logical

Quick little reminder to all of you who may have slept for the last 40 years and missed anything to do with the science fiction thing. Leonard Nimoy was born this day in 1931.

Son of a barber he first started to get into film and TV around the end of the 50's. Bit parts in series and cheapo movies and the odd Twilight Zone was where he cut his teeth. Of note (I guess): Zombies of the Stratosphere was an installment in a movie serial that featured Nimoy as a martian. The stuff isn't very good. I mean really. The main character is some guy named Commander Cody. From there it goes downhill.

Oddly enough he appeared with William Shatner in 1964. They were in an episode of The Man from Uncle.

That's gotta hurt.

Starting up a new department tonight. In poking around the news and archives I see so much amazingly messed up stuff that it's too good to pass up. I'm not talking about the typical shock Internet crap a la Jackass stuff. I'm talking "it really happened." And if it has some stupid historical connection, I'm there.

So, today's 1st gem is from Japan. Though these events occurred just a few months ago, it does connect with a short couple of posts I did about submarines colliding.

The Japan Times reported that on January 12th of this year a surfacing submarine collided with a Japanese fishing vessel. This tiny little story is telling in that the fishing vessel had aboard at this time a Maritime Self Defence Force officer charged with preventing submarine / fishing boat collisions. He was on the lookout for a sub when it happened.

And from the other side of the globe now, news of another sub/boat crack up. The Straight of Hormuz is the spot, the date, last Friday night. An American submarine, the USS Hartford and a surface vessel, the USS New Orleans, ran into each other around 1am.

Seems the collision was a vertical one, that is to say, the Hartford was under the New Orleans. No details if someone official was posted on the New Orleans to spot for submarines.

Oh weely?

So history has a way of having a laugh every now and again. Case in point: British engineer Frank Whittle was the first to patent a real turbo jet engine. The year was 1932. He managed to build a functioning prototype by 1937. Though strapped to a test bed, it ran just fine. British military were not that interested.

On the other side of the channel, Hans von Ohain, a German engineer, had been tinkering with his own turbo jet. And the laugh is they never knew of each others work. The difference was German industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw a demonstration of the lab model and was hooked.

Heinkel had acces to the tools, machinery and expertise to build lots of stuff. He teamed Ohain with master machinist Max Hahn. Together they created a fully functioning stand alone engine. Heinkel was ready with an airframe and on August 27, 1939 (less than 2 years from workshop bench to production) test pilot Erich Warsitz successfully flew the He 178. This was the world's first turbo jet airplane to take to the skies. Erich Warsitz (know as titanium gut, cast iron constitution guy) was also the first guy to fly a rocket powered plane, the He 176, only a few months before. Hope he had a pension. Military testing was undertaken in quiet remote areas to maintain "secrecy and reasonable safety". Nice to know they care.

A whittle bit of this and that.

There was no shortage of good ideas when it came to getting the jet engine off the ground. The real stopper was there was no materials or equipment that could handle the temperatures or pressure levels that were going to be needed to run a jet engine with enough snot to propel an airplane faster that an propeller driven engine.

For example, in 1915, the Hungarian Albert Fono devised adding a ramjet to a cannon fired projectile. The idea was the size of the cannon could be smaller and lighter as the jet engine equipped bomb would fly father on it's own. Although it was never built (denying the world ballistic missiles for, oh, a good 25 more years or so) he did patent a jet propelled airplane in 1928. It too, was merely a blueprint that awaited smarter minds and cleverer processes.

Maxime Guillaume, a French engineer, actually was the first to patent the jet airplane. He eclipsed the Hungarian by 7 years.

A Norwegian, a Hungarian, a Frenchman and finally a German and a Brit. The jet was about to be born.

Those wiley Norwegians, again.

It's Monday and I'm back. I spent the weekend looking through material for today's post and coming up with many possibilities. Remember, I am easily distracted. I have found that about the best music to do the nasty work of keeping the fires burning at the Barn is by far the wonderful streaming audio from CBC, in particular the Signal with Laurie Brown. Heard every evening from 10pm onwards, but because of the time zones you can pick it up as early as 6pm. Want to hear what I'm listening to? Click on this - http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/mediaPlayer.html?ATLANTIC_HI

Anyway, this post's title hides a rather interesting story. Ægidius Elling was a Norwegian inventor who is credited with if not inventing, at least figuring out, the gas turbine engine.

For those of you non techies out there, that's a real jet engine. His original patent for this engine came out in 1884. Trouble is, as he progressed through the theoretical to the practical he realized that there was few materials out there that could hold up to the high temperatures that modern jet engines produced. He was, in essence, making a modern jet engine in 1903.

Issues with safety and reliability prevented the jet engine from moving beyond Ellings prototypes. It would be over 2o years later when British engineer Frank Whittle patented a workable engine in 1932.

Coandă you fly?

I'll just jump ahead thousand years or so (because I want to ) and leap into the modern age a bit. What I really mean is about 1910.

In this year a Romanian engineer by the name of Henri Coandă built the very first jet powered airplane, the unimaginatively named Coandă 1910. You figure he could have named it after a bird at least.

No matter. He originally joined the military at the behest of his father. He was always interested in flight and paid special attention to artillery. However his inventive spirit and the army life was not a good fit and in 1908 he left to pursue a career in science. He found his way to Paris and enrolled in the École Nationale Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Construction Aéronautique. Two years later he was an aeronautical engineer. The year is only 1910.

He moved quickly. He was curious about how wind moved over the surfaces of airplanes and experimented with many shapes first using a fast train to mount his test subjects on, and then developing a wind tunnel, complete with smoke trails. Again, this guy was doing this stuff in 1910.

He then sat down and built the world's first jet airplane. Just like that. It was powered by a genuine jet engine, not an exploding keg of gunpowder strapped under the wing. Although not that powerful, and destined to be the poor cousin of jet propulsion, the thermojet engine he built was an amazing device indeed. A standard 4 cylinder piston engine powered an air compressor that forced air at amazing high speed into a combustion chamber where fuel was delivered and set alight. The roaring flames out the back pushed the plane through the air. In an age when inventors flew their creations, you got to figure he had as much raw courage as technical skill.

The damn thing flew, but crashed on later flight and burnt up. He walked away. By then though interest and money were lacking, so jet planes were put on the back burner. He continued to design and build airplanes over the years, but he maintained a quirky side throughout his life. He developed a jet powered sleigh and an early version of the hovercraft.

Eastern winds.

As is often the case, the more I look into something, the more it grows tentacles. As I snooped about to find worthy historical tidbits to weave together a reasonably accurate account of the history of jet engines I ran into all sorts of side roads to explore.

One of the basic ones is there is considerable history around rockets, and it begs the question, where do you split the jet engine off from rockets? I'm going to perform the surgery at the moment when jet turbines (what we call jet engines) were invented.

But there are some cool old rocket stories. The ancient Chinese had the gunpowder going on and it is assumed that occasionally something more substantial than a firework was fired heavenward. Chinese history records a fei tschu, or flying vehicle around 1750 BC, apparently capable of flying thousands of miles. No pictorial record has surfaced so we can only surmise at what powered it.

However, the crafty Turks with a long scientific heritage, look like they came up with rockets for at least firing at their enemies, if not for travel. With the Crusades and all, there was a sense of urgency to get going with weapons technology. Witnesses have recorded the Turkish forces using rocket powered "torpedoes", and books on military technique stating the same still exist today.

And in the 1600's Lagari Hasan Celebi is reported to have strapped no less that 140 pounds of gunpowder powered rockets to his back while slung under a seven winged monstrosity. He reportedly shouted he was going to "talk to Christ" and took off. The rockets fizzled and he came to earth over the ocean, landing safely.

Scrambled eggs.

I'm finally at the next obsession. It has all the elements of a good one: Excitement, danger, strong odours and rending human limbs. It has for me also, that extra twist of scientists bedecked in top hats toiling over Erlenmeyer flasks and steaming coils of copper tubing. And of course, they then attempted to ride these things.

The basic idea of hot gas escaping through an opening is as old as boiling water. The aeolipile is the first purpose made device to use hot gasses to propel something. Invented by Hero of Alexandria, (sometimes called Heron) a Greek scholar living in the first century AD. The motor was no more than a delightful toy for his and his colleague's amusement. An amazingly simple little gizmo it consists of a suspended metal ball with 2 tubes on either side to the axis. When filled with water and heated from below the escaping steam jets whizz the thing around and around.

Hero was a cool inventor. Among his other ideas were a wind wheel that powered an organ and the first coin op vending machine. It dispensed holy water. Damn. You have to admit, he had a sense of humour.

Don't let him live in Alabama.

Please indulge me one more off topic post. This one is just too good to be true.

OK, so here's the scoop: There's this chimpanzee in Sweden (at a zoo, NOT in the Swedish jungle)who has had a habit of throwing things at visitors. Can you blame the poor bugger? I was at a zoo in Quebec once and the monkey's there were throwing poop at the gawkers, (or freaking them out by masturbating).

Granted, monkeys aren't apes, but they are practical since they came up with effective ways of making their grievances heard.

Sorry, back to the rock throwing chimp. Called Santino, he was born on 1978 and was known to pitch rocks across the safety moat at visitors, and at other chimps to display his dominance of the joint.

After a few years the other male chimp died and Santino's rock wielding died down. But a few years later the barrage began, with volleys of ten stones or more. Zoo staff conducted a stake out and discovered he was stashing ammo all over the compound in little piles. Some neatly laid out, others tucked away in secrecy.

Bubba -y

I admit I'm still distracted by science stuff so before I tear off in another direction I want to briefly talk about those statues they dug up near Luxor, Egypt. Anyone see the news stories that ran mid afternoon about the two Pharaoh Amenhotep III statues that showed up while crews were excavating the pharaoh's mortuary.

According to AP, one statue is black marble and depicts him in a seated pose, while the other, carved from quartzite, shows him as a sphinx, (a la- his own head on the body of a lion).

Amenhotep was the ninth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty and ruled for 40 odd years around 1400BC. Apparently, he left more images of himself than any other pharaoh. Hmmm.

I've tried to find out just how big the damn things are but just about every story so far is based on the AP news wire. Bet they're bigger than a Volkswagen.

Science-y

I am so easily distracted. They shouldn't let people like me near things like old record shops and the Internet. I started to look up stuff about jet engines (going fast, lots of fire, skidding out of control) and got hung up on two cool science headlines. Both have their roots in history. Which is good because my wealthy patrons will shut up.

The first is well, we all knew this was true, but here we are again with some more tantalizingly almost for sure proof of water on mars.

According to Samuel Schon, a Ph.D. student in the geological science department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Mars had flowing water as recent as 1.25 million years ago. His studies of crater rims, and specifically water gullies, shows what he believes to be proof of running water.

Since you and I can't remember back that far, to put this news into perspective, this was a time when early humans were walking about and making very basic things, probably beer.

Now the other piece of science history is only a few days old, the actual item involved was much older. Did anyone happen to notice on Monday a kind of whoosh?Around 8:30am? It seems a rock, described by scientists as a "giant space rock" (glad they got that cleared up) passed by the earth about 72,000 kilometers away.

Oddly enough, the scientists can tell you to practically a car length how far away the thing is but estimate the rock to be anywhere from 21 to 47 meters across. A margin of error of over 2 to 1. And to make us feel better about it, they figure the Tunguska kaboom was caused by a rock about the same size.

All this science has me in a mood.