George Everest

His mathematical and engineering skills came to the attention of Stamford Raffles in 1814 who requested the presence of Everest in Java to survey the island. With the survey complete he returned to India in 1816 where he took on the task of improving river navigation.

Then came the opportunity to work on the great trigonometrical survey of India under William Lambton, a task that would occupy the rest of his career. In 1818 Everest travelled to Hyderabad to complete Lambton’s work of measuring a meridian arc through India.

Everest was keen to carry out the work to the greatest possible accuracy, but faulty instruments and poor staff made this difficult. Ill health also held him back and he had to stop work in 1820 after contracting malaria for a second time. He returned to work the following year and in 1823, after Lambton’s death, Everest was appointed superintendent of the survey.

Long hours of survey work in the field had a detrimental effect on his already poor health and, in 1825, he became too ill to carry on. Everest returned to England and all work on the survey came to a halt.

On regaining his health, Everest set about improving conditions for the survey. He investigated instruments used by Ordnance Survey in Ireland and redesigned those to be used in India. He also persuaded the East India Company to secure the services of Henry Barrow in maintaining the instruments in India. Scientific interest in the project was raised by Everest’s success in networking and on 8 march 1827 be was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Everest returned to the subcontinent in June 1830 as surveyor-general of India and his work on the great trigonometrical survey of India resumed in 1832. The survey took a further nine years to complete, but by 1841 the meridian arc of almost 2,400km had been measured from Cape Comorin on the southern tip of India to the Himalayas in the north.

With the final calculations from the survey complete, Everest retired on 16 December 1843 and returned to England, recommending his colleague, Andrew Waugh, to succeed him. On 17 November 1846 he married Emma Wing with whom he had six children. The two volumes of his record of the survey, An Account of the Measurement of Two Sections of the Meridional Arc of India, won Everest the medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Yet it is for the mountain that bears his name rather than his surveying work that he is mainly remembered. When no local name could be agreed upon for Peak XV in the Himalayas, Andrew Waugh decided to name it after his predecessor. In 1856 Peak XV was renamed Mount Everest.

Everest continued to be as active as his health would allow and was knighted in 1861. He served as a manager of the Royal Institution, a vice-president of the Royal Geographical Society and on the council of the Royal Society.

George Everest died at his home in London on 1 December 1866 and was buried in St Andrew’s churchyard, Hove. It is unlikely that he ever saw the mountain that was named in his honour.

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Charles Goodyear

The family hardware business produced a wide range of products, from ivory, pearl and metal buttons to heavy agricultural implements, and was initially successful. In 1830, however, the business failed leaving Goodyear with large debts. This professional collapse coincided with a first period of personal ill-health.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the Roxbury Rubber Company had started to manufacture waterproof clothing, shoes and other products from leather treated with India rubber. Although early sales were good, many of the products were returned after they melted or became sticky in the summer heat. The garments also became rigid in extreme cold.

Goodyear came into contact with the Roxbury Rubber Company in 1834 when he purchased a life jacket from their New York store. Noticing that the jacket’s inflation tube was of poor quality, Goodyear improved the design, made some new tubes and returned to New York to show the store’s manager his work. It was then that he learned of the problems with the rubber and the company’s impending failure.

So began Goodyear’s ten-year crusade to improve the rubber manufacturing process. Unfortunately, before he could start, he was imprisoned as a debtor by one of his creditors, the first of several periods of imprisonment during his life. Undeterred, Goodyear began his experiments in the prison with a small amount of raw gum provided by a friend and the help of his wife, Clarissa, and their children.

His first experiments produced sheets of white rubber by mixing the raw gum with magnesia and boiling it in lime. These sheets did not become sticky but could be ruined if they came into contact with a weak acid.

Goodyear thought he had solved this problem in 1836 by applying nitric acid to the surface of the rubber. He found financial backing and started a business in the abandoned factory at Roxbury to make mail bags for the government. Unfortunately his solution only worked on the surface of the bags and they rotted before they could be delivered.

What was needed was a process that worked all the way through the rubber, not just on the surface. Nathaniel Hayward, a former employee of the Roxbury Rubber Company, had been experimenting by treating rubber with sulphur. In 1838, Goodyear bought the right to use this process from Hayward, and in 1839, possibly as a result of an accidental spill, he found his solution.

While trying to harden the raw gum by boiling it with sulphur, a lump of the mixture fell onto the surface of the stove. The result was vulcanized rubber. Goodyear spent the next five years refining the vulcanization process (named after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire), determining the exact mixture of ingredients and the precise temperature. He and his family spent much of this time in debtors’ prison or relying on the charity of friends.

With new financial backers Goodyear opened a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, and, on 15 June 1844, he patented the vulcanization process. The patent was challenged, however, and it was not until 1852 that the final case was settled in his favour in the USA. Goodyear was not so fortunate in Europe, losing patent battles in both Britain and France. The failure of his business in France led to his imprisonment once again for debt in Paris.

Although he was recognised as the inventor of the vulcanization process, and despite filing more than sixty patents for rubber products, Goodyear never made any money out of his discovery. The cost of fighting patent infringement cases and the failure of his businesses left him with increasing debts. When Charles Goodyear died in New York on 1 July 1860 his creditors were owed $200,000. But to Goodyear, to have created a process that benefited society was more important than money.

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1. Hydrogen (H)
2. Helium (He)
3. Lithium (Li)
4. Beryllium (Be)
5. Boron (B)

More elements will follow soon.

In the late 19th century observations of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune suggested that they were being affected by another planet. In 1906 Percival Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory, started a search for the elusive “Planet X”.

Lowell’s ten year search came to an end with his death in 1916. A battle with Lowell’s widow, Constance, over the terms of a funding bequest in his will put the project on hold until 1929 when a new astronomical camera was built.

Tombaugh was hired and set to work examining the photographs taken of the night sky by the new camera. He compared pairs of photographs taken on different nights and attempted to determine if any of the objects shown had moved.

On 18 February 1930 Tombaugh examined photographs taken on the nights of 23 and 29 January. He noticed an object in the plates that appeared to have moved. This was his first view of Pluto. Further photographs of the same patch of night sky confirmed the movement and the discovery was announced to the world through the telegraph to Harvard on 13 March.

After collecting over a thousand suggestions for the new planet’s name it was officially designated Pluto on 24 March. The name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, had been suggested by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old girl from Oxford.

Over the course of the 20th century estimates for the size of Pluto were reduced considerably. With a radius of only 1,172 km many astronomers questioned its planetary status. The discovery of objects in the Kuiper belt of a similar, or possibly larger, size forced a reassessment of Pluto’s classification. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created a new category of objects called dwarf planets and placed Pluto within it, leaving only eight planets in our solar system.

To find out more about beryllium, read the article at Scienceray.com by following the link below.

Elements of the Periodic Table: Beryllium (Be)
Essential facts, history and uses of the fourth element of the periodic table.

St Elmo's Fire on Masts of a Ship at Sea

Descriptions of St Elmo’s fire have also found their way into works of fiction, including those of William Shakespeare and Herman Melville. Even classical writers, such as Pliny and Julius Caesar, have given us first-hand accounts of the spectacle. But what is St Elmo’s fire and how is it caused?

You can find the answer to this question at Scienceray.com by following the link below.

What is St Elmo’s Fire?
St Elmo’s fire is a familiar phrase to most of us (even if we ignore the film and song). But what is St Elmo’s fire and how is it caused?

The article also discusses the methods of helium production and the origin of the element’s name. The properties of its two stable and four unstable isotopes are studied, including the superfluidity of helium-4.

To find out more about helium, read the article at Scienceray.com by following the link below.

Elements of the Periodic Table: Helium (He)
Essential facts, history and uses of the second element of the periodic table.