Famous People In Energy - Lehigh University

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Famous People in EnergyBrief biographies of individuals who have made significant contributions to energy andscience. The biographies vary in reading level, but we have tried to find pioneers that willbe interesting for students of all ages.Energy People (alphabetical)Alcorn (1940)Celsius (1701)Crosthwait(1898)Curie (1867)Dalton (1766)Diesel (1858)Drake (1819)Edison (1847)Einstein (1879)Faraday (1791)Ford (1863)Franklin (1706)Goddard (1882)Gourdine (1929)Jones (1892)Joule (1818)Koontz (1922)Latimer (1848)Marconi (1874)Maxwell (1831)Meitner (1878)Newton (1642)Ohm (1787)Oppenheimer (1908)Otto (1832)Pupin (1858)Roberts (1913)Stanley (1858)Stokes (1924)Tesla (1856)Woods (1856)Isaac Newton (1642)back to topIsaac Newton was born in 1642 in England. His father haddied two months before his birth. When Isaac was three hismother remarried, and Isaac remained with hisgrandmother. He was not interested in the family farm, so hewas sent to Cambridge University to study.Isaac was born just a short time after the death of Galileo,one of the greatest scientists of all time. Galileo had proved that the planets revolve aroundthe sun, not the earth as people thought at the time. Isaac Newton was very interested inthe discoveries of Galileo and others. Isaac thought the universe worked like a machine andthat a few simple laws governed it. Like Galileo, he realized that mathematics was the wayto explain and prove those laws. Isaac Newton was one of the world’s great scientistsbecause he took his ideas, and the ideas of earlier scientists, and combined them into aunified picture of how the universe works.Isaac explained the workings of the universe through mathematics. He formulated laws ofmotion and gravitation. These laws are math formulas that explain how objects move whena force acts on them. Isaac published his most famous book, Principia, in 1687 while hewas a mathematics professor at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the Principia, Isaacexplained three basic laws that govern the way objects move. He then described his idea, ortheory, about gravity. Gravity is the force that causes things to fall down. If a pencil falls offa desk, it will land on the floor, not the ceiling. In his book Isaac also used his laws to showthat the planets revolve around the suns in orbits that are oval, not round.Isaac Newton used three laws to explain the way objects move. They are often callNewton’s Laws. The First Law states that an object that is not being pushed or pulled by

some force will stay still, or will keep moving in a straight line at a steady speed. It is easyto understand that a bike will not move unless something pushes or pulls it. It is harder tounderstand that an object will continue to move without help. Think of the bike again. Ifsomeone is riding a bike and jumps off before the bike is stopped what happens? The bikecontinues on until it falls over. The tendency of an object to remain still, or keep moving ina straight line at a steady speed is called inertia.The Second Law {force mass x acceleration; f ma} explains how a force acts on anobject. An object accelerates in the direction the force is moving it. If someone gets on abike and pushes the pedals forward the bike will begin to move. If someone gives the bike apush from behind, the bike will speed up. If the rider pushes back on the pedals the bikewill slow down. If the rider turns the handlebars, the bike will change direction.The Third Law states that if an object is pushed or pulled, it will push or pull equally in theopposite direction. If someone lifts a heavy box, they use force to push it up. The box isheavy because it is producing an equal force downward on the lifter’s arms. The weight istransferred through the lifter’s legs to the floor. The floor presses upward with an equalforce. If the floor pushed back with less force, the person lifting the box would fall throughthe floor. If it pushed back with more force the lifter would fly into the air.When most people think of Isaac Newton, they think of him sitting under an apple treeobserving an apple fall to the ground. When he saw the apple fall, Newton began to thinkabout a specific kind of motion—gravity. Newton understood that gravity was the force ofattraction between two objects. He also understood that an object with more matter–mass- exerted the greater force, or pulled smaller object toward it. That meant that thelarge mass of the earth pulled objects toward it. That is why the apple fell down instead ofup, and why people don’t float in the air.Isaac thought about gravity and the apple. He thought that maybe gravity was not justlimited to the earth and the objects on it. What if gravity extended to the moon andbeyond? Isaac calculated the force needed to keep the moon moving around the earth.Then he compared it with the force the made the apple fall downward. After allowing forthe fact that the moon is much farther from the earth, and has a much greater mass, hediscovered that the forces were the same. The moon is held in an orbit around earth by thepull of earth’s gravity.Isaac Newton’s calculations changed the way people understood the universe. No one hadbeen able to explain why the planets stayed in their orbits. What held them up? Less that50 years before Isaac Newton was born it was thought that the planets were held in placeby an invisible shield. Isaac proved that they were held in place by the sun’s gravity. Healso showed that the force of gravity was affected by distance and by mass. He was not thefirst to understand that the orbit of a planet was not circular, but more elongated, like anoval. What he did was to explain how it worked.Anders Celsius (1701)Anders Celsius was born in 1701 in Sweden. He succeeded his fatheras professor of astronomy at the University of Uppsala in 1730. It wasthere that he built Sweden's first observatory in 1741. One of themajor questions of that time was the shape of the Earth. IsaacNewton had proposed that the Earth was not completely spherical,but rather flattened at the poles. Cartographic measuring in Francesuggested that it was the other way around - the Earth was elongatedback to top

at the poles. In 1735, one expedition sailed to Ecuador in SouthAmerica, and another expedition traveled to Northern Sweden.Celsius was the only professional astronomer on that expedition. Their measurementsseemed to indicate that the Earth actually was flattened at the poles.Celsius was not only an astronomer, but also aphysicist. He and an assistant discovered thatthe aurora borealis had an influence oncompass needles. However, the thing thatmade him famous is his temperature scale,which he based on the boiling and meltingpoints of water. Celsius' fixed scale formeasuring temperature defines zero degreesas the temperature at which water freezes,and 100 degrees as the temperature at whichwater boils. This scale, an inverted form ofCelsius' original design, was adopted as thestandard and is used in almost all scientificwork.Anders Celsius died in 1744, at the age of 42. He had started many other research projects,but finished few of them. Among his papers was a draft of a science fiction novel, situatedpartly on the star Sirius.John Dalton (1766)backtotopJohn Dalton was born in England in 1766, ten years before theU.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. His family lived ina small thatched cottage. As a small child, John worked in thefields with his older brother, and helped his father in the shopwhere they wove cloth. Although they had enough to eat, theywere poor. Most poor boys at that time received no education,but John was lucky to attend a nearby school. In 1766, only aboutone out of every 200 people could read.John was a good student and loved learning. His teachersencouraged him to study many things. When he was twelve, heopened his first school in a nearby town, but there was very littlemoney. He had to close his school and work in his uncle's fields.Three years later, he joined his older brother and a friend to runa school in Kendall, England. They taught English, Latin, Greek,French, and 21 math and science subjects. John studied the weather and the nature aroundhim. He collected butterflies, snails, mites, and maggots. He measured his intake of foodand compared it to his production of waste. He discovered he was color-blind and studiedthat, too.In 1793, John moved to Manchester as a tutor at New College, and began observing thebehavior of gases. He began to think about different elements and how they are made. Hehad a theory that each element is made up of identical atoms and that all elements aredifferent because they are each made of different atoms. He thought that each element had

a different weight, because it was made of different atoms.In 1808, Dalton published a book, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, which listed theatomic weights of many known elements. His weights were not all accurate, but theyformed the basis for the modern periodic table. Not everyone accepted Dalton's theory ofatomic structure at the time, however. He had to defend his theory with more research.When John Dalton died in 1844, he was buried with honors in England. More than400,000 people viewed his body as it lay in state. As his final experiment, he asked that anautopsy be performed to find out the cause of his color-blindness. He proved that it wasnot caused by a problem with his eyes, but with his perception-the way his brain worked.Even in death, he helped expand scientific knowledge.Today, scientists everywhere accept Dalton's theory of atomic structure. A simple countryboy showed the world a new way of thinking about the universe and how it is made.backtotopGeorg Simon Ohm (1787)Georg Simon Ohm was born in 1787 in Germany. His father, JohannWolfgang Ohm, was a locksmith and his mother, Maria Elizabeth Beck,was the daughter of a tailor. Although his parents had not been formallyeducated, Ohm's father was a remarkable man who had educated himselfand was able to give his sons an excellent education through his ownteachings.In 1805, Ohm entered the University of Erlangen and received adoctorate. He wrote elementary geometry books while teaching mathematics at severalschools. Ohm began experimental work in a school physics laboratory after he had learnedof the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820.In two important papers in 1826, Ohm gave a mathematical description of conduction incircuits modeled on Fourier's study of heat conduction. These papers continue Ohm'sdeduction of results from experimental evidence and, particularly in the second, he wasable to propose laws which went a long way to explaining results of others working ongalvanic electricity.The basic components of an electrochemical cell are:1) Electrodes (X and Y) that are made ofelectrically conductive materials: metals,carbon, composites .2) Reference electrodes (A, B, C) that are inelectrolytic contact with an electrolyte3) The cell itself or container that is made of aninert material: glass, Plexiglass, . and4) An electrolyte that is the solution containingions.Using the results of his experiments, Georg Simon Ohm was able to define the fundamentalrelationship between voltage, current, and resistance. What is now known as Ohm's lawappeared in his most famous work, a book published in 1827 that gave his complete theoryof electricity.

The equation I V/R is known as "Ohm’s Law". It states that the amount of steady currentthrough a material is directly proportional to the voltage across the material divided by theelectrical resistance of the material. The ohm (R), a unit of electrical resistance, is equal tothat of a conductor in which a current (I) of one ampere is produced by a potential of onevolt (V) across its terminals. These fundamental relationships represent the true beginningof electrical circuit analysis.backtoMichael Faraday (1791)topBorn in 1791 to a poor family in England, Michael Faradaywas extremely curious, questioning everything. He felt anurgent need to know more. At age 13, he became an errandboy for a bookbinding shop in London. He read every bookthat he bound, and decided that one day he would write abook of his own. He became interested in the concept ofenergy, specifically force. Because of his early reading andexperiments with the idea of force, he was able to makeimportant discoveries in electricity later in life. He eventuallybecame a famous chemist and physicist.Faraday built two devices to produce what he called electromagnetic rotation: that is acontinuous circular motion from the circular magnetic force around a wire. Ten years later,in 1831, he began his great series of experiments in which he discovered electromagneticinduction. These experiments form the basis of modern electromagnetic technology.In 1831, using his "induction ring", Faraday made one of his greatest discoveries electromagnetic induction: the "induction" or generation of electricity in a wire by meansof the electromagnetic effect of a current in another wire. The induction ring was the firstelectric transformer. In a second series of experiments in September he discoveredmagneto-electric induction: the production of a steady electric current. To do this, Faradayattached two wires through a sliding contact to a copper disc. By rotating the disc betweenthe poles of a horseshoe magnet he obtained a continuous direct current. This was the firstgenerator. From his experiments came devices that led to the modern electric motor,generator and transformer.Faraday continued his electrical experiments. In 1832 he proved that the electricityinduced from a magnet, voltaic electricity produced by a battery, and static electricity wereall the same. He also did significant work in electrochemistry, stating the First and SecondLaws of Electrolysis. This laid the basis for electrochemistry, another great modernindustry.Michael Faraday, one of the world's greatest experimentalphysicist, is known as the father of the electric motor, electricgenerator, electric transformer, and electrolysis. He wrote the"Law of Induction" and is known for the "Faraday Effect".Two units in physics were named in his honor, the farad (forcapacitance) and the faraday (as a unit of charge).James Prescott Joule (1818)back to top

Joule was born in 1818 in England. A physicist, he shared in discovering thelaw of the conservation of energy. The law states that energy used in one formreappears in another and is never lost. In 1840, he stated a law, now calledJoule's Law, that heat is produced in an electrical conductor. The internationalunit of energy, the joule, is named in his honor.Edwin Laurentine Drake (1819)back to topEdwin Laurentine Drake was born in 1819 in Greenville, New York. Drake isconsidered the petroleum entrepreneur of the oil industry. A former railroadconductor, his success was based on his belief that drilling was the best way toobtain petroleum from the earth. He organized Seneca Oil Co., leased land, andon August 27, 1859, struck oil at a depth of 69 feet near Titusville,Pennsylvania.Most historians trace the start of the oil industry on a large scale to thisfirst venture. Drake used an old steam engine to power the drill. After hiswell began to produce oil, other prospectors drilled wells nearby. Oilcreated riches for many people and for many countries, but not for Drake.His poor business sense eventually impoverished him. In 1876, he wasgranted an annuity by the State of Pennsylvania, where he remained untilhis death in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.An industry which brought great riches to so many, finally honored himby bringing his body back to Titusville and interring it in a fine tombreplete with symbolic bronze sculpture. The oil industry honors its birthplace with amuseum and memorial park at the site where Drake struck oil in his pioneer well.James Clerk Maxwell (1831)back to topJames Clerk Maxwell was born in Scotland in 1831. He is generallyconsidered the greatest theoretical physicist of the 1800s, if not thecentury's most important scientist. He combined a rigorousmathematical ability with great insight into the nature of science.This ability enabled him to make brilliant advances in the two mostimportant areas of physics at that time (electromagnetism and akinetic theory of gases), in astronomy, and in biology as well.Maxwell was a physicist who is best known forhis work on the connection between light,electricity, magnetism, and electromagneticwaves (traveling waves of energy). "Maxwell's Equations" are thegroup of four equations that show his greatness. This simple groupof equations, together with the definitions of the quantities used inthem and auxiliary relations defining material properties, fullydescribe classical electromagnetism. He discovered that lightconsists of electromagnetic waves. He not only explained howelectricity and magnetism are really electromagnetism, but also paved the way for thediscovery and application of the whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that has

characterized modern physics. Physicists now know that this spectrum also includes radio,infrared, ultraviolet, and X-ray waves, to name a few.Maxwell's second greatest contribution was his kinetic theory, especially the part dealingwith the distribution of molecular speeds. In developing the kinetic theory of gases,Maxwell gave the final proof that the nature of heat resides in the motion of molecules. Thekinetic theory of gases explains the relationship between the movement of molecules in agas and the gas's temperature and other properties.Maxwell also made important contributions in several othertheoretical and experimental fields. Early in his career hefigured out and then demonstrated the principles governingcolor, color vision, and how eyes work. He used a green, redand blue striped bow in making the world's first colorphotograph of an object. He hypothesized that the rings of theplanet Saturn were made up of many small particles, and wasproven right when satellites visited Saturn in the 1970's and later.Nicolaus Otto (1832)back to topBorn in 1832 in Germany, Nicolaus August Otto invented the firstpractical alternative to the steam engine - the first successful four-strokecycle engine. Otto built his first four-stroke engine in 1861. Then, inpartnership with German industrialist Eugen Langen, they improved thedesign and won a gold medal at the World Exposition in Paris of 1867.In 1876, Otto, then a traveling salesman, chanced upon a newspaperaccount of the Lenoir internal combustion engine. Before year's end, Ottohad built an internal combustion engine, utilizing a four-stroke pistoncycle. Now called the 'Otto cycle' in his honor, the design called for four strokes of a pistonto draw in and compress a gas-air mixture within a cylinder resulting in an internalexplosion. He received patent #365,701 for his gas-motor engine. Because of its reliability,efficiency, and relative quietness, more than 30,000 Otto cycle engines were built in thenext 10 years. He also developed low-voltage magneto ignition systems for his engines,allowing a much greater ease in starting.Patent Number365,701Clicking on thisimage will take youfrom the EIA Kid'sPage to the U.S.Patent andTrademark Office'sPatent Full-Textand ImageDatabase. Whenyou get there, youwill need to click onthe box that says"Image" in order to

access the patent.When coming"back", you mightneed todouble-click your"back" button.Thomas Edison (1847)back to topThomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio. Young Tom didn't do very well in school,so his mother decided to teach him at home. She gave him lots of books to read. Tom was acurious boy. He always wanted to know how things worked. He liked to see if he couldmake them work better. His mother let him set up a laboratory in the house where hecould experiment with things.As a young man, Tom set up a lab of his own, where he could try out his ideas. He inventedlots of things in his laboratory. Guess what his favori

to explain and prove those laws. Isaac Newton was one of the world’s great scientists because he took his ideas, and the ideas of earlier scientists, and combined them into a unified picture of how the universe works. Isaac explained the workings of the universe through mathematics. He formulated laws of motion and gravitation.

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