Bed Time Story 39

Once upon a time there was a man named Anthony R. "Tony" Barringer  and he was a Canadian/American geophysicist. He made numerous contributions to mineral exploration technology. His most famous work was the development of the INPUT airborne electromagnetic system, which has been credited in the discovery of tens of billions of dollars' worth of ore deposits.
Before beginning his university studies, Barringer served with the British Army in World War II. In 1948, he began attending the University of London. In 1951, he obtained a B.Sc. in economic geology from the university's Imperial College of Science and Technology. He obtained a PhD degree in 1954, from the same institution.
Barringer left the United Kingdom to accept a post in Toronto, Canada with Selco Exploration as an exploration geologist. Eventually he was promoted to Manager of its Airborne and Technical Services division. At this time, he invented the INPUT (Induced Pulse Transient) airborne electromagnetic system and the equipment for a portable ground electromagnetic system. This technology uses one horizital transmitter looped around a fixed-wing aircraft and a vertically suspended receiver loop about 120 meters behind the aircraft. The transmitter electromagnetic pulses are half sine wave shape of millisecond duration, the induced transient is picked up by the receiver coil; analysis of the received wave pattern when matched against a catalog of waves forms generated in the lab based upon analog scale modeling allows explorers to get a better understanding of the minerals in a rock formation, without extracting the rocks. The Society of Exploration Geophysicists said INPUT was “a meritorious technical achievement which has been instrumental in the discovery of many base metal deposits in a number of countries around the world.”
In 1961, he formed a private company, Barringer Research Ltd. He was the President and major shareholder. Barringer continued to develop the airborne system and licenses its use to exploration companies. Major oil and mining companies depended on this remote-sensing technology for their exploration. It has been credited in the discovery of over 25 commercial ore deposits, representing tens of billions of dollars.
Barringer Research went public in 1967. Ten years later, Barringer moved to Denver, Colorado and brought the company's headquarters with him. He later became a citizen of the United States.
Barringer made numerous technical contributions to the mining industry, including a laser-induced fluorescence-based system used primarily in oil and gas exploration (FLUOROSCAN), correlation spectrometer used to measure atmospheric dispersions of various gases (COSPEC), an infrared remote sensor for atmospheric gases which has been used by NASA to measure the worldwide atmospheric distribution of carbon dioxide (GASPEC), two airborne conductivity mapping systems using very low frequency fields (E-phase and radiophase) and several particulate analyzers (COTRAN, SURTRACE, LASERTRACE and AIRTRACE). He has presented more than 80 technical papers and has been awarded more than 70 patents in Canada, the U.S., and other countries.
In 1989, Barringer officially retired. He died in Golden, Colorado at the age of 84. With this known and so much more to learn about Anthony R. Barringer i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most interesting inventors of his time.




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                                        From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 38

Once upon a time there was a man named Vladimir Pavlovich Barmin and he was a Soviet scientist, designer of the first soviet rocket launch complexes.

 An asteroid 22254 Vladbarmin was named in his honor.

With this known and so much more to learn about Vladimir Barmin i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most intriquing inventors of all time.



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                                       From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 37

Once upon a time there was a man named John Bardeen and he
was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers to missiles. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) or its medical sub-tool magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In 1990, John Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908.He was the son of Charles Russell Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School.
Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, even though he could have graduated several years earlier. His graduation was postponed due to taking additional courses at another high school and also partly because of his mother's death. He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1923. While in college he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He raised the needed membership fees partly by playing billiards. He was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. He chose engineering because he didn't want to be an academic like his father and also because it is mathematical. He also felt that engineering had good job prospects.
Bardeen received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a classmate of Grant Gale. He graduated in 1928 despite taking a year off during his degree to work in Chicago.He had taken all the graduate courses in physics and mathematics that had interested him, and, in fact, graduated in five years, one more than usual; this allowed him time to also complete a Master's thesis, supervised by Leo J. Peters. He received his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1929 from Wisconsin.
Bardeen stayed on for some time at Wisconsin furthering his studies, but he eventually went to work for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Corporation, based in Pittsburgh. From 1930 to 1933, Bardeen worked there on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. He worked as a geophysicist. After the work failed to keep his interest, he applied and was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University.
Bardeen studied both mathematics and physics as a graduate student, ending up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics, under physicist Eugene Wigner. Before completing his thesis, he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935. He spent the next three years there, from 1935 to 1938, working with to-be Nobel laureates in physics John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936.
 In October 1945, John Bardeen began work at Bell Labs. Bardeen was a member of a Solid State Physics Group, led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan. Other personnel working in the group were Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore and several technicians. He moved his family to Summit, New Jersey.
The assignment of the group was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments mysteriously failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states, and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely exchanged.By the winter of 1946 they had enough results that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to Physical Review. Brattain started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily and suggested that they use glycol borate (gu), a viscous chemical that didn't evaporate. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of gu placed across a P-N junction.
On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain—working without Shockley—succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. By the next month, Bell Labs' patent attorneys started to work on the patent applications.
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.
Shockley took the lion's share of the credit in public for the invention of transistor, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
The "transistor" (a combination of "transconductance" and "resistor") was 1/50 as large as the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios and allowed electrical devices to become more compact.
 In 1956, John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Brattain and Shockley received their awards that night from King Gustaf VI Adolf. Bardeen brought only one of his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony. King Gustav chided Bardeen because of this, and Bardeen assured the King that the next time he would bring all his children to the ceremony. He kept his promise.Bardeen died of heart disease at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1991.Although he lived in Champaign-Urbana, he had come to Boston for medical consultation. Bardeen and his wife Jane (1907–1997) are buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wisconsin. They were survived by three children, James & William and Elizabeth Bardeen Greytak, and six grandchildren. With this known and so much more to learn about John Bardeen i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most brilliant inventors of all time.




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                                               From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Tme Story 36

Once upon a time there was a man named  John Barber and he was an English coalmaster and inventor. He was born in Nottinghamshire, but moved to Warwickshire in the 1760s to manage collieries in the Nuneaton area. For a time he lived in Camp Hill House, between Hartshill and Nuneaton, and later lived in Attleborough. He patented several inventions between 1766 and 1792, of which the most remarkable was one for a gas turbine. Unfortunately nothing practical came out of this patent, but Barber was the first man to describe in detail the principle of the gas turbine, and in recent years a working model based on Barber's specification has been built.
In 1791 Barber took out a patent (UK patent no. 1833 – Obtaining and Applying Motive Power, & c. A Method of Rising Inflammable Air for the Purposes of Procuring Motion, and Facilitating Metallurgical Operations) which contained all of the important features of a successful gas turbine. Planned as a method of propelling a "horseless carriage", Barber's design included a chain-driven, reciprocating gas compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine.
Barber's turbine was to burn gas obtained from wood, coal, oil, or other substances, heated in a retort or producer, from where the gases were conveyed into a receiver and cooled. Air and gas were then to be compressed in different cylinders and pumped into an "exploder" (combustion chamber) where they were ignited, the mixture of hot gas then being played against the vanes of a paddle wheel. Water was to be injected into the explosive mixture to cool the mouth of the chamber and, by producing steam, to increase the volume of the charge.
Barber’s concept was sound, but given the technology of that day, it was not possible for the device to create sufficient power to both compress the air and the gas and produce useful work. Nevertheless, the credit for the idea that leads to the modern gas turbine can clearly be given to John Barber. In 1972 the Bonn firm Kraftwerk-Union AG showed a working model of Barber's turbine at the Hannover Fair. With this known and so much more to learn about John Barber i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most interesting inventors of all time.



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                                            From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 35

Once upon a time there was a man named Guido of Arezzo and he was an Italian music theorist of the Medieval era. He is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation; his text, the Micrologus, was the second-most-widely distributed treatise on music in the Middle Ages (after the writings of Boethius).
Guido was a monk of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. Recent research has dated his Micrologus to 1025 or 1026; since Guido stated in a letter that he was thirty-four when he wrote it, his birthdate is presumed to be around 991 or 992. His early career was spent at the monastery of Pomposa, on the Adriatic coast near Ferrara. While there, he noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants.
He came up with a method for teaching the singers to learn chants in a short time, and quickly became famous throughout north Italy. However, he attracted the hostility of the other monks at the abbey, prompting him to move to Arezzo, a town which had no abbey, but which did have a large group of cathedral singers, whose training Bishop Tedald invited him to conduct.
While at Arezzo, he developed new techniques for teaching, such as staff notation and the use of the "ut–re–mi–fa–so–la" (do–re–mi–fa–so–la) mnemonic (solmization). The ut–re–mi-fa-so-la syllables are taken from the initial syllables of each of the first six half-lines of the first stanza of the hymn Ut queant laxis, whose text is attributed to the Italian monk and scholar Paulus Diaconus (though the musical line either shares a common ancestor with the earlier setting of Horace's "Ode to Phyllis" (Odes 4.11) recorded in the Montpellier manuscript H425, or may even have been taken from it.) Giovanni Battista Doni is known for having changed the name of note "Ut" (C), renaming it "Do" (in the "Do Re Mi ..." sequence known as solfège). A seventh note, "Si" (from the initials for "Sancta Iohannes," Latin for St. John the Baptist) was added shortly after to complete the diatonic scale. In Anglophone countries, "Si" was changed to "Ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter."Ti" is used in tonic sol-fa and in the song "Do-Re-Mi".
The Micrologus, written at the cathedral at Arezzo and dedicated to Tedald, contains Guido's teaching method as it had developed by that time. Soon it had attracted the attention of Pope John XIX, who invited Guido to Rome. Most likely he went there in 1028, but he soon returned to Arezzo, due to his poor health. It was then that he announced in a letter to Michael of Pomposa ("Epistola de ignoto cantu") his discovery of the "ut–re–mi" musical mnemonic. Little is known of him after this time. With This known and so much more to learn about Guido of Arezzo I would say he is on my list of one of the most interesting inventors of all time.





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                                            From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 34

Once upon a time there was a man named George Charles Ballas, Sr. and he was an American entrepreneur. He invented the first string trimmer, known as the Weed Eater in 1971. He is the father of ballroom dancer, Corky Ballas, and grandfather of professional dancer Mark Ballas of Dancing with the Stars.Ballas was born in Ruston, Louisiana. He was the son of Charles Ballas and Maria (née Lymnaos), who were Greek immigrants that ran a restaurant. His brother is Peter Ballas.
He enlisted in the United States Army at the age of 17 in 1942 during World War II and was a bombardier. Ballas would later serve in the Korean War.He married Maria Marulanda in 1951.
He had five children, Corky Ballas, George Ballas Jr., Michelle Ballas Pritchard, Maria Ballas Jamail, and Lillian Ballas Miles.His grandson, Mark Ballas is a dancer in Dancing with the Stars. He had six other grandchildren.Ballas got the idea for the trimmer while driving through an automatic car wash, where the rotating brushes gave him an idea. Using a tin can laced with fishing line and an edge trimmer, he tried out his idea, which worked. After some refinements, he shopped it around to several tool makers, who all rejected his invention. He went on to develop the garden tool himself. The first year, sales were over a half million dollars. By 1977 they were $80 million, and Ballas sold his company the following year to Emerson Electric Company. With this known and so much more to learn about Goerge Charles Ballas Sr. i would say he is on my list for one of the most interesting inventors.



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                                          From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 33

Once upon a time there was a man named Charles Babbage and he was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage, along with Ada Lovelace, is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer.
Considered by some to be a "father of the computer",Babbage, along with Lovelace, is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex designs. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century.
Parts of Babbage's uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the Science Museum in London. In 1991, a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked.Babbage's birthplace is disputed, but according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he was most likely born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England. A blue plaque on the junction of Larcom Street and Walworth Road commemorates the event.His date of birth was given in his obituary in The Times as 26 December 1792; but then a nephew wrote to say that Babbage was born one year earlier, in 1791. The parish register of St. Mary's Newington, London, shows that Babbage was baptised on 6 January 1792, supporting a birth year of 1791.Babbage was one of four children of Benjamin Babbage and Betsy Plumleigh Teape. His father was a banking partner of William Praed in founding Praed's & Co. of Fleet Street, London, in 1801. In 1808, the Babbage family moved into the old Rowdens house in East Teignmouth. Around the age of eight, Babbage was sent to a country school in Alphington near Exeter to recover from a life-threatening fever. For a short time he attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, but his health forced him back to private tutors for a time.Babbage then joined the 30-student Holmwood academy, in Baker Street, Enfield, Middlesex, under the Reverend Stephen Freeman. The academy had a library that prompted Babbage's love of mathematics. He studied with two more private tutors after leaving the academy. The first was a clergyman near Cambridge; through him Babbage encountered Charles Simeon and his evangelical followers, but the tuition was not what he needed.He was brought home, to study at the Totnes school: this was at age 16 or 17. The second was an Oxford tutor, under whom Babbage reached a level in Classics sufficient to be accepted by Cambridge.Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1810.He was already self-taught in some parts of contemporary mathematics; he had read in Robert Woodhouse, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and Marie Agnesi. As a result, he was disappointed in the standard mathematical instruction available at Cambridge.Babbage, John Herschel, George Peacock, and several other friends formed the Analytical Society in 1812; they were also close to Edward Ryan. As a student, Babbage was also a member of other societies such as The Ghost Club, concerned with investigating supernatural phenomena, and the Extractors Club, dedicated to liberating its members from the madhouse, should any be committed to one.In 1812 Babbage transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was the top mathematician there, but did not graduate with honours. He instead received a degree without examination in 1814. He had defended a thesis that was considered blasphemous in the preliminary public disputation; but it is not known whether this fact is related to his not sitting the examination.After Cambridge he , considering only his reputation, Babbage quickly made progress. He lectured to the Royal Institution on astronomy in 1815, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816. After graduation, on the other hand, he applied for positions unsuccessfully, and had little in the way of career. In 1816 he was a candidate for a teaching job at Haileybury College; he had recommendations from James Ivory and John Playfair, but lost out to Henry Walter. In 1819, Babbage and Herschel visited Paris and the Society of Arcueil, meeting leading French mathematicians and physicists.That year Babbage applied to be professor at the University of Edinburgh, with the recommendation of Pierre Simon Laplace; the post went to William Wallace.With Herschel, Babbage worked on the electrodynamics of Arago's rotations, publishing in 1825. Their explanations were only transitional, being picked up and broadened by Michael Faraday. The phenomena are now part of the theory of eddy currents, and Babbage and Herschel missed some of the clues to unification of electromagnetic theory, staying close to Ampère's force law.
Babbage purchased the actuarial tables of George Barrett, who died in 1821 leaving unpublished work, and surveyed the field in 1826 in Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives.This interest followed a project to set up an insurance company, prompted by Francis Baily and mooted in 1824, but not carried out. Babbage did calculate actuarial tables for that scheme, using Equitable Society mortality data from 1762 onwards.
During this whole period Babbage depended awkwardly on his father's support, given his father's attitude to his early marriage, of 1814: he and Edward Ryan wedded the Whitmore sisters. He made a home in Marylebone in London, and founded a large family. On his father's death in 1827, Babbage inherited a large estate (value around £100,000, equivalent to £7.81 million in today's pounds), making him independently wealthy.After his wife's death in the same year he spent time travelling. In Italy he met Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, foreshadowing a later visit to Piedmont. In April 1828 he was in Rome, and relying on Herschel to manage the difference engine project, when he heard that he had become professor at Cambridge, a position he had three times failed to obtain (in 1820, 1823 and 1826).Babbage lived and worked for over 40 years at 1 Dorset Street, Marylebone, where he died, at the age of 79, on 18 October 1871; he was buried in London's Kensal Green Cemetery. According to Horsley, Babbage died "of renal inadequacy, secondary to cystitis." He had declined both a knighthood and baronetcy. He also argued against hereditary peerages, favouring life peerages instead. With this known and a whole lot more to know about Charles Babbage i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most creditable inventors of all time.





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                                          From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 32

Once upon a time there was a man named Ralph Henry Baer and he was a German-born American video game developer, inventor, and engineer, and was known as "The Father of Video Games" due to his many contributions to games and the video game industry in the latter half of the 20th century. Born in Germany, he and his family fled to the United States before the outbreak of World War II, where he changed his name and later served the American war effort. Afterwards, he pursued work in electronics. In 1951, while working at Loral, he was asked to build "the best television set in the world". He proposed the idea of playing games on television screens, but his boss rejected it. Later in 1966, while working at Sanders Associates, his 1951 idea came back to his mind, and he would go on to develop eight hardware prototypes. The last two (the Brown Box and its de/dt extension) would become the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. He would contribute to the development of other consoles and consumer game units. In February, 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms". Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Baer, a Jewish family living in Germany, and was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 11, he was expelled from school because of his ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Baer's family, fearing increasing persecution, moved from Germany to New York City in 1938 two months prior to Kristallnacht while Baer was a teenager. Baer would later become a naturalized United States citizen. In the United States, he was self-taught and worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars; upon seeing an advertisement at a bus station for education in the budding electronics field, he quit his job to study in the field. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II and assigned to military intelligence at the United States Army headquarters in London. With his secondary education funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering (unique at the time) from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949. In 1949, Baer went to work as chief engineer for a small electro-medical equipment firm, Wappler, Inc., where he designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and low frequency pulse generating muscle-toning equipment. In 1951, Baer went to work as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York, where he designed power line carrier signaling equipment for IBM. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president. He started his own company before joining defense contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems Inc.) in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987. Baer's primary responsibility at Sanders was overseeing about 500 engineers in the development of electronic systems for military applications. However, out of this work came the concept of a home video game console; he would go on to create the basis for the first commercial units, among several other patented advances in video games and electronic toys. Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952; she died in 2006. They had three children during their marriage, and at the time of Baer's death, he had four grandchildren. Baer died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014, according to family and friends close to him. With this being so and so much more to learn about Ralph Henry Baer i would have to say he is on my list for one of the most interesting inventors of all time.



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                                                From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bed Time Story 31

Once upon a time there was a man named John Vincent Atanasoff and he was an American physicist and inventor, best known for inventing the first electronic digital computer.Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College. Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.
Atanasoff, of Bulgarian, French and Irish ancestry, was born on October 4, 1903 in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher. Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasoff was born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, close to Yambol, Bulgaria. While Ivan was still an infant, Ivan's own father was killed by Ottoman soldiers after the Bulgarian April Uprising.In 1889, Ivan Atanasov immigrated to the United States with his uncle. Atanasoff's mother, Iva Lucena Purdy, was a teacher of mathematics.
Atanasoff was raised by his parents in Brewster, Florida. At the age of nine he learned to use a slide rule, followed shortly by the study of logarithms, and subsequently completed high school at Mulberry High School in two years. In 1925, Atanasoff received his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida, graduating with straight A's.
He continued his education at Iowa State College and in 1926 earned a master's degree in mathematics. He completed his formal education in 1930 by earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his thesis, The Dielectric Constant of Helium. Upon completion of his doctorate, Atanasoff accepted an assistant professorship at Iowa State College in mathematics and physics.
Partly due to the drudgery of using the mechanical Monroe calculator, which was the best tool available to him while he was writing his doctoral thesis, Atanasoff began to search for faster methods of computation. At Iowa State, Atanasoff researched the use of slaved Monroe calculators and IBM tabulators for scientific problems. In 1936 he invented an analog calculator for analyzing surface geometry. The fine mechanical tolerance required for good accuracy pushed him to consider digital solutions.
With a grant of $650 received in September 1939 and the assistance of his graduate student Clifford Berry, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) was prototyped by November of that year. According to Atanasoff, several operative principles of the ABC were conceived by him during the winter of 1938 after a drive to Rock Island, Illinois.
The key ideas employed in the ABC included binary math and Boolean logic to solve up to 29 simultaneous linear equations. The ABC had no central processing unit (CPU), but was designed as an electronic device using vacuum tubes for digital computation. It also used separate regenerative capacitor memory that operated by a process still used today in DRAM memory. With this being so and so much more still to learn about John Atanasoff I would say he is on my list of one of the most notable inventors in the world.



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Bed Time Story 30

Once upon a time there was a man named Joseph Aspdin and he was an English cement manufacturer who obtained the patent for Portland cement on 21 October 1824. Aspdin (or Aspden) was the eldest of the six children of Thomas Aspdin, a bricklayer living in the Hunslet district of Leeds, Yorkshire. He was baptised on Christmas Day, 1778. He entered his father's trade, and married Mary Fotherby at Leeds Parish Church (the Parish Church of St Peter at Leeds) on 21 May 1811.
By 1817 he had set up in business on his own in central Leeds. He must have experimented with cement manufacture during the next few years, because on 21 October 1824 he was granted the British Patent BP 5022 entitled An Improvement in the Mode of Producing an Artificial Stone, in which he coined the term "Portland cement" by analogy with the Portland stone, an oolitic limestone that is quarried on the channel coast of England, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset. See below for the text of the patent.
Almost immediately after this, in 1825, in partnership with a Leeds neighbour, William Beverley, he set up a production plant for this product in Kirkgate, Wakefield. Beverley stayed in Leeds, but Aspdin and his family moved to Wakefield (about nine miles away) at this point. He obtained a second patent, for a method of making lime, in 1825. The Kirkgate plant was closed in 1838 after compulsory purchase of the land by the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company, and the site was cleared. He moved his equipment to a second site nearby in Kirkgate.
At this time his eldest son James was working as an accountant in Leeds, and his younger son, William, was running the plant. However, in 1841, Joseph went into partnership with James, and posted a notice that William had left, and that the company would not be responsible for his debts, stating "I think it right to give notice that my late agent, William Aspdin, is not now in my employment, and that he is not authorised to receive any money, nor contract any debts on my behalf or on behalf of the new firm.^"
In 1843, William established his own plant at Rotherhithe, near London. There he introduced a new and substantially stronger cement, using a modified recipe for cement-making, the first "modern" Portland cement. In 1844 Joseph retired, transferring his share of the business to James. James moved to a third site at Ings Road in 1848, and this plant continued in operation until 1900. Joseph Aspdin died on 20 March 1855, at home in Wakefield.
 Aspdin called the product Portland cement because set mortar made from it resembled “the best Portland stone". Portland stone was the most prestigious building stone in use in England at the time. The patent clearly does not describe the product recognised as Portland cement today. The product was aimed at the market for stuccos and architectural pre-cast mouldings, for which a fast-setting, low-strength cement was required (see cement). It was fired at low temperature (below 1250 °C) and therefore contained no alite. With this known and so much more to learn about Joseph Aspdin i would say he is on my list for one of the most interesting inventors.



                                                                  The End