A Famous Nobel Prize Snub, Journey of Paper and Webcam Coffee connection
The Volume No. 2 of TheCuriosity
What are forgeries?
“We can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected. The good ones are still hanging on museum walls.”
You’re reading the second edition of TheCuriosity! TheCuriosity is an email newsletter delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Sourcing ideas from an eclectic mix of current affairs, science, philosophy, technology, history, and sometimes even spirituality.
😑 A Quiz.
How Many Pieces Of Pure Wooden Equipment Are Used In A Game Of Cricket?
🔖 Short Takes
ST2.1 The Famous Nobel Prize Snub
Polio epidemics swept through Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America through the first half of the 20th century.
John Enders is one of the great forgotten heroes of 20th Century Medicine. He was a son of a multimillionaire Connecticut banker, and was born in 1897. He graduated from Yale in 1919 and later earned his PhD at Harvard in 1941.
Enders was interested in viruses, and he especially wanted to see an adenovirus isolated. The best way to do this was to infect monkeys, kill them, and then examine the cells for viruses. He had an assistant working with him, Thomas Weller. They tried to infect monkeys with adenovirus using diphtheria as an entryway, but it didn't work. Adult monkeys built up immunity to diphtheria. They then grew polio virus in fertilized hens' eggs, and killed the virus with formaldehyde.
John Enders and Frederick Robbins’s 1949 demonstration that the poliovirus could be grown in the laboratory using skin and muscle tissue from human embryos. Before this, the virus had to be grown in live monkeys.
Enders got the virus from the blood and throat washings of an eleven-year old boy in 1954. The diluted vaccine was injected into several hundred children, who all showed immunity.
1954, Dr Sven Gard, Professor of Virology convinced a certain committee to name John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins to be the 1954 Nobel Laureates for a breakthrough discovery. He was also instrumental in convincing the committee that Jonas Salk, research and publication were derivative of the already felicitated trio of Enders, Weller and Robbins. Salk, whose biological institute that has become his legacy, has produced five Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine, but his death in 1995 ensures that he will never himself be awarded one.
Polio remains one of the great American public health success stories of the twentieth century.
ST2.2 The Journey of Paper
The Egyptians had written on papyrus, a rough surface made from reeds. They also wrote on silk. Europeans wrote important documents on parchment made from the skins of sheep or calves. The Chinese had made paper from bamboo.
Around 105 C.E., the Chinese invented the art of manufacturing paper from the macerated fibres of vegetable plants in a cheap and efficient manner. Paper entered the Islamic world after the Arab victory over the Tang in AD 751. Soon the imprisoned Chinese papermakers transmitted their skills to Muslim craftsmen in Baghdad, Egypt and Morocco, and eventually to the west, Spain and Italy. At the time, in the western world, the only writing material in use was parchment or vellum, made from sheep or calf leather.
In the 1790s a Frenchman named Louis-Nicolas Robert, a French soldier and mechanical engineer, is credited with a paper-making invention that became the blueprint of the Fourdrinier machine.
In the late 18th century, mathematician Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a mechanical device that automatically punched holes in a chain of paper. The chain was fitted with cards labeling symbols, and by punching different holes he could cause the device to create a pattern for any one of those symbols. This is a great example of creative destruction. The creative bit is automating a task that had been carried out by hand, making it much cheaper and quicker. The destruction part is that by automating the task, Jacquard basically destroyed the jobs of the human beings who had been carrying it out.
ST2.3 The Webcam Coffee connection
Who created the first webcam?
In 1991, the first webcam was installed. It was created at the University Of Cambridge to observe the Trojan coffee pot. The people who set it up wanted to be able to keep an eye on coffee in a pot that they had boiled and hadn't yet poured into cups. They intended, in other words, to use the camera's live feed for surveillance. The invention was created to help people working in the other areas of the building from making pointless trips to the room. So, a live 128×128 picture, on grayscale, of the state of the coffee pot was given as the video feed. While the term "webcam" is a combination of the words "web" and "camera".
The camera was switched off in August of 2001, and all that’s left if you try and pull the feed is a link to the last ever picture the webcam took. The coffee machine itself was auctioned off on eBay for over $5,000 to German magazine Der Spiegel, where it was refurbished and put back to work by Krups.
📻 Replug From TheBizdom
The South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Bubble of 1720 were economic bubbles, like "tulip mania" of the preceding century or the dotcom bubble of our last century. There is a Newton connection also with these Bubbles. Read
✨ Shower Thoughts
Willpower is like a muscle. It becomes fatigued with use, and after a fairly short period of time, it gives out.
🛎️ Interesting Tweet
↪️ Answer for the Quiz: 12 (6 Stumps, 4 Bails And 2 Bats)
Thanks, for reading all this!!