of our coverage on evolution has dealt with historical milestones: the Scopes Monkey Trial, the discovery of "Mrs. Ples," the resurgence of the coelacanth, and the Piltdown hoax, all received ample (and exuberant) coverage on our pages. We even published a story on how instructors quietly circumvented anti-evolution laws to educate students Darwin's ideas.
Have we tickled your history bone yet? You can read that story and more in our on how evolutionary theory progressed during the first half of the 20th century.