Nuclear Reactor

Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard invented the first nuclear reactor in which nuclear chain reactions are initiated, controlled, and sustained at a steady observable rate. In Chicago, Fermi oversaw the design and assembly of what was called the ‘atomic pile’, the code name given to a ‘nuclear reactor’ so as to not cause panic during peace-time.

With World War II raging in Europe, the ability to produce an atomic bomb was considered of the greatest importance, and so Fermi was assisted in the development of his nuclear reactor.

Being the world’s largest source of emission- free energy, generating nuclear energy needed a device to initiate and control a sustained nuclear chain reaction and so we have the Nuclear Reactor. Four distinct ‘Generations’ of nuclear plants have existed through time.

Generation 1 reactors were the first to produce civilian nuclear power. Generation 2 designs were commercial reactors, but had the disadvantage of needing manpower to operate and not functioning if the power was shut off. This brings us to Generation 3 reactors which can function by themselves hence addressing, to an extent, safety concerns of working in a nuclear plant. And finally, Generation 4 reactors which right now are still in theory but will supposedly surpass all other nuclear reactors.

Obninsk Nuclear Power Station, situated 100km from Moscow, was the first civilian nuclear power station in the world.

Infraded

Who’d have thought of measuring the temperature of light. But that’s how Sir William Herschel discovered infrared rays in 1800. Also known as thermal rays, they are beyond the visible range, below the red side of the spectrum (hence the name).

Probably application of infrared rays is in the remote control.  saving humanity the trouble of having to get up to flick channels on TV. They’re  also extensively used in mice, the ones connected to your PC, not the rodent variety. Its other applications are in the field of medicine, space and communication amongst several others. They are extensively used in night vision equipment to gauge distances, detect motion, and increase visibility in fog. Infrared equipment is used by the police and military as well as in fires fighting to enhance visibility. They are used in spectrometers used to test and study electronic systems.

Infrared imaging is used by satellites to monitor the weather, vegetation patterns, ocean temperatures and several other applications in astronomy

Sophisticated Fibers

It’s mind-boggling to think where mankind would’ve been without radical materials. From simple shoelaces to lighter trainers to stronger aircraft, advances in material sciences have literally transformed ordinary things forever. Some of these advances include Fibers. Take the case of Velcro; something that we take for granted today.

The fiber has a 1955 patent (in the name of George de Mestral) and was inspired by the way burrs (a prickly fruit) stick to the fur of animals. In the ‘60s Japanese researchers experimented with ways in which polymers can be infused with carbon fiber inventing strong and light composites, with never before seen strength-to-weight ratios. Everything from fishing rods to F1 cars and aerospace engineering benefited from this. In 1965 Dupont created a high strength para-aramid synthetic fiber called Kevlar. (Counter Strike players are probably nodding their heads right now). Kevlar is literally bulletproof. 

Hard Drive

Created by IBM in 1956, the first hard drive- a popular data storage device- was made form 50 24 –inch discs contained inside a cabinet that was as large as a cupboard! The whole thing had a whopping capacity of 5 MB and could only be leased at a cost of $3,200 per month. The first commercially available hard drive called profile was sold by Apple in 1981 for $3500 –that’s $700 per GB!

While hard drives became popular for widespread use in computers and later as external data storage devices, it may be news to you that even calculators, cash registers and VHS machines utilize hard drives to store varying amounts of data. This device is important because the size and speed of the hard drive in a system is directly proportional to how efficient the system will be.

What makes hard drives revolutionary is their infinite ability to be rewritten unlike traditional storage devices such as disks and tapes. Because the information is stored magnetically all the data can be rear-ranged, changed and moved around without disruption or loss of data. It actually took 51 years since the hard drive was first invented for disks to reach a capacity of 1 terabyte. This happened in 2007. Following shortly was the first 2TB storage hard dive in 2009. One can only wonder what the next level of storage will be and how soon it will come to the market.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981,presumably because they found viewing through standard microscopes ‘uncool’ An older version of the STM was the ‘topografiner’ invented by Russel Young and his colleagues between 1965 and 1971.

A super fine tip is taken and kept at a distance of one nano meter away from the sample. The tip is changed and hence electrons start flowing from the tip to the surface in a process called ‘tunneling’. The current flowing through the tip is kept constant by scanning the tip over the surface horizontally and by adjusting the height of the tip vertically. This results in a 3-D image of the surface, which in our opinion is pretty damn cool. Because of the 3-D structure, one could make characterize surface roughness, observe surface defects, and determine the size and conformation of molecules and aggregates on the surface.

STMs are also advantageous because they can be used in ultra-high vacuum, air, water, other gases, as well as foam temperatures as low as 273 degree Celsius to around 300 degree Celsius. Their only drawback is that they require quite a bit of skill to use and are very fragile so forget running and buying one for yourself. Also, it costs only about $8000 for the cheapest STM.

Radio Transmission

While some say that it was Nikola Tesla who invented the radio, others say it was Guglielmo Marconi. But the best version of these stories is that our own Jagadish Chandra Bose was the one who invented it. JCB demonstrated radio transmission in 1896 in Calcutta in front of the British Governor General and had solved the problem of waves not travelling through walls or water through his ‘Mercury Coherer with a telephone detector’ device. Marconi’s Coherer, which he used in 1901, was an exact replica of it. 

The story goes that Marconi stole JCB’s notebook in which the Mercury Coherer was drawn, and so when asked how he came up with the design, he fumbled like a snotty little boy and lied that he got it from someone else, but this lie was also found out. We’d like to believe that JCB met Marconi outside wherever scientists meet and made him regret that he did anything like that, but we can safely assume that JCB was a bigger man that. He even declined to file a patent for his device, believing in information to be free to allow more research, and only filed a patent by 1904 on the insistence of his friends. By then, slimy Marconi had already received his patent and international recognition, leading us to conclude that he was either very smart or that history is just trying to make us lose hope in humanity.

Operating Systems

“Real programmers program in binary” So goes a famous joke in the programming world, especially popular with the performance wise. Truth be told, programmers programmed in binary once but this was when computers were just in their infancy. You’d punch your instructions on a card in the form of dots representing the binary instructions on a card in the form of dots representing the binary instructions and feed them to the machine; the machine would then execute them. Any errors were only to be blamed on you. Since then, computing has come a long way, thinks to operating systems (OSes).

An OS forms a layer between the hardware and the application program while managing other programs and keeping an account of hardware resource usage. The program asks the OS for the resources (network, disk, display etc.) and doesn't have to deal with the hardware level details such as disk configurations, display resolution etc. in early days. OSes were written in the assembly language. These included OSes such as MULTICS and the first version of UNIX which were written in the assembly language of their target processor architectures. However, later Ken Thompson (also the creator of language ‘B’) and Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language to port UNIX to PDP-11 and since then, OSes have been written in C.

The invention of the OS started the true software revolution by reducing the amount of effort required to create a working piece of code. This encouraged more and more geeks to try out programming and discover new capabilities. To this day, almost any device that can handle number crunching runs some form of an OS.

Integrated Circuits

“Tyranny of numbers” was the phrase used to describe used a problem which arose during World War II, when vacuum tubes were the components which humanity used for computational purposes. The problem: to perform more complex tasks, more tubes were required and more tubes meant increased complexity, and beyond certain adding more vacuum tubes slowed down operations instead of speeding them up.

The breakthrough happened in 1948. It was called a transistor. But as with any new technology – the face of progress hit a wall soon. As the complexity and number of transistors grew in circuits, things became increasingly difficult to manage. The seeds of integrated circuits (IC) were sown in 1949, but it took almost 10 years before the fruits were reaped. Built from four transistors, the first IC replaced 8 transistors, 26 diodes and 27 resistors. We've not looked back since.

So why do we count ICs as one of mankind’s greatest inventions? Because it makes the Electronics Industry what it is today. Be it the TV, mobile phone, laptop, supercomputer or telescope fitted on a satellite- ICs have changed the world our forefathers imagined for us. For the uninitiated, the latest processor chips from Intel house more than 2.2 billion transistors on a die which is merely 52.5 X 45 mm in area! Courtesy: Integrated Circuits.

Voice Data Transmissions

Through we now know the telephone as the mobile phone, its basic purpose remains the same – communication. The telephone is undoubtedly one of the greatest uses of electricity. Through there have been claims stating otherwise, the first device that enabled human beings to speak to each  other over very large distances. Using the vibrations produced by human speech and converting it to analog, electrical signals changed the world forever.

Through telegrams were already being used for long distance communication when the telephone first came into being, it stood out to due to its practicability, allowing communication to happen in real time which wasn't the case with telegrams. The technology took its own time reaching the hands of the common man and the prices of phones dropped after large networks started operating to run business around the communication industry. The concept of transferring voice data over wires led to another obvious idea waiting in the wings – wireless telephony. It was also discovered that signals that can carry data other than voice can also be transported era, the telephone kicked off the communication era. Mobile phones, internet, Wi-Fi and undersea cables were all inspired by voice data transmissions.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

It’s used to create documents on the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee was the primary author of HTML (developed in 1990), assisted by his colleagues at CERN. HTML is used to design a web page to be displayed in a web browser. The web browser reads the HTML code and display the content. The code is written in the form of tags (like <>) with attributes. It allows images and objects to be embedded to create interactive web pages.

 HTML documents are usually delivered by HTTP form a web server. There are some WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors, which allow you to lay out the design of your web page using GUI and the editor creates the corresponding code. The fifth revision of HTML, HTML 5 keeps up with the new multimedia technology and is mobile friendly. HTML 5, supplemented with CSS 3 and JavaScript does away with (previously required) external plugins like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silver light. The Berners-Lee and is currently headed by him, is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.