In the simplest of terms, the induction pump worked something like this. A liquid metal was sealed in a welded stainless steel container. Coils of wire wrapped around the cylinder, which allowed the electromagnetic field surrounding the liquid to be varied. And, as any high school physics student knows (at least he or she should know!), a metal that is placed in a varying electromagnetic field will move at a right angle to the field. In other words, the liquid metal ends up being pumped without ever contacting the current. The moving liquid metal acted like a piston that compressed the refrigerant. Heat was released by an array of condenser coils like those found on the back of modern refrigerators.
END OF WARNING!
THIS HAS BEEN A SERVICE OF THE PUBLIC TECHNOLOGY WARNING SYSTEM.
Back to our story:
On July 31, 1931, the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator went into continuous operation. It worked like a charm, although it was very noisy.
So what happened to the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator?
The whole project was dropped for a number of reasons. The worldwide depression certainly didn’t help things. Nor did continual improvements in refrigerator design. But the 1930 invention of Freon was the real killer of the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. Freon was a nontoxic refrigerant, so the danger of leaking was eliminated. There was no longer a need to redesign the refrigerator.
Oddly, that was not really the end of the Einstein-Szilard system, however. The pump was later incorporated into the cooling systems of nuclear breeder reactors.
In the end, the two great scientists filed more than fortyfive patents in six countries. The contributions of these great minds to the field of refrigeration is largely forgotten, but their other achievements will long be considered among the greatest of the twentieth century.
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
the foot thina~u
whatchamacallit?
He used it. She used it. They’ve all used it. In fact, we can be pretty sure that even you have used it. And not just once. Yes, even 1 am willing to admit that I’ve used it.
What we are dealing with here is the most universally accepted measuring device on the North American continent.
You’re probably guessing that I’m talking about a ruler, but I’m not. We’ve all used rulers, but there is certainly no standard ruler design. (They are not even all straight.)
This universally adopted device that I’m talking about is that contraption that the shoe salesguy (or gal) sticks your foot into to measure the size of your foot.
You know what I’m talking about. It’s that really cold metal thing with all the markings on it that you put your foot in.
All-metal construction gives it some really nice heft. (There must be a few bratty kids out there who have cracked their siblings’ skulls open with this thing.) Come to think of it, this gizmo is probably the only thing in America that hasn’t been redesigned into a cheap designer plastic imitation.
So, do you have any idea what this device is called? Few people outside the shoe industry do. Yet, the name is printed as clear as day on the top of the device, although your foot obscures the name when you actually use it.
This device is called (drum roll, please!):
The Brannock Device.
The Brannock Device was patented in 1927 by a Syracuse University student named Charles F. Brannock. (Big surprise on the name, huh?) At the time, Brannock’s dad Otis was a partner in the Park-Brannock shoe store located in downtown Syracuse. The younger Brannock realized that there was a big problem. To measure a customer for a proper fit, the salesmen had just two options: Use either a crude wooden measuring stick or just keep trying on shoes until the proper fit was achieved. Brannock knew that there had to be a better way and spent endless sleepless nights solving the problem. His original prototype was made from one of those childhood Erector sets and the rest is shoe history.
Just in case you’re curious, the size system is linear. For example, a men’s size 1 is 72/3 inches. Each additional size is inch longer.
Widths work the same way. Each width is separated by a distance of ‘/,6 of an inch. There are actually nine widths in the U.S. system (width actually varies with foot length): AAA, AA, A, B, C, D, E, EE, and EEE.
Today, the Brannock Device is the standard for the footwear industry.
If you think about it, the Brannock Device has one other distinct honor; it’s one of the few things that you can just throw on the floor anywhere and it looks fine. Throw a shoe, a piece of paper, or anything else on the floor and it’s considered a mess. Not so with the Brannock Device. It belongs on the floor.
You can’t kill one of these things, either. They are essentially indestructible, although 1 am sure that any good explosion could destroy it. 1 have noticed that the numbers do eventually wear away with use, but there are many stores out there that have been using the same device for thirty or forty years. (If only my car could last this long.)
Even with the great success of his foot-measuring device, Charles Brannock continued to operate his shoe store until 1981 when his building was sold to allow for the expansion of the Hotel Syracuse. Sadly, Charles Brannock died in 1993 at the age of eighty-nine.
The company has since been purchased by Sal Leonardi (do you know him?), who owned a small tool factory and just happened to be looking to acquire a new product line. With approximately 1 million devices sold, the Brannock Device has varied very little, although the company has started manufacturing customized models and is currently considering producing a digital model.
So, the next time you’re in the mall and you want to impress your friends, just drag them into any shoe store. Point to that metal measuring device sitting on the floor and show them your brilliance. That, my friend, is a Brannock Device …
Side note: Being a member of the EEE club, it is clear that 1 have really fat feet. I guess that 1 won’t be doing much foot modeling in the near future. My friend Brett, on the other hand, has great-looking feet. Years ago, while he was sunbathing at college, some stranger came up to him and told him that he had really beautiful feet. The guy ended up shooting tons of pictures of Brett’s feet. Yes, there are some really strange people in this world!
Useless? Useful? I’ll leave that for you to decide.
america”s first subway
it was one big secret
Most major cities around the world have been faced at some time in history with the question of what to do with all the traffic in the streets. Today, those smelly buses and graffiti-covered trains have been providing a somewhat viable solution. But what happened when cities were faced with this problem during the 1800s?
Imagine what it must have been like in a large city back in the nineteenth century. There were millions of people with no practical means of mass transportation. Remember, enginepowered vehicles practical for city use had not been invented yet. Just tons of horse-drawn carriages creating one stinky mess in the city streets. Hold your nose!
Such a transportation problem existed in New York City and, to no one’s surprise, there was no practical solution.
Enter one Alfred Ely Beach. Don’t worry if you don’t know who this guy is-most people don’t.
What you do need to know is that in 1846 Alfred purchased a newly launched publication called The Scientific American with a friend named Orsun D. Munn. He quickly became its editor and turned it into the great magazine that we know today (although they seem to have dropped the The from their name).
You’re probably wondering where he got the cash to purchase this great magazine. Since you just had to know, 1 will tell you.
Beach got his start working for the New York Sun, the city’s first penny daily newspaper. It would be nice to say that he had to work his way up through the ranks, but he didn’t. You see, his father owned the paper. By 1848, management was turned over to Alfred and his brother Moses.
So here we have young Alfred in charge of both a great scientific magazine and a leading newspaper. Day after day he gl
anced out the window of his lofty Sun office to the congested city streets below. Just horse-and-buggy gridlock (better watch where you step!). Surely, he wondered, there must be a solution to this problem. Well, he actually came up with two solutions.
The first was to build elevated roads and place the extra traffic above. Very costly and not very practical.
The second possibility was to go underground. In 1849, he proposed to tunnel the entire length of Broadway and put down a double track. But this was not a track for trains-it was for horses. One track for each direction. Horses pulling cars behind them would stop at every corner for ten seconds and then move on down the track. But such a far-fetched scheme was not to happen. At least not yet.
Beach moved on to bigger and better things.
You see, Beach and Munn had also opened a patent agency in 1846 called Munn Ft Co. (Al was one busy guy). This was no small-time operation. Many important inventors walked through their doors. Some guy named Thomas Edison demonstrated his newfangled contraption called a phonograph for the first time ever to Beach. Other important inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Morse also sought out the company’s assistance. Between 1850 and 1860, Beach commuted from New York to Washington every two weeks to look over his clients’ affairs.
Oh, yeah. As if Beach wasn’t busy enough, he also invented some of his own things. In 1856, he won First Prize and a gold medal at New York’s Crystal Palace Exhibition. Beach had invented a typewriter for the blind that moved the paper carriage along with every keystroke. This mechanism was eventually adopted for use in all standard typewriters.
During the same period, Beach turned total control of the Sun over to his brother and in 1853 started a new publication called the People’s Journal.
Busy guy.
But Beach never lost sight of the traffic problem that faced the city. The population of New York City was growing and growing. More people meant crowded streets, unsanitary conditions, and more horses racing up and down the city’s thoroughfares (actually they spent most of their time standing still in traffic).
In March 1864, a man named Hugh B. Wilson offered a solution to the traffic problem. Wilson was a Michigan railroad man and financier and had attended the opening of the London subway in January 1863. What was good for London must be good for New York. Unfortunately, the proposed bill was defeated. Why? Very simple-Boss Tweed, who headed the city Tammany Hall political machine, received a kickback on every fare in the city. Allowing a subway to be built would cause a loss of revenue. Tweed controlled the governor’s office and this bill was dead in the water before it was ever proposed.
Even if the bill had passed, the idea would never have been a success.
The London steam locomotives burned coke and stored the exhaust in special tanks mounted below the boilers. Unfortunately, they didn’t work properly. The passengers were forced to store the smoke in their lungs, if you know what 1 mean. More than one person died from this exhaust.
In other words, locomotives were out. Electric motors had not been perfected yet and subways seemed to be an impossibility.
But wait! We forgot about Alfred Beach!
Beach still had his mind set on doing something about that awful traffic congestion.
Through his various contacts, Beach learned of a pneumatic mail tube that had been successfully built in London in 1866. You’ve probably seen small versions of these devices at your bank’s drive-through teller. You put your transaction into a little container, close the hatch, and air pressure sends it on its way into the bank building. Whoooosh!
The British tube was four and a half feet high and two miles in length. Its sole purpose was to quickly move mail and packages from one place to another. As you are probably well aware, humans tend to do idiotic things. Scrunching down and going for a ride on one of the mail carriers just happened to be one of them.
Beach quickly realized that if the concept was enlarged to carry packages of humans, all of the city’s transit problems would be gone. He was convinced that pneumatic transit was the solution and decided to give it a shot.
In 1867, Beach unveiled his idea to the world at the American Institute Fair being held at the Fourteenth Street Armory in New York. His model consisted of a tube six feet in diameter. The walls of the tube were one and one half inches thick, made of fifteen layers of wood laminated together. The tube was suspended from the roof of the building and ran 107 feet from Fourteenth Street to Fifteenth Street. The car, which ran on wheels and was confined to a track, was moved back and forth by a ten-foot-diameter fan. The ten-passenger car was kept in constant motion and was a smash hit. More than 170,000 people took a ride on this model before the close of the exhibition. To no one’s surprise, Beach took home the Gold Medal for his invention.
Translating this successful prototype into reality would not be easy. Tunnel drilling equipment just didn’t exist at the time and Boss Tweed still controlled the political scene. Beach knew that in order to build his proposed subway he would need to obtain a city franchise. But to do so would probably mean funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into Tweed’s pockets.
Building the subway in secret was the only solution. Beach formed a company called the Pneumatic Dispatch Company and proposed to tunnel two tubes, each four and one half feet in diameter and approximately one-half mile in length. These tubes were intended to carry packages under Broadway between Warren Street and Cedar Street. Since the tubes would only carry mail, Tweed did not object and the project was easily approved. In fact, Tweed had expected Beach to propose a pneumatic elevated train and was very happy to see Beach’s focus diverted. A charter was issued to Beach.
An engraving of a passenger riding in Beach’s luxurious subway car. (Scientific American, March 5, 1870)
Then Beach pulled a fast one. He went back to the legislature and requested an amendment to the legislation. He said that he wanted one large tube in order to simplify construction and save money. This very minor change easily passed.
1 bet you can now see where this story is going.
Beach wasted no time and did everything possible to keep his project a secret. His first move was to rent the basement of Devlin’s Clothing Store, which was located at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street.
To cut the tunnel, Beach invented a hydraulic shield that could gouge out sixteen inches of earth with each advance. Six people operated the machine: two to work the hydraulic rams, two to carry out the earth, and two to put in the tunnel’s brickwork.
All work on the tunnel was done at night.
Why nights?
Very simple. Trying to build a secret tunnel in the middle of a major city was virtually impossible during the day. All the work on the tunnel was done at night in an effort to minimize public attention. Bags of soil were also smuggled out and taken away on covered wagons with muffled wheels.
The tunnel was drilled at approximately 21 feet below street level. The soil proved to be fairly soft. The only obstacle encountered was the foundation of an old fort, but the shield was able to go through it without any problem. The entire 312foot tube was dug out in just fifty-eight nights.
Then, when the subway was nearly complete, a reporter disguised as a workman gained access to the tunnel. As a result, the New York Herald revealed Beach’s secret to the world. The newspaper’s description was fairly accurate and critically attacked the feasibility of such a project.
Beach counteracted. He opened his tunnel for all to see on February 28, 1870. He charged 25 cents admission and people were shocked to see what was hidden in the ground below.
Upon entering the rented store at street level, visitors descended a flight of stairs to Beach’s masterpiece. He spared no expense. He knew that he had to use this tunnel to impress even the harshest of critics.
The subway waiting room was 120 feet long and 14 feet wide. It was brightly lit with zircon lamps. There was a cascading fountain filled with goldfish that helped to muffle the sound of the street traffic above.
Frescoes, fancy chandeliers, and blind windows (with damask curtains) lined the walls. Let’s not forget the grandfather clock and the grand piano. This was clearly not your typical subway. (Today everything would be stolen or vandalized within the first twenty-four hours.)
Spectators descended six more steps down to the train platform where the tunnel came into view. There it was, engraved in the tunnel’s header: PNEUMATIC (1870) suBWAY. On either side of the tunnel entrance was a bronze statue of Mercury holding a cluster of red, green, and blue gaslights. Mercury was an appropriate choice, as he was the messenger of the gods, the symbol of the great speed of the winds.
The subway car was equally lavish. It was very brightly lit by gaslights and furnished with cushioned seats that could accommodate twenty-two passengers at a time.
When the doors to the car closed, a giant fan (called the Western Tornado) kicked into action and pushed the car along the track at six miles per hour, although it was capable of going much faster.
Oh, I almost forgot. So that Beach would not break his charter, there was a thousand-foot eight-inch diameter mail dispatch tube incorporated into the tunnel. It carried packages at about sixty miles per hour from a drop box hidden in a hollow lamppost on the street above.
The cost of the tunnel project was about $350,000, including approximately $70,000 of Beach’s own money.
The pneumatic subway was an instant smash. Very quickly, the New York Herald changed its opinion and now called for the building of a pneumatic subway that went to every corner of the city.
Obviously, this never happened.
Why?
Boss Tweed, again, stood in the way. A bill to extend Beach’s subway five miles to Central Park passed both houses of the legislature by a wide margin. But good old Boss Tweed ordered then-Governor John T. Hoffman to veto the bill. Beach tried again in 1873 after Tweed and his cronies were toppled from power. This time there was a new governor, John A. Dix, and the bill was signed into law.
But luck was not on Beach’s side. Just a few weeks after the bill was passed, the financial panic of 1873 set in. People had bigger concerns than worrying about building a subway.
Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories from the Flip Side of History Page 6
