Abstract
The fall of Rome and rapid depopulation of the city of Rome itself was due, in large measure to the severing of the large aqueducts that supplied the city with water. Civilization, at least insofar as measured by the ability of peoples to live in high densities, can be measured then by its plumbing. Indeed, after any natural disaster in which essential services are disrupted, restoration of the water distribution and sewage treatment facilities are specific points of emphasis.
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Notes
- 1.
Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity” were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1831, establishing his precedence over the American Joseph Henry who conducted similar experiments in New York at approximately the same time.
- 2.
Faraday was apprenticed to a book binder at age thirteen but read voraciously and attended public lectures to better himself. He had the audacity to ask Humphrey Davy, a leading member of the Royal Society, for a position. Davy politely declined initially but shortly thereafter sacked one of his assistants for fighting. Faraday’s interview had impressed Davy sufficiently that he offered Faraday the vacant position.
- 3.
There is an arbitrary phase that we have suppressed. Generally, the time variation would be sin(ω t +ϕ), where the phase ϕ depends upon the orientation of the loop at time t = 0.
- 4.
The American inventor Thomas Edison envisioned utilizing constant current dynamos for power distribution. He installed several of his bulky devices in American cities, with commercial operation of the Pearl Street Station in New York City beginning on September 4, 1882. Edison was rapidly supplanted in the marketplace by the superior alternating current technology of Russian emigré Nikolai Tesla and his industrial partner George Westinghouse.
- 5.
Kirchhoff was a student of the eminent mathematician Franz Ernst Neumann when his “Über den Durchgang eines elektrischen Stromes durch eine Ebene, insbesondere durch eine kreisförmige,” stating his two circuit principles was published in the Annalen der Physik in 1845. His demonstration that a unique solution existed was provided in “Über die Auflösung der Gleichungen, auf welche man bei der Untersuchung der linearen Vertheilung galvanischer Ströme geführt wird,” also published in the Annalen in 1847.
- 6.
Note that here the symbol L does not represent the magnitude of the angular momentum vector. It would stand to reason that we use the symbol I for inductance but we are already using that symbol to denote current. To avoid confusion, it has become standard practice to use L to denote inductance in honor of the Russian physicist Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz, who also contributed to the understanding of electrical circuits.
- 7.
It is somewhat cleaner mathematically to use complex numbers in our derivations but we shall defer that discussion to subsequent courses.
- 8.
Van Musschenbroek’s experimental results were reported to the Paris Academy of Science in 1746 by his correspondent René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. Van Musschenbroek’s report of a (literally) breathtaking shock delivered by the device spurred widespread interest.
- 9.
Franklin communicated his ideas in a letter to his colleague Peter Collinson in April of 1749. Franklin suggested using a portrait of the King of England and soliciting unwary subjects by declaring that the device was designed to test loyalty to the Crown.
- 10.
Chu, Cohen-Tannoudji and Phillips were awarded the 1997 Prize “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”
- 11.
The original Bell Telephone system had a frequency cutoff of 3 kHz. People in those days had a different “telephone voice.” AM radio broadcasts have a bandwidth limit of 10 kHz and the effects of eliminating the high frequency content of the signal is much less noticeable.
- 12.
Fourier’s Théorie analytique de la chaleur was published in 1822. The work provided the foundations for what is now called Fourier analysis and also introduced the concept of dimensional analysis that we have used throughout the text.
- 13.
Edison’s U.S. Patent 307030 “Electrical meter” was the first issued in the United States for an electrical device.
- 14.
Fleming’s device consists of two electrodes. Hence, it has subsequently been denoted as a diode, from the Greek δ i ζ, meaning twice.
- 15.
De Forest’s U.S. Patent 879532 “Space telegraphy” was issued in 1908. His earlier patents on a two-electrode version of the Audion provoked a patent suit by Fleming. In his testimony for the suit, de Forest admitted he did not understand how the Audion worked.
- 16.
The Austrian physicist Robert von Lieben procured a patent for a three-electrode cathode ray tube in 1906 that included magnetic deflection of the cathode rays. Credit for invention of what we call triodes (from the Greek τ ρ i α meaning three) is usually given to de Forest.
- 17.
Not surprisingly, these are called tetrodes and pentodes from the Greek roots \(\tau \acute{\epsilon }\tau \tau \alpha \rho \epsilon \zeta\) (four) and \(\pi \acute{\epsilon }\nu \tau \epsilon\) (five).
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© 2015 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2015). X Modern Technology. In: Neoclassical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10647-2_10
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