Finding iodine

There are thirty recognized isotopes of iodine, but only one of these, iodine–127, is counted among the stable isotopes, and is found in nature. Radioactive iodine-125 is routinely used in tracing problems with the thyroid gland, and another isotope, iodine-131 has been commonly used to treat overactive thyroid conditions. The “iodine” which is commonly used on small wounds is tincture of iodine, a solution of potassium iodide and iodine in ethanol.

Iodine is element number 53 in the periodic table, atomic weight 126.90. This element was first isolated in 1811 by Bernard Courtois (1777 - 1838). 

Like the Germans in the First World war, the French found themselves restricted by a British naval blockade which stopped them accessing American sources of potash during the Napoleonic wars.  The potassium carbonate was used to make potassium nitrate for French gunpowder, but the seaweed also contained a variety of other chemicals, one of which was an iodide.

In treating seaweed ash with acid to get rid of sulfur compounds, Courtois noticed a purple vapour, which condensed to make crystals of iodine. He later passed this information on to Sir Humphry Davy, who proposed the name “iodine”, from the Greek word for the colour violet, iodes. The credit for suggesting the name is sometimes given to Joseph Gay-Lussac, but this is incorrect.

As mentioned above, iodine is needed in the production of thyroxin, and a deficiency in dietary iodine leads to goitre, so that foods (especially table salt and bread) in many parts of the world now have traces of iodine added, although this is unnecessary in areas where seafood is available.

Part of the hormone ‘picture’ was already there in 1905, because a number of diseases were linked to disorders in particular glands: goiter and cretinism were associated with an enlarged thyroid gland, but this was rightly regarded as a deficiency disease caused by a lack of iodine. Many folk remedies used iodised salts or sea foods rich in iodine, even before we knew iodine existed (the element was detected in 1813). Its role in preventing goitre became more obvious after Eugen Baumann (1849–1896) showed in 1896 that iodine was only concentrated in the thyroid gland.

Curiously, Courtois also discovered that major fascination for undergraduates of a certain kind, nitrogen triiodide, which forms tremendously unstable crystals that will even explode when hot water falls on them.

I have no intention of revealing how I discovered this fact, as I conclude now that I had a lucky escape: Pierre Dulong  lost three fingers and an eye investigating this substance — which may explain why, when he was formulating what is now called “Dulong and Petit’s Law”, he chickened out, and did not investigate tellurium, fraudulently manufacturing the data for that and several other elements.

The reason is probably that when you handle tellurium, it is absorbed, and you get “tellurium breath “. Not to mince words, you stink of stale garlic for months after working with tellurium compounds. Dulong  either feared that, or perhaps he was attached to his remaining fingers and wished to stay that way.

Everything (other than Dulong's fingers, perhaps) is connected.

The art of estimation

Like the previous entry, this comes from my (now) out-of-print volume, The Speed of Nearly Everything.  I may get around to releasing it as an e-book, if enough people think it's a good idea.

*

To a physicist, the notion of an immortal rabbit is quite acceptable. As a boy, my English teacher encouraged me to psychoanalyse Macbeth, even though I objected that we shouldn’t, since Freud hadn’t been invented when Shakespeare was writing. Ever a historically-minded cuss, I argued that it would be more relevant to look at the political situation in London, with a Scot sitting on the throne. Exasperated, he exhorted the class to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief.

And well he might, if he wanted us to accept some of the artifices and conceits of coincidence found in the 19th century novel, but we scientific types were subjected to much hardier fictional nonsense than that.

We routinely solved problems that involve a steel girder of negligible mass, suspended at its centre of gravity by a silken thread, and before we were too far advanced, we heard our first physics joke. It was about the three scientists who were trying to pick the winner of Australia’s premier horse race, the Melbourne Cup, which is held each November.

The mathematician gathers a wealth of data on weather, rainfall, wind, pollen counts and other possible influences, and three years in a row, fails dismally to pick a winner. At the end of those three years, the geneticist has just finished drafting a plan for a breeding program that should, in five generations, produce a winner, but the physicist has got it right, three times in a row.

The others ask him how he did it. He reaches into his pocket and produces an envelope which he turns over. Then he draws a circle on it. “Consider,” he says, “a spherical horse running in a vacuum…”

In fact a spherical cow or spherical horse can be a useful starting point to explore ideas, to get a first approximation that can be extended. Take the yarn about the bumblebee that was shown not to be able to fly: this is usually trotted out as evidence that scientists are thick, but there is a little more to it than that. In 1934, a French entomologist called Antoine Magnan tried to apply an engineer’s equation to bumblebees, and showed that according to that equation, designed for aircraft that did not flap its wings, the bee could not generate enough lift.

A bumblebee, coming in to land (or fall?)

There is a great deal of folklore wrapped around this “event” and who actually was involved, but it appears that the equation was worked out by André Saint-Lagué, and while the incident is often dressed up as “a scientist proving that bumblebees can’t fly”, all that was really shown was that the equation was inadequate to describe the flight of the bumblebee.

Magnan had shown that you can’t apply that particular equation to bumblebees, rather than proving that spherical bumblebees can’t fly, even if real ones, flapping their wings at 130 times a second, move happily along at 3 metres/sec, 11 km/hr or 7 mph. Like Zeno’s paradox (which will be in the next blog entry), Magnan’s calculation merely showed that there was a faulty assumption in there somewhere. The mathematical model was flawed.

When we escaped from the English classroom to the lab, we learned of marvels that could be done with simple apparatus. The muzzle velocity of a bullet could be measured with nothing more than a block of wood, a piece of string, a protractor and a measuring tape.

Our physics teacher, equally as at home with fiction as our English teacher, explained how, in the days of gunpowder and muzzle-loading firearms, slight variations in the ingredients, their amounts and proportions, could make a lot of difference. The most obvious measure was the speed at which a cannon ball or musket ball left the barrel of the gun, or in physics-speak, the muzzle velocity.

The idea was quite simple. You suspend a large block of wood and fire a bullet at it from close range. The bullet lodges in the block, and the energy of the bullet is transferred to the block, which swings like a pendulum. Then one simply has to measure the swing angle and calculate the height the block reaches.

This device even has a name: it is called the ballistic pendulum, and it has been around since the 1742, when it was invented by Benjamin Robins. From the swing, or so we were told, it is a fairly elementary calculation to estimate the energy and hence the velocity of the bullet. Unfortunately, this explanation ignores the 800-pound spherical horse which is rolling around the room.

Some of the energy goes into deforming the bullet and the wood, some is wasted as friction, and to do any calculations, we have to assume that the bullet stops instantaneously (which is as likely as a girder with negligible mass). Of course, if you are trying simply to compare different grades of gunpowder, rather than measuring the muzzle velocities, the losses will be similar in each case, and can be ignored. Whichever powder produces the biggest swing is the best, if everything else is kept constant — and in fairy physics, that always applies.

Robins was born to Quaker parents, but as a mathematician, he tried to make gunnery a science. Along the way, his ballistic pendulum probably showed that Indian saltpetre made the best gunpowder. He died in India in 1751, supervising the construction of forts, and a few years later, the British drove the French out of India, which let them have all that excellent saltpetre for their own use.

Curiously, the pursuit of novel sources for saltpetre during the Napoleonic wars led a French chemist, Bernard Courtois, to discover iodine, but that's another story...the next story, in fact.

That speedy botfly

I revived this excerpt from my out-of-print book The Speed of Nearly Everything when the image on the right turned up in my Facebook feed, coming from Science Humor.

In case you don't look out for details, the hole that the fly was caught in (or poked into) was actually made by a projectile coming from the other side, so the accompanying question about the fly's speed is, at the very least, just a bit misleading, but somebody is going to cite a legend.

When you enquire about fast animals, more often than not, you will read that the fastest animal of all is the deer botfly, which is credited with an amazing 1287 km/hr, though if you convert this to miles per hour, it comes out as a round 800 mph, a figure that smells a little bit like fudged science—and rightly so.

The story begins with a 1927 article by an entomologist called Charles Henry Tyler Townsend, who reported a speed like this in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society. He actually claimed that the fly was clipping along at 400 yards per second, which works out at 818 mph or 1316 km/hr in metric units. As we will see shortly, any preciseness in the conversion is hardly justified.

Townsend reasoned that these flies passed in a blur, and so must have been travelling very fast. On that scientific basis and no other, he credited them with a nice round 400 yards/second.

That story should have been questioned right away, but people wrote it down, passed it on, quoted it uncritically, and never stopped to wonder what would happen if flies were tearing around at supersonic speeds.

As we will see later (next entry in this blog), some people would stop to prove that the bumblebee could not fly, but nobody stopped to consider and demonstrate the impossibility of the botfly claim until 1938, when Irving Langmuir, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, having given it some thought, tested the assumptions.

First, the air pressure on the fly at that speed would be more than half an atmosphere, surely enough to crush it. The energy needed to maintain the flight would be 370 watts, half a horsepower, which would be quite an ask. Aside from anything else, the botfly would use up its own weight in fuel every second, so it would need to be a voracious feeder.

Next, Langmuir had been hit by these flies, and while it hurt, that weight of fly at 1300 km/hr would have left a significant hole, rather like that of a soft bullet, and the fly would have been mashed inside the wound. Instead, the fly bounced off.

Langmuir mocked up a model of the botfly, using solder to make a pellet that was 1 cm long and 0.5 cm wide. He attached this to a string, and whirled it around his head, timing it so he could work out its velocity. He reported that at 13 mph it was a blur, at 26 mph it was barely visible, at 43 mph an observer could not tell which way it was going, and at 64 mph, it was completely invisible.

He concluded that the blur Townsend had seen came from a fly travelling at 25 mph (40 km/hr). His results were published in Science and reported in Time magazine, but legends are tough things, even when they are debunked by Nobel Prize winners. So even today, the same old values keep emerging from the woodwork.

By a curious chance, Langmuir’s name crept into the record books in an entirely different way in 2006 when plasma physicists used a specially designed holographic-strobe camera to capture pictures of matter waves that were travelling at 99.997% of the speed of light.

Known as Langmuir waves, they are generated by intense laser pulses, and may one day lead to “tabletop” versions of high-energy particle accelerators. One step along the way was taking photographs of the waves to see if they behaved the way scientists thought they would. They did, which is more than we can say about the botfly's behaviour.

What is a day?

When does the day start? The ancient Greeks said the day began at sunrise, and ended at the next sunrise. The Babylonians held that the day began and ended at sunset, while up until 1925,

astronomers worked on a “day” which began and ended at noon, and so did the Royal Navy in the days of Captain Cook. Now the astronomers, like us, and the ancient Egyptians, have a day which commences at midnight. Islamic tradition has a day which begins at sunset.

By definition, noon is when the Sun is at its highest point in the sky, so it is always noon somewhere in the world, with a noon zone sweeping along through a degree of longitude every four minutes. Logically, you should be setting your clock forward or back by a minute for each 15-20 kilometres that you go east or west!

This would be far too confusing, and to make life easier, we have split the world into time zones, usually (but not always) 15 degrees across, where everybody keeps the same “official time”. If you are trying to set up a very accurate sundial, you need to make allowance for your position east or west of the true time in your zone.

Some points to ponder: Clockwise is a word used to describe the direction of the shadow of a northern hemisphere sundial. What way does the shadow travel in the southern hemisphere?

If you stop and think about it for a moment, you may be able to deduce where the word “dial” comes from, especially if you know anything about the Latin word dies. If you lack this knowledge, look up “dial” in a good dictionary, and find out where it comes from. From this knowledge, can you say what the most appropriate use of the word “dial” is?

We probably had the idea of the two ways, even before clocks. Widdershins is an old word meaning counter-clockwise. The equally old word which means “clockwise” is deasil.

Somewhere along the way, something happened to humans that made them start using art, that made them start communicating with each other, and generally showing signs of being human, rather than hominid. Could it have been the discovery of time which caused these changes?

It is probably time to look at the things we first used for time-keeping and calendars, the stuff that is out there, beyond our atmosphere, the stuff that even a century ago, people knew was forever unreachable — and rather hard to see in any case.

The barman says, “We don’t serve time travellers in here.”

A time traveller walks into a bar.

Brain size

I will studiously not comment on this next one, much as I would like to:

Bischoff, one of the leading anatomists of Europe, thrived some 70 years ago. He carefully measured brain weights, and after many years’ accumulation of much data he observed that the average weight of a man’s brain was 1350 grams, that of a woman only 1250 grams. This at once, he argued, was infallible proof of the mental superiority of men over women. Throughout his life, he defended this hypothesis with the conviction of a zealot. Being the true scientist, he specified in his will that his own brain be added to his impressive collection. The post-mortem examination elicited the interesting fact that his own brain weighed only 1245 grams.
— Scientific American, March 1992, 8, quoting from an unidentified and untraceable source in Scientific American, March 1942.

SMILE!

Corang River

Australia may be easily divided into two parts: the city and the bush.  Almost all of us live in what is loosely called ‘the city’ — while a smaller number live in ‘the bush’.  Any rural area, any wild or wilderness area, any quiet patch, even in the middle of the city, is ‘bush’.  There are patches of bush, just a kilometre from the Opera House in Sydney, and many larger patches dotted around the landscape.

We have a bush mythology, all about how Australians relate to it, but most of us are wholly city-bred and raised.  Even so, many Australians gain a great benefit from the bush and from bushwalking.  Each weekend, urban Australian may be seen wandering along well-worn tracks through urban bush, while others, rather better equipped, can be found far out in the wilderness of the Watagan ranges, the Blue Mountains, the Budawang Ranges, or some other favoured lonely place.  For my family, the preferred solution is to drive for four hours in the dawn to get to the Budawangs.

The Budawang basement rock was laid down in Devonian times, back 350 million years ago, when fishes ruled the earth, along with their cousins the early amphibians.  We can only guess at the rocks' history after that, but they must have been deeply buried and heated, for they are all now low-grade metamorphics, and that only happens with deep burial and light baking in the depths of the earth.

After baking and squeezing, the rocks were twisted and folded, then slowly revealed again.  The tops of the folds were carved off, leaving a series of tilted quartzite slabs.  These tough ribs of stone were shaped in the days of the early dinosaurs, which must have wandered over their surface, leaving not a trace.  By now, the rocks were 150 million years old, and due for burial once more.

They were covered over in a huge flood of mud and boulders that created massive conglomerates.  Some of the pebbles in this conglomerate are more than a metre across, and the beds stretch for kilometres.  But after the conglomerate had filled in around the old hills of Devonian rock, gentler conditions prevailed.  Sand was laid down over the top, through the Permian, then more Triassic sediments came on top of that.  Finally, the process reversed itself, and the Devonian rocks were brought back to the surface as the covering slowly weathered and eroded away.

The Devonian rocks are survivors.  They took all the world could throw at them before, and now they do so again.  When a river comes up against the uptilted ribs of tough metamorphic rock, the water is forced to fight to find a way through.  Where they can, the rocks dam up the water, creating swamps where the usual harsh dry conditions are replaced by harsh soggy conditions.  Where the river is strong enough, it carves down until it meets the truly immovable rocks: then it backs up to form a lagoon.

A little up the hill from such a place, we find the Permian conglomerate sitting uneasily on the tough Devonian ribs, making what the geologists call an unconformity, where one hand, spread on the cliff face, can span more than a hundred million years of history.  The base of the conglomerate falls apart easily, creating caves and rock shelters where campers can shelter when it rains.

The Budawang Ranges are full of places like this, but for my money, the best place to go in the whole area is the Corang River, at a place where the river backs up against tough tilted Devonian rocks, delayed for a couple of hundred metres.  This makes a pool which is refreshingly chill, even on the hottest day, where mists will rise off the river in the early morning, as the first small birds skim across, looking for insects to eat.

Around the edges of the lagoon, kangaroos thump around, looking for food at night.  It is not a place for those with a heightened imagination.  Wombats charge along their favourite tracks like small tanks, mopokes make dismal sounds in the dark, and possums scream at each other.  This is a good place to bring new chums, people who are marvellous victims when it comes to tall tales.  Here you can regale them with drop-bears, hoop snakes, fanged frogs, bush alligators, wombahs and more.

Out in the wilderness, such tales are believable.  Getting there means a drive of four hours, then a walk for three hours, so we usually camp overnight at the trail head, or drive down in the pre-dawn darkness on deserted roads.  Then we hike in, set up our tents, grab some firewood, and prepare for a couple of days of relaxing, reading and swimming.

Except, that is, when my adult son decides we should go exploring.  This is wild country, but we have been coming here for many years, and we know the land marks, so we elect to do a slightly risky thing, and wander off as a pair.  Strictly, we should take three people, one to stay by any injured person, and one to get help, but this is to be little more than a gentle stroll.

Famous last words!  It has been raining in the last few months, and all the swamps are topped up, trapped behind the quartzite dam walls.  When we decide to plunge into low-lying area for a short-cut, we become well and truly bogged down.  My son, I forgot to mention, is very stubborn: he must have inherited this from his mother, for I am never anything more than unswervingly determined.

Whatever the cause, we decide to push on, rather than going back and around the swamp.  Perhaps it is the range of unusual spiders you can find deep in a swamp: perhaps it is the hope of seeing some of the rarer sundews, small insectivorous plants that live in swamps like these, but we force our way, deeper and deeper, following the trails made by the wombats.  There is no plant alive that can withstand a wombat, which is good when we want a clear track, but wombats are very agile about jumping from tussock to tussock, which is not so good.

Cursing and grunting, we leap, slip and slide our way along.  We have done this sort of thing before, so we are still comparatively dry, but it is all very tiring.  We look around for somewhere to sit, but there is no dry dry place big enough or flat enough to sit on.

I recount the old paradoxical definition of an infinite regress, where a band of soldiers get tired in a swamp.  They form a circle, and each sits on the knees of the one behind, until they are rested.  Arguing the logic of this blunts our discomfort for a while as we slog along.  That and a complex disagreement about the differences between marshes, bogs, fens, swamps, swards and water meadows, which helps to keep our minds active as we go.

All good things come to an end, but so do bad things.  Suddenly, what I still insist is swamp, rises above the water table.  We stop, just at the edge of the mud, looking at the beautiful dry land in front of us.  ‘I've definitely learned one thing,’ he tells me.  Foolishly, I ask him what it was.

‘The fen is muddier than the sward’, he tells me.  Something inside me snaps.  One swift push and he learns the Zen lesson that one person cannot make an infinite regress.  Not in a swamp, anyhow.

Macedonio Melloni, a forgotten genius

This is just a filler to say I aten't dead yet. I'm just fairly busy.

Macedonio Melloni (1798 - 1854) is little-known, which is why this is a brief account. Still, what there is seems quite interesting, and it sets the scene for several other stories, so I will share it with you.

First, some background. William Herschel did many things in astronomy. Among other things, he took the temperature of different parts of the spectrum, and found that the hottest part of the Sun’s spectrum was beyond the visible range. Using a thermometer, he discovered the infrared part of the spectrum.

Now back to Melloni: if you heat a junction between two different metals, you generate a very small current. In order to be able to measure the current, you need to multiply it by linking a number of these junctions together, to make a battery of them, like the pile of cell units that Alessandro Volta made. This is why we call Melloni’s invention a thermopile.

Source: https://muxindia.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/passive-infrared-sensor-pir-sensor/

As well, Melloni developed ways of concentrating the heat from distant sources, and he found out how to use rock salt to make lenses to focus the heat rays, in the same way we use glass lenses to focus light rays. He established that the infrared rays were in every way like light: they could be refracted, reflected, polarised and made to interfere with each other, exactly like light.

Melloni really deserves to be better known, for while Herschel’s discovery of the infrared is a commonplace, few people realise that Melloni’s investigations laid a practical framework within which James Clerk Maxwell could propose the existence of a continuous electromagnetic spectrum.

Everything in science is connected, which is why we can usually spot fraudulent science at a glance. It doesn't connect with all the other bits...

Making predictions

Yes, it's been a bigger time gap than most, because in Covid-19 time, I have been clearing my back burner of partly done books. More of the current time-stealer in the near future.

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Out there, somewhere, there is a discovery, an observation, a measurement that does not quite fit the present model for something. There is an idea, a notion, a hunch that will some day become a great discovery of science. I have no idea how long it will take for us to realise that it is both a discovery and a great discovery, but it will occur to us one day that we ought to have seen it coming.

I have no intention of trying to predict what it might be, because as Niels Bohr used to say, making predictions is problematical, especially about the future. Bohr always said he got it from Robert Storm Petersen, who apparently got it from somebody else.

Some people out there will already have predicted it: in 1906, rocket scientist Robert Goddard was thinking of the energy in a gram of radium and wondering if it could be used to power a rocket. In 1913, H. G. Wells was describing the dropping of an atom bomb, though he thought the target would be Berlin. Nobody paid attention.

Most predictions miss the mark. For the past hundred years, every depiction of the future has offered us food pills, flying cars and easy access to space, and none of those has happened.

Then again, remember Arthur C. Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

They say Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

who could have guessed that two World War II developments, jet engines and computers, would lead to us booking our overseas holidays online in the 21st century?

When scientists get old, they often become fixed in their ways. They make dogmatic statements, and expect everybody to accept what they say, but more often than not, they turn out to be disastrously wrong. Take these examples:

• In 1797, farmers in America rejected a new cast-iron plough, saying it would stimulate weeds and poison the crops.

• The patent for the radio valve (the thermionic valve, the thing we used before the invention of the transistor) was not renewed when it ran out in 1907. Nobody could find a use for the Edison effect until a few years later.

• During World War II (when the first atom bombs were exploded), an admiral reassured the American vice-president: “Atomic bombs won’t go off, and I speak as an explosives expert.” (Even though H. G. Wells had predicted atomic bombs in his novel The World Set Free, as early as 1913!)

• A few years earlier, Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand’s greatest scientist, and one of the greatest scientists of this century, said “The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a poor kind of a thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”

• Twelve years before the first moon landing, and just after the first Russian satellite was launched, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain commented that generations would pass before people landed on the moon, and even if they did, there was little chance they would ever get back to earth. (In fairness, the Astronomer Royal was being political, as funds were being diverted into rocketry that he thought should have been going to astronomy.)

The moral of this list of disasters: keep an open mind, because things may change sooner than you think. And if you have to make a prediction, try to make sure nobody writes it down! But if you want to see science flourish, don’t let such fears stop you from making or drawing inferences.

Pneumatic transports of delight

No, this is not a reference to Brave New World, but to something that turned up in my FB feed this morning, concerning ways of getting cash away from the sticky fingers of shop assistants.

Some ran on wires, others ran through tubes, and as a small boy, these things made me aware that sometimes, rarely, Heath Robinson gadgets might work.

At the age of 8, I tried making Meccano versions of the run-on-wires models, without success. I knew about the pneumatic versions, but the Meccano sets had inconvenient holes, so I gave up.

In what follows, the pics are more detailed than they appear here: click on them to see them in all their glory.

As it happens, I wrote about such things in my Not Your Usual Clever Ideas, available on Kindle (it includes shoe guns, sharkproof suits and pile drivers powered by gunpowder and the 'rowing bike' seen on the left), but here's the detail on the stranger ways that things were moved by air pressure.

In 1868, all eyes were upon the new device, the pneumatic telegraph, which was going to revolutionise the world by allowing one to send actual documents hurtling to their destination. This was the pneumatic telegraph, which was all the rage in the 1860s.

The Pneumatic Dispatch Company in London declared its hand in 1861, when they set up a quarter of a mile (400 metres) of test tubing at Battersea, near the Victoria railway bridge. This included irregular curves and gradients to show that the terrain would be no obstacle to a working system. Carriages were introduced and air was drawn out in front of them to give a pressure differential of "seven to eleven inches of water".

Atmospheric pressure is taken today as 100 kilopascals, and it supports about 400 inches of water, so we are talking here of a pressure in the 2-3 kilopascal range, about the same difference as that between the top and bottom of a 300-metre building, so not that great. Still, this gentle difference was enough to accelerate the rail cars to 25 mph (40 km/hr), and the individual cast iron tubes were 9 feet (2.7 metres) long and about 850 mm high.

There was no seal, which would have caused frictional loss, so there was a small amount of "windage", and most importantly, Parliament had granted them the power to "open the streets", to lay the tubes that would no doubt soon link all of the post offices in the world's greatest metropolis.

By 1862, the company was meeting to vote on an increase in capital to fund extended works and to obtain new machinery, and a further £50 000 was subscribed, though several members opposed the motion, one of them declaring the system a financial failure which ought to abandoned. The details of the company are not very clear, but a 1929 enquiry mentioned "the Post Office Tunnel", constructed by the company in 1866, and found to be less than air-tight. The Post Office bought it in 1921, and the tunnel ended its days as a conduit for telephone cables.

By 1863, 110 mails passed through the pneumatic despatch tube from the station to the district post-office during each day, and, said a report in Scientific American, the occasional human was allowed to ride in the carts.

For some years, the system was used to carry parcels from the railway to the Post Office. In the USA, though, there were far more ambitious plans. By 1867, these extended to mail sorting systems that would carry letters in scurrying carts, hither and thither, under the streets of American cities.

That was nothing, though, to the grand plans of the Waterloos and Whitehall Pneumatic Railway Company which planned to send parcels under the Thames in a giant tube, 12 feet 9 inches (3.9 metres) in diameter. This would connect the various lines which were by then operating on either side of the river. The illustration shows sections of the tube being prepared on dry land before being lowered into the river.

The tube systems operated successfully in a few cities, but they had their greatest penetration in stores, where trusted cashiers, locked in cages, received cash and dockets by pneumatic tube, and sent receipts and change back, again by tube, to be handed to the customer.

If you want the original images, here are the sources.

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[1] Scientific American 5 October 1861, 209.

[2] Scientific American 5 January18 67, 1.

[3] Scientific American 16 March 1867, 165.  6

Magic, medicine and technology

This morning, I saw a picture of a truck on which the owner had painted "Jesus is my vaccine". I immediately began to write a piece that referenced this quotation:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

— Clarke’s Third Law, Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1973.

When I went to dig that out of my files, I recalled that I had written about this same matter at the start of my e-book, Not Your Usual Treatments, so I just plundered that. You don't need to read the book (though you'll never be the same if you do!). Here are the salient bits.

I use four different computing devices at different times, and for different purposes. Each uses a different sig file for emails, and right now, the message below appears under emails sent from my tablet:

Away from my desk, and using something with technology sufficiently advanced to pass for magic, given the right lighting. The fully indistinguishable bit will come with the next upgrade.

The sort of people I work and play with recognise that as a reference to Clarke’s Third Law. They probably also know the unofficial corollary: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”

My friends live in the world of logic, science and technology. They know what I know: that when we find “magic” being presented as real, rather than as entertainment, we’re in the presence of ignorance, or fraud, or both. Nearby, we will find charlatans and/or the gullible.

I first encountered “magic” when I was about 13. I had a severe rope burn on my leg, and my uncle had been dabbling with a new “religion”. He treated the burn using a neat trick taught to adherents of this movement. His sons, younger than me, mispronounced the trick as “touch and fix”.

Like most conjuring tricks, it was simple. He repeatedly touched my skin near the wound, asking each time if I could feel it, and in the end, according to my mother who watched the process, he was scraping his fingernail down the wound, quite hard — and I was reporting no pain.

Basically, this was desensitisation, a matter of overloading the pain receptors so they stopped sending strong pain signals. I was a scientifically-inclined child and I knew, even then, about desensitisation and deception. On the other hand, my mother, a life-long gullible, was impressed. Even though this was the first rope burn she had ever seen, she told all and sundry that no rope burn in history had ever recovered so quickly.

She was just about ready to sign us all up to join the group, which would have been a salutary experience for them, having me inside the tent and still aiming inwards, but my uncle realised they were dangerous, dropped them, and warned her off.

Desensitisation is easily explained by science. It is simple technology, but in the wrong hands, it can easily be packaged to look like something close to magic. In the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc, much as I would have done, inside the tent.

Almost anything in the wrong hands can wreak havoc.

In Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl showed us that the frozen leg of a fluffy lamb makes a grand club for braining somebody. The poison in 200 kg of potatoes will kill anybody persuaded to eat them, and a medicinal leech in a soldier’s drinking water may attach inside his throat and choke him to death. Any book, placed in a drum of cement, and tied to the ankle of a literary critic may be used, in damp environments of sufficient depth, to improve the human gene pool.

It’s all about context and intent. Medical havoc usually comes when a person lacks any basic knowledge of a technology, culture or set of procedures. Guided by a charlatan (or being a charlatan), the ignorant person adopts or constructs a nonsensical explanation of reality, and applies it without any thought, or hesitation.

In ignorant minds, analogy sounds as good as analysis, and by a false analogy with scurvy, cancers can be blamed on dietary deficiencies. It’s an easy slide, all the way down the slippery slope after that. Some users progress to believing that one can eliminate TB by rubbing the patient’s brow with crystals. Soon, the very same treatment is credited with fixing headaches, beating sunstroke, banishing syphilis and mending varicose veins.

Filled with excitement, the converts claim that eating worms mends broken bones, that a tea made from a noxious weed stops HIV in its tracks, or that snake bite is cured by injections of meerkat urine. These people enter a frauds’ universe where, while many things are still impossible, they, the victims, don’t know it. This is not magic, they parrot — just advanced and esoteric science that the listener could never comprehend.

To be fair, some of the frauds are the victims of self-delusion, but they are still a threat to public health. In 1709, Alexander Pope wrote in An Essay on Criticism, “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, though this is usually seen and heard as “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

This book is about people with little knowledge or learning, and no inclination to find out — and about people with a great deal of knowledge of deception, and a strong inclination to find money.

I originally planned to look at Australian quacks, but I soon realised that context and intent are all-important, that most “quacks” were nothing of the sort — and that strange medicine knows no borders. In the end, I realised I simply had to spread the net wider, but there is still a strong emphasis on the Australian side of this story.

One generation’s orthodox medicine is seen by the next generation as out-and-out quackery, and the only thing that has changed is the dominant paradigm, the accepted model of what makes us ill.

Occasionally, a far-seeing practitioner has been denounced as a quack, before later being proven right. These rare examples of genius struggling along, unrecognised, are just what the frauds and charlatans need.

“They laughed at Einstein,” they jeer, trying on their Einstein wigs.

All the same, there is a difference between the medically trained lone-wolf pioneer and the fraud. The pioneer was merely working to a different paradigm, while the charlatan works only to a greed paradigm.

Henry Cruciform's transmitting piano

A bit of background: I have just published a new book, Australia's Hidden Heroes: Crooked Mick of the Speewah and Henry Cruciform, and you can read more about the book here.

Among bush folk, Crooked Mick is still remembered, but even science historians like my friends know little about him, but I have recently gained access to the Cruciform Papers, and shared his stories. This account covers one of his wartime exploits, one which required a gifted pianist, a consummate mathematician and a highly creative mind, all in one person

 It reveals for the first time just how complex the secret war was that was waged between 1914 and 1918, when nothing was what it seemed—and the same applied in World War II, when the by-now septuagenarian Cruciform answered his country's call. Sadly, the needs of national security still preclude telling major parts of the story.

*

Cruciform's first hoodwink project involved some further developments on radio transmission, in particular, the use of his previously developed transmitting piano to send coded messages which sounded like bad piano playing. This was probably (but not definitely) intended as a hoax to play against the German High Command.

The scheme succeeded, as the German Intelligence authorities enthusiastically adopted the scheme and used it with great success. The ‘music’ which transpired helped to sap the moral fibre and fighting will of the average German soldier. Convinced that the Allies were using the same system, the Germans spent a great deal of time trying to decode Cruciform’s random transmissions.

Sir Edward Elgar’s knighthood was awarded for the work he did on the Enigma Variations, which totally defeated the German decoding efforts during the war (with fiendish cunning, the variations contained no code at all, making them very difficult to decode accurately). Some incidental evidence suggests that George Gershwin was performing a similar role for the American forces, while still a teenager.

Fearful that the same code systems would be used again in World War II, the Germans developed the Enigma coding and decoding machine in the 1930s, based on the action of a barrel organ, but playing at supersonic speed.

Cruciform solved this problem for the Allies in World War II, recording the German messages on 78 rpm records, and playing them back on the 33 rpm turntable which he invented for the purpose, but this also will be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming second volume of Cruciform’s scientific papers.

The project backfired to a certain extent when, during the chaos of post-war Berlin, the memoirs of a German general were mistakenly coded for piano transmission. This would have caused no problem, except that his publisher was also a music publisher, and the result was erroneously released to an unprepared and unsuspecting public, allegedly as the collected works of Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern.

By coincidence, there really was an Arnold Schönberg, a little-known composer of rustic polkas and lyric love ballads who happily took the credit and royalties for the cacophony published over his name, although he then needed to compose his simple and derivative tunes under the pseudonym Karl-Heinz Stockaitken-Wassermann. This caused him some problems, as the end of his name invariably fell off the royalty cheques, and he died in poverty, being buried in the same paupers’ grave as W. A. Mozart.

Anton von Webern was wholly imaginary, and his alleged existence remained an embarrassment to the whole musical world until his ‘death’ was staged at the end of World War II, with the agreement of all the Allied and Axis powers, after Eisenhower had asked to meet either him or a Lieutenant Kije of the Red Army.

The story that von Webern was shot dead by an American sentry while slipping outside for a crafty cigarette was deemed so unbelievable that the authorities thought, correctly, that people would believe it. When Eisenhower was told that Kije had fallen victim to Beria’s thugs, he decided to enter politics, and was elected President of the USA in 1952. All of this arose only because of Cruciform’s work during World War I, but we are getting ahead of our story.

By 1913, as has already been mentioned, Cruciform had fitted a transmitter to an ‘Ampico’ reproducing piano. The ‘Ampico’ is able to reproduce every nuance of the original player’s performance, causing Busoni’s widow to burst into tears when she heard one of her husband’s piano rolls played after his death. [1]

During World War II, each secret agent’s ‘hand’ on the Morse key could be separately recognised. If a major deception was to be achieved concerning the ‘piano coder’, then a foolproof method of reproducing the agent’s ‘hand’ would have been invaluable. This alone can account for Cruciform’s work in this area. [2]

Crooked Mick’s main role was to carry pianos into positions where they could be easily captured by the Germans, but once a few of the pianos had been transferred to German control, it became easier simply to allow the rolls of paper to fall into German hands.

---

[1]        Dennis Condon (pers. comm.)

[2]        The notion that the “radio-Ampico” was part of a complicated diabolical assassination machine, designed to kill anybody sitting during the German national anthem (i.e., the Kaiser) is, of course, too ludicrous for words. Those aware of the literature on Cruciform will already know, of course, that this is another De Choncqui theory.

A bit about LIDAR

Many moons ago, I was a teenager in New Guinea, working in what we would call "work experience" today. I was in the jungle near Sogeri, and though I didn't realise it at the time, it became good background for the history of the Kokoda campaign that I wrote for younger readers, some years back. It helped me in another way, because we used a "chain", by then a steel tape, to measure distances.

In Port Moresby, I was shown a tellurometer, though I never saw one operating. I was told that in the near future, chaining would be a thing of the past, but the basic methods we used were far more hands-on. They were little changed from the methods used by explorers and surveyors in the 19th century, so that helped me when it came to writing histories of that sort of work.

It's hard to relate to that now, in an era when the truth of plate tectonics can be established by GPS measurements on ground stations. Even recent advances whizz by so fast that we tend to miss them, as a US friend observed the other day:

"[My dad] kept reminding me that he was working on the Atlas missile program and the controls were all in a trailer bigger than his 5th wheel and didn't have as much computing power as Liz's graphing calculator. It's pretty awesome to think that we could have sent men to the moon with less computing capacity than I'm carrying around in my purse."

Well, the tellurometer was good, but grab this, from a release I saw some time back, relating to a story in Nature Photonics*: I tucked it away in a file that was just being searched for something quite different...

"By combining the best of two different distance measurement approaches with a super-accurate technology called an optical frequency comb, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a laser ranging system that can pinpoint multiple objects with nanometre precision over distances up to 100 kilometres. The novel LIDAR (for 'light detection and ranging') system could have applications from precision manufacturing lines on Earth to maintaining networks of satellites in perfect formation, creating a giant space-based platform to search for new planets."

LIDAR is a bit like radar: it sends out a flash then detects and analyzes the reflection, updating distances to multiple reference points every 200 microseconds (to get your head around that, it means 5000 times a second!). Now LIDAR has an "ambiguity range", and it has trouble distinguishing between two distances separated by this range. The new system has an ambiguity range of around 1.5 metres, so all the operators have to do is use GPS or some other method which gives you a close enough measure to tell you which of the competing values to accept.

So, we can measure the distances between mountains incredibly accurately but what else can we do? We can launch a bunch of satellites to fly "in formation" at very precise distances, measured by LIDAR. These, says the release, could form images of "black holes with multiple X-ray telescopes on different satellites, and support tests of general relativity through measurements of satellite spacing in a gravitational field".

LIDAR may also be used in automated manufacturing, where many parts need to fit together with tight tolerances, the developers say. This is always the crunch point in press releases: some of them make ambit claims about "shows promise as a cure for cancer" while others miss the boat by not seeing where the real applications may lie.

Recall that Frank Whittle conceived of the jet engine as a power unit for fighters, and not for the jets that criss-cross the world each day, carrying Covid-19, SARS, swine flu and tourists from place to place. Before him, the earliest rocket scientists were simply trying to find a way to get higher in the wispy gas at the edge of our atmosphere than rockets could go.

I would like to be around for another fifty years to see what LIDAR ends up doing, but that won't happen. That's why I spend my days burrowing through 19th century science, where I can look to see what became of this or that greatly praised invention, like putting sulfur in your socks to ward off cholera, but that's another story.

And this is yet another story:
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/what-is-lidar-and-why-would-you-want-it-on-your-phone/

* I. Coddington, W. C. Swann, L. Nenadovic and N. R. Newbury. Rapid, precise absolute distance measurements at long range. Nature Photonics. Published online May 24, 2009. I never throw out any notes!

Bolters, part 10 of many

Tarwood and friends

It was hard for a convict to hide on a ship, with a view to quitting Australia. After the transport Neptune was unloaded in Sydney in August 1790, she was to sail to China to pick up a cargo, but before the ship weighed anchor, John Long, the town-adjutant, searched the ship and found a man and a woman hidden in the ship’s firewood supply. [1] This was probably no chance search, because there was little honour among the convicts, and informers were everywhere.

Those who went off into the bush never lasted long. They had no idea of how to get food in the bush, no idea of how to stay warm and dry, and Governor Phillip said they stood little chance of being helped by the locals. [2] So if a convict wanted to escape, stealing a small boat was the best choice. It got you away from settled areas.

On the night of September 26, 1790, five male convicts took a small punt from Rose Hill and headed for Sydney. David Collins said the punt would have been a death trap, once they left the shelter of Port Jackson, but the party made their way to Watson’s Bay, or Look Out Bay as it was called back then, stole a small leaky boat with a mast and sail, and headed out to sea.

They had each taken provisions for one week; their cloaths and bedding; three iron pots, and some other utensils of that nature. They all came out in the last fleet, and took this method of speedily accomplishing their sentences of transportation, which were for the term of their natural lives.  Their names were, John Tarwood, a daring, desperate character, and the principal in the scheme; Joseph Sutton, who was found secreted on board the Neptune and punished; George Lee; George Connoway, and John Watson.…  They no doubt pushed directly out upon that ocean which, from the wretched state of the boat wherein they trusted themselves, must have proved their grave… [3]

Collins called this boat small and weak, but it had a mast and a sail. Rather optimistically, they were planning to reach Otaheite, or as we would say now, Tahiti, which was more than 6000 km away.

That, at least, is what they told the people they left behind, but perhaps they were leaving a false trail. They were searched for in the harbour, and when no trace was found, the authorities assumed they had sailed out across the ocean and died. In fact, the men sailed up the coast as far as Port Stephens and put in there.

Sutton later died, but the other four men were taken in by the local people, and when Captain Broughton of the Providence put in there during a storm in August 1795, he found four white men (if four miserable, naked, dirty, and smoke-dried men could be called “white”, David Collins commented) who begged to be taken back to Sydney. They had had enough of the primitive life.

By that time, almost five years on, each had a native wife and one or two had children, and according to them, the natives worshipped them as the spirits of their countrymen, which, after death, had gone away and then returned in pale human form. Worshipped or not, they had had enough. David Collins was fascinated by them:

Each of them had had names given him, and given with several ceremonies. Wives also were allotted them, and one or two had children. They were never required to go out on any occasion of hostility, and were in general supplied by the natives with fish or other food, being considered by them (for so their situation only could be construed) as unfortunate strangers thrown upon their shore from the mouth of the yawning deep, and entitled to their protection.

It appeared from these four men, that the language to the northward differed wholly from any that we knew. Among the natives who lived with us, there were none who understood all that they said, and of those who occasionally came in, one only could converse with them. He was a very fine lad, of the name of Wur-gan. His mother had been born and bred beyond the mountains, but one luckless day, paying a visit with some of her tribe to the banks of the Dee-rab-bun (for so the Hawkesbury was named) she was forcibly prevented returning, and, being obliged to submit to the embraces of an amorous and powerful Be-dia-gal, the fruit of her visit was this boy. Speaking herself more dialects than one, she taught her son all she knew, and he, being of quick parts, and a roving disposition, caught all the different dialects from Botany Bay to Port Stephens. [4]

Nobody seemed to comment on it at the time, but well before Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth made their “first” crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813, here was clear evidence that the “savages” could cross the mountains at will.

Soon after Tarwood and friends took off, there were others with similar plans, according to an informant who claimed that the plotters “…had provided themselves with oars, masts, sails, etc. for the purpose, which were concealed in the woods…” [5]

The authorities moved in, but found only a few stakes of timber that might have been made into oars. The authorities kept a close eye on the alleged plotters, but nothing came of it. It was likely to be a problem, said Collins, because there were those whose sentences had expired, who wanted to return to their wives and children.

If these people found any obstacles in their way, they would naturally be driven to attempt the attainment of their wishes in some other mode; and it would then become an object of bad policy, as well as cruelty, to detain them.[6]

---

[1] See David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1.

[2] Arthur Phillip, The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay, 118.

[3] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1, 1798, 112 – 3.

[4] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1, 1798, 356 – 7.

[5] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1, 1798, 115 – 6.

[6] David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume 1, 1798, 116.

Deaf adder or death adder?

Note to file.

These three items give the lie to the theory that ''deaf adder'' is a corruption of ''death adder'': in fact, it is the other way around!

1611

King James Bible, Psalm 58:4

Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;

1832

And when the sound of the church-going bell is heard in the stillness of the Sabbath morn, swelling its note of tuneful invitation upon the breeze to your homes embosomed in the vast forest, whose long silent echoes that sacred minstrelsy never awoke before, O! be not ye as the deaf adder which stoppeth her ears against the charmer, charm he never so wisely; and O! be well assured, the voice which will then be lifted up in this place, fraught with the message of reconciliation, will move in perfect unison with so harmonious and hallowed a tone, when it also calls on the passers-by in such words as these . . . The Sydney Herald, 13/12/1832, 2 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12845902

1848

The death of Mrs. Ann Morrissy at Dundudemore near Wellington.

The reptile upon being trod upon gave a sort of short shrill cry, that was generally supposed by the friends of the deceased to have emanated from a cat. The deceased, however, stoutly maintained that she had trod upon a death adder, whereupon search was made, and the venomous reptile was caught and destroyed… As the symptoms apparent upon a human being, after the sting from a death adder, have never been fully described, the following may not be uninteresting:-The deceased trod on the death, or deaf, adder, as it is generally designated, late in the evening, near the steps of a kitchen door; she wore a shoe and thick worsted stocking; she trod on, or so near to the head of the reptile, that little doubt seems to be entertained of the fatal wound having been caused by the sting in its tail. The anomalous fact of a sting in the adder's tail has often been doubted, but is generally supposed to be the case.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 31/3/1848, 3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/59768330