Category Science & Technology

You might still be too young to ride your own motorcycle, but that surely wouldn’t have stopped you from riding along with elders in your family, older cousins and friends. The feeling of the wind gushing against your face (do wear your helmet!) could well have you fantasizing the days when you would be allowed to ride these vehicles yourself. While that might not be too far away in the future, we will have to be content now with learning about how the first such ride panned out.

Gottlieb Daimler, a German mechanical engineer, is a huge figure in the early history of the automotive industry. After studying engineering and learning about engines while working with various firms, he started to work for Nikolaus Otto, a German engineer who had invented the four-stroke internal combustion engine, in 1872.

Experimental workshop

A decade later, Daimler left this company along with his co-worker – another German engineer – Wilhelm Maybach, to start their own experimental engine building workshop. They were successful in developing a compact, high-speed single-cylinder engine that they called grandfather clock engine and patented it in 1885.

Once they had their engine, it was important for Daimler and Maybach to offer proof on wheels and show that an engine was capable of powering a vehicle. Even though their objective was not to build a motorcycle, they ended up designing one as the engine prototypes at their disposal wasn’t powerful enough for a full-size carriage. The result was the Daimler Reitwagen or “Riding Car”, which was patented in August 1885.

Paul rides it

The design included a wooden bicycle frame with the pedals removed and a single-cylinder Otto cycle four-stroke engine mounted on rubber blocks. Apart from the two iron tread wooden wheels, there were two outrigger wheels to help its stability. With an engine output of 0.5 horsepower at 600 rpm, the Reitwagen could attain a top speed of about 11 kmph.

It was in November (some accounts say November 10, while others say November 18) 1885 that the Reitwagen made its first journey of real length in public. It was Daimler’s son Paul who rode the vehicle and he covered the distance of around 5 km between Cannstatt to Unterturkheim in Stuttgart, Germany, achieving speeds of 5-12 kmph during the process. The ride not only showed that such an engine could power such a vehicle, but also that a human being could completely control it.

Is it the first motorcycle?

Not everyone agrees with the notion of Reitwagen being the first motorcycle as there were other steam-powered vehicles that also lay a claim. The fact that the Reitwagen sports auxiliary wheels for stabilisation further dents its case. What the Reitwagen has going for itself, however, is that it is the first gasoline internal combustion engine motorcycle and a forerunner of all vehicles that came after it and used this common engine type.

Daimler and Maybach went on to use their engines on a four-wheeled carriage and a boat, before eventually building a four-wheeled vehicle that was designed from scratch as an automobile. Even though building the Reitwagen was never his ultimate goal, inventing it meant that Daimler is often called “the father of the motorcycle.”

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Have you heard of rocket planes? No, not the planes we make with paper in our classrooms, letting them fly around during a free hour. Rocket planes or rocket-powered planes are aircraft propelled by rockets, sometimes in addition to jet engines.

These planes are capable of achieving much higher speeds than similarly sized jet aircraft and are also suitable for flying in very high altitudes. Propulsion through rocket engines implies that these aircraft can also achieve shorter take-offs and much higher acceleration.

The first of these aircraft that was used in a public demonstration came about late in the 1920s. It turned out to be a reality, thanks to the work done by three men, who brought in their individual skill sets together for this project.

Meet Valier, Opel & Sander

The first among these was Max Valier, an Austrian rocketry pioneer. Valier worked tirelessly to popularise rocketry and wrote many popular articles and books that brought this technology closer to the layperson. He was also among the earliest to experiment with rocket-powered vehicles and dreamt of rocket-powered flights that will not only cut down the flying time between cities, but also eventually take human beings into space.

Fritz von Opel, a German engineer and industrialist, was the second person. Grandson of Adam Opel, the founder of the Opel company that now manufactures automobiles, Fritz was a racing driver and entrepreneur with an eye for detail, both technically and organisationally. German engineer Friedrich Wilhelm Sander completed the trio. A manufacturer and expert in pyrotechnics, Sander owned a company, which he expanded to produce rockets.

Together for the project

While Valier was drawn towards rocketry as early as 1924 after reading physicist Hermann Oberth’s research on the idea of rockets carrying humans to space, Opel was sucked into it after meeting Valier in 1927. The fact that Opel decided to get actively involved in the rocket research project also meant that he brought with him his financial clout. Believing that the Opel brand would have a positive impact through such an involvement, he next brought Sander into the project. As Sander’s company made solid fuel signal rockets, Opel was hoping for faster implementation of the rocket motor through this move.

As early as March 1928, the trio of Valier, Sander and Opel started seeing the fruits of their labour. Rocket-propelled prototypes of automobiles were launched behind closed doors, and by April, the automobile RAK 1 was test-driven. Opel decided to drive the RAK 2 automobile himself and on May 23, 1928, he fired the 24 solid fuel rockets fitted to his futuristic car and pushed it to a maximum speed of 238 km/hour! The feat, performed in front of nearly 3,000 people including celebrities, earned him the nickname “Rocket Fritz”.

From cars to aircraft

Spurred on by their success, the trio turned their focus towards aviation. Despite setbacks, including the explosion of one of their test flights, they carried on and were ready for their demonstration next year. On September 30, 1929, Opel piloted the RAK 1 (sometimes referred to as RAK 3 to distinguish it from the automobile), the first such public rocket-powered flight, in front of a large crowd.

Opel flew at an altitude averaging about 50 feet and covered nearly two km in less than 100 seconds. Even though the plane was wrecked during landing, Opel was able to escape unhurt and wrote that it was “marvelous to fly like this” in an article in The New York Times after the flight. The Great Depression that came about at that time, however, put an end to these rocket experiments, pushing Opel’s company to focus instead on vehicle development.

In the decades that followed, rocket-powered aircraft were initially deployed in warfare and a number of models were built during World War II. Rocket planes were the first to break the speed of sound in level flight and they continue to be built for experimental usage, owing to the fact that there are practical difficulties while operating rockets.

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You might know about comets – cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, dust and rock that orbit the sun. But have you heard about sungrazing comets? A class of celestial objects, sungrazing comets are comets that pass extremely close to the sun at its perihelion or point of closest approach. When we say extremely close, we refer to a few thousand kilometres from the sun’s surface – a small distance on a cosmological scale.

These sungrazing comets have been observed for many hundred years and there is reason to believe that ancient Greeks – philosopher Aristotle and historian Ephorus amongst them – might well have spotted these during their times. sungrazing comets, however, do not lend themselves exactly to be easily observed.

Space-based approach

It is for this reason that only a few sungrazing comets had ever been spotted from ground-based observatories. It was a whole new snowball game altogether from 1979, however, when satellites and space-based observatories started doing our bidding.

The P78-1 satellite, which carried a white-light coronagraph known as SOLWIND, was launched in February 1979 by the U.S. Air Force. Out there to observe and give us insights into solar physics and operational for about five years, SOLWIND’s most important discovery turned out to be a comet.

Masks for corona

While certainly not the first space-based coronagraph, SOLWIND was surely an update on its predecessors. Designed to look at the solar atmosphere and thus monitor activity in the sun’s outer corona, the SOLWIND had a mask or occulting disk. Using this mask, it was able to create the effect of an eclipse artificially, hiding the bright disk of the sun to better observe its corona.

On August 30, 1979, SOLWIND spotted a comet approaching the sun – rather closely than usual – and recorded the data. Delay in analysing the spacecraft data, however, meant that these images were actually seen only a couple of years later.

Shock to surprise

When Naval Research Lab (NRL) scientists Russ Howard, Marty Koomen and Don Michels first looked at the images taken on August 30-31 1979, they were first horrified. On seeing the huge bright streak appear in the data, they first thought that something had happened to the camera, leading to a reflection inside it. Only on further study did they realise that they were actually staring at a feature that was moving and that it was indeed a comet.

It wasn’t long before they figured out that the satellite had captured a sungrazing comet. The Howard-Koomen-Michels comet was the first comet to be discovered by a space-based observatory – a satellite in this case.

Once the floodgates had been opened, it happened repeatedly as observatories in space made discoveries on a regular basis. In fact, they spot new asteroids and comets almost every week! SOLWIND itself was able to discover a number of other comets before it was eventually destroyed by a ground-based missile in 1985 during a planned Air Force exercise.

Naming convention changes

The flurry of discoveries also led to a change in the naming convention as the International Astronomical Union caught up with the fact that satellite discoveries were the norm and not the exceptions. So rather than naming it after the person who identified objects in the image, it is now named after the satellite or survey that found it in the first place. And this meant that comet Howard-Koomen-Michels officially became C/1979 Q1 (SOLWIND). Space observatories that came later have hundreds and thousands of comets named after them.

The Kreutz sungrazers

German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz studied comets that had been observed until then in the 1880s and 1890s.

Apart from figuring out that some of these were sungrazers and some were not, Kreutz was also able to deduce that many of the sungrazers actually follow the same path or orbit.

It was as if these comets were all broken up fragments of a much larger comet from the past. The original comet and its fragments likely broke up repeatedly as they orbited the Sun and approached it closely.

To honour Kreutz’s work, this group of comets was named as the Kreutz sungrazers.

The Kreutz sungrazers get to within about 50,000 km of the sun’s surface, meaning that they reach the lower layers of the solar atmosphere, or the corona.

All the comets discovered by Solwind, including comet Howard-Koomen-Michels, belong to the Kreutz group.

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Before landing humans on our moon, one of the important points of consideration, obviously, were the landing sites. In response to this need of obtaining detailed photographs of potential Apollo landing sites, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter program was born. The plan included a series of three-axis stabilized spacecraft to be inserted into lunar orbit, with each of them comprising a main engine and four solar panels.

The first of these was the Lunar Orbiter 1, designed primarily to photograph the smooth areas of the lunar surface. For this, it was fitted with a Eastman Kodak imaging system that weighed 68 kg.

Spy turns scout

The system, which employed both wide and narrow-angle lenses, had the ability to develop exposed films, scan the images and relay them back to Earth. The Eastman Kodak camera flown on the Lunar Orbiters, in fact, had been originally developed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and used in spy satellites – a truth that was revealed only after the Cold War ended.

While imaging was the primary objective, the spacecraft was also equipped with other instruments to collect data regarding radiation intensity and micro-meteoroid impact, among others. Launched on August 10, 1966, it was placed in an Earth parking orbit before being fired towards the moon.

Stumbling blocks

During its cruise to the moon, the spacecraft experienced failure to its Canopus star tracker (probably due to stray sunlight) and overheating. The former issue was resolved by navigating with the moon as the reference, and the latter was taken care of by orienting the spacecraft at a different angle off the sun.

On August 14, Lunar Orbiter 1 was injected into an orbit around the moon and began working on its objective of photographing nine potential Apollo landing sites, seven secondary areas and some sites on the far side of the moon. It successfully completed this work by August 28, with over 200 images to boast about.

Even though some of the early high-resolution images lacked quality due to smearing, the mission was largely successful as it was able to capture images covering over 5 million sq.km. of the moon’s surface. While the wide-angle images taken by this system showed resolutions up to 0.5 km, the narrow-angle pictures were accurate up to 60-80 m.

First Earthrise

Among these photos was that of the first Earthrise, captured unintentionally. During its 16th orbit around the moon on August 23, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of our Earth taken from the moon. The image, which was shot just before the spacecraft was about to pass behind the moon, shows the crescent of the Earth. The image data was transmitted by Lunar Orbiter 1 and received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain.

Lunar Orbiter 1 continued working, turning its attention away from photography and focusing instead on engineering goals from September 16. The spacecraft’s condition, however, deteriorated by October 28, forcing the ground controllers to command it to impact onto the lunar surface.

On October 29, on its 577th orbit around the moon, Lunar Orbiter 1 crashed on the moon’s far side to prevent its transmission from interfering with the Lunar Orbiters to come. By the time the Lunar Orbiter program, which consisted of five orbiters, came to an end, 99% of the moon’s surface was photographed down to a resolution of 1m!

Old and new

As for the first Earthrise photo, it proved to be a remarkable image, despite the fact that the image released then was starkly black, wide and had poor resolution. The full resolution of the image wasn’t obtained from the mission data up until 2008.

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project at NASA Ames Research Center went about their task then, obtaining original mission data from tapes and restoring it to an operational condition by combining modern electronics with 1960s era parts. The result was a beautiful high resolution image of the first Earthrise photograph, a touched up version of which has been used with this story.

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Every time you visit a shopping mall or a metro station (if your city has one), one aspect of it that you can’t fail to notice are the escalators that take you from one floor to another. These places are also provided with an elevator, but i bet most of you would rather be out there on an escalator, than inside an elevator.

A number of people have been involved in the development of what we see as escalators in the modern day. Even though the idea came about in the middle of the 19th Century, it was only by the end of the century that we had our first working models. The first working escalator, which came about as an amusement ride, was courtesy of American inventor Jesse W. Reno.

Reno’s idea

Reno was born in Kansas in 1861 and spent his early life in the mid-western and southern states of the U.S. After moving with his family to Georgia when he was 16, he started making his first plans of an inclined elevator.

He graduated from Lehigh University’s emergent engineering programme in 1883 and got to work with a mining company and then an electrical company. He moved to New York soon enough, the stage for his strong ambition and aptitude in engineering.

It was in the final decade of the 19th Century that Reno came up with his invention, which had a conveyor belt inclined at an angle of 25 degrees. The conveyor belt had planks of metal with a serrated surface and the design allowed for a smooth transition, especially in the top and bottom  landings where people had to get on and off. The overall contraption provided the passenger with an added sense of security by having handrails that moved with the conveyor belt.

Patents “inclined elevator”

Reno received the patent for his “inclined elevator” on March 15, 1892. He didn’t meet with success immediately though. He had a huge professional setback when his extensive plans to New York City officials were turned down. These plans included building a double-decker subway system beneath the city’s streets, with his inclined elevators transporting passengers from the street to the underground station and vice versa.

In the end, Reno had to agree to his inclined elevator appearing as an amusement ride. One of the world’s first working models of an escalator thus appeared at the Old Iron Pier, Coney Island, New York as a temporary amusement ride. With a vertical rise of 2.1 m (7 feet) and the belt moving at a rate of 22.8m (75 feet) per minute, the ride attracted an estimated 75,000 people during the fortnight-long installation.

Features still remain

Within years of showcasing it thus, Reno’s invention was finding its way into railway stations and department stores. Reno Started his own company to manufacture them after the turn of the century and it was later bought out by Otis Elevator Company, that also got the rights to Reno’s patents.

It was Otis that came up with the name “escalator” – combining the words “elevator” and “scala” (the Latin word for steps) – for their own invention that worked similarly. When the term turned out to be popular with the larger masses to refer to all such machines as a whole, it came into generic public use.

The strength of Reno’s invention lies in the fact that many features of his inclined elevator are still found in modern escalators. Be it the comb of projecting fingers at each end of the machine or the rubber-covered chain handrail that moves in sync with the steps, they were all envisioned by Reno for the very first working model of an escalator.

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When we speak about the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that took place in the second half of the 20th Century, we often focus on the moon missions. There were, however, various other missions during this time that had many different objectives as well. One of these was the Venera programme that corresponded to a series of probes developed by the Soviet Union – to better understand our neighbouring planet Venus – between 1961 and 1984.

Launched in 1961, Venera 1 lost radio contact before it flew by Venus. Venera 2 failed to send back any important data, but it did fly by Venus at a distance of 24,000 km in February 1966. Venera 3 too lost communication before atmospheric entry, but it did become the first human-made object to land on another planet on March 1, 1966.

With the planned mission including landing on the Venusian surface and studying the temperature, pressure and composition of the Venusian atmosphere, Venera 3 carried a landing capsule that was 0.9 m in diameter and weighed 310 kg. The atmosphere was to be studied during the descent by parachute.

Positive start

Venera 3 was launched on November 16, 1965, just four days after the successful launch of Venera 2. Things went fine for Venera 3 as ground controllers were able to successfully perform a mid-course correction on December 26, 1965 during the outbound trajectory and also conducted multiple communication sessions to receive valuable information.

Among these were data obtained from a modulation charged particle trap. For nearly 50 days from the date of launching, Venera 3 was thus able to give an insight into the energy spectra of solar wind ion streams, out and beyond the magnetosphere of our Earth.

A failure and a first

Just before Venera 3 was to make its atmospheric entry in Venus, on February 16, 1966, it lost all contact with scientists on Earth. Despite the communications failure, the lander was automatically released by the spacecraft.

At 06:56:26 UT (universal time) on March 1, 1966, Venera 3’s probe crash-landed on the surface of Venus, just four minutes earlier than planned. It wasn’t in a position to relay back any information as it had lost contact, but it was the first time an object touched by humans had struck the surface of a planet other than our own.

Success follows

Investigations revealed that both Venera 2 and 3 suffered similar failures owing to overheating of several internal components and solar panels. With regard to Venera 3, its impact location was on the night side of Venus and the site was put in an area between 20 degrees north and 30 degrees south latitude and 60 degrees to 80 degrees east longitude.

Venera 3 tasted success in what was largely a failure, but it did pave the way for several more successes as well. For, Venera 4 became the first to measure the atmosphere of another planet, Venera 7 became the first to achieve soft touchdown and transmit information from another planet, and Venera 13 and 14 returned colour photos of the Venusian surface, days within each other. Venera 13, in fact, transmitted the photos on March 1, 1982, exactly 16 years after Venera 3 had landed on Venus.

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