By John Howard

Prompted by the recent OPN article about Lord Rayleigh and Otto Lummer, John wrote his previous post on the early history of blackbody radiation. Here, he picks up where he left off in that history--in 19th century America and the work of Thomas Edison.

In the United States, a bright, hard-working young Thomas Edison with a knack towards invention had taught himself telegraphy. In 1869, when he was 22, had applied for a job at a brokerage firm in New York City.  While he was waiting to be interviewed, the stock ticker broke down, and he was the only one who knew how to fix it. He was immediately hired—and at a better wage than he had expected.

Within a year, he had designed a much improved stock ticker, and he sold his model to the firm for $40,000. With this money, he bought a building near Newark, N.J.; hired two or three assistants; and began a lifelong career of practical inventions. Of his early inventions, he was most proud of the phonograph. In 1878, at the age of 31, he announced that he was turning his attention toward designing an electric light. In his laboratory in Menlo Park, he worked as much as 20 hours a day.

Edison and his assistants tried hundreds of filaments, until finally, in October 1879, he had a light bulb with a carbon filament that successfully stayed lit for 40 hours. (His team then turned to other materials for filaments, and ultimately settled on tungsten.)

With the invention of the electric light bulb, many scientists and engineers turned their attention to the radiation from lamp filaments and hot incandescent bodies. The General Electric Company began a laboratory at Nela Park in Cleveland for its lamp division, and blackbody radiation was a primary research subject. In Germany, the Siemans company urged the German government to found the Physicalische-Techniche Reichsanstalt (PTR) and even donated a building and land near Berlin University to house that research organization.

In 1887 Hermann Helmholtz joined the PTR as its first director, bringing with him his assistant Otto Lummer, who headed the research effort on blackbody radiation. Lummer constructed a heated sphere with a small hole to emit blackbody radiation, and, in the late summer of 1900, he and Pringsheim studied blackbody radiation over a wide variety of temperatures. Working with them was a young graduate student, Heinrich Rubens of the University of Berlin, a guest worker at PTR.

In early 1900, Lord Rayleigh turned his attention to the problem of blackbody radiation. He was an expert in acoustics, and he had many times calculated the formation of acoustic standing waves in a resonant cavity; why not try that same approach to standing waves of blackbody radiation in a blackbody cavity? He counted up all the possible standing waves, assumed that there was an equal probability for each to occur, and that each standing wave represented an energy of kT of radiation.

When he then calculated the total blackbody radiation, he found to his surprise that he disagreed by a factor of eight with the published value calculated by Wien. He nevertheless published his calculation. He promptly received a note from a bright young Cambridge graduate, James Jeans, who said that he thought Rayleigh had only counted the number of possible standing waves in one octant of the possible directions of x, y, z; he should have counted from minus infinity to plus infinity for the entire range of standing waves. Rayleigh agreed with Jeans immediately, and dropped a note to Nature, renaming his Rayleigh distribution to the more proper Rayleigh-Jeans distribution of standing waves.

The bright young Jeans now had his name linked to the much better known physicist Lord Rayleigh. However, even with this correction, the Rayleigh-Jeans equation appeared only to represent the true spectrum of blackbody radiation at long wavelengths (or low frequencies).

Then, in the late summer of 1900. . .

John’s next post will cover how the work of Lummer, Pringsheim, Planck, and others contributed to the development of an interpolation formula that would reduce to the Rayleigh prediction at low frequencies.

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By John N. Howard

In less than a month, scientists from all over the world will gather at OSA's annual meeting in Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A.—and a select few of them will be recognized for their outstanding contributions to the field of optics with an OSA award. In my upcoming History of OSA column in OPN, I will present a biography of William F. Meggers, who was a renowned spectroscopist, OSA honorary member, and OSA president from 1949-1951. In just a few short weeks, Frédéric Merkt of ETH Zürich, Switzerland, will carry on Megger's legacy when he receives the award named after Meggers. The William F. Meggers award acknowledges outstanding work in the field of spectroscopy.

But back in 1964, it was Meggers himself who was receiving an OSA award. He shared the C.E.K. Mees Medal, which is given to scientists who do excellent interdisciplinary work, with George R. Harrison of MIT. In those days, the awards were bestowed at an OSA ceremonial banquet, held on an evening during an OSA annual meeting. Attendees at the banquet were already aware of the friendly sparring that always occured between Harrison and Meggers, both of whom had been internationally known spectroscopists and long-time friends and competitors.

After Meggers had made his short acceptance speech, he was presented with the C.E.K. Mees Medal. Harrison then remarked to the audience that he planned to design an optical arrangement with mirrors that would enable Meggers' portion of the medal to be seen when the joint medal was displayed! His crack was received with much laughter and applause. And, actually, the Optical Society ultimately addressed that particular issue by presenting each awardee with his own individual medal.

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By John N. Howard, OPN Contributing Editor

A couple weeks ago, I introduced this blog by talking about OSA Honorary Member Albert Michelson, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science (in 1907). He won that prize for his improved optical determination of the velocity of light.

For young people starting out in their careers, it can sometimes seem that optics luminaries such as Michelson were simply born to be stars. But, as the following story points out, Michelson had to work hard to make his start. In fact, he walked right into the Oval Office of the White House, and presented a plea directly to President Ulysses S. Grant.

Michelson was born in 1852 in Strelno, Prussia (now Strzelno, Poland).  When he was two years old, the family immigrated to America. They stayed a few weeks in New York City with some relatives. But the lure of the California Gold Rush caused Albert’s father, Samuel, to book passage to the West--by boat to Panama, then 50 miles across the Isthmus, and then again by boat to San Francisco.

They proceeded to Murphy’s Camp (about 150 miles east of San Francisco), where Samuel opened a store selling shovels, pick-axes and other supplies to the prospectors. Albert was sent to live with his father’s sister in San Francisco, where he attended the Boys High School, graduating in 1869. Meanwhile, Samuel moved his dry goods store to Virginia City, Nev., where the mining lure was now mostly silver.

The store was not prospering not well enough to think in terms of college for young Albert. In 1869, Samuel saw a notice in the paper announcing that Congressman Fitch of Nevada was authorized to appoint a candidate for the next class at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., U.S.A.

About a dozen young high school graduates applied, and the congressman selected a committee to screen the applicants.The committee eliminated all but Michelson and two others, whom they regarded as tied for first place. The congressman selected young James Blakely, whose family connections were the strongest, and whose father had lost an arm in the Civil War. (In those days, the sympathies of most Californians and Nevadans were almost completely with the Union.)  

Albert was very disappointed, but not ready to give up. He bought a ticket to Washington on the transatlantic railroad—which had only been operating for about a year—and made the three-day journey to Washington.

He then presented himself at the White House, telling a young military receptionist: “I want to see the President.”  “Do you have an appointment?,” she asked. Albert then showed her his letter stating that he had tied for first place to an appointment to Annapolis, but had just barely missed out. The receptionist let him go on in, followed by a young naval orderly, who remained in the back of the room.

President Grant looked up from some papers he was reading, and then listened as 16-year-old Albert told his story. Albert was a bright, handsome young man, and President Grant also had a son of about the same age. But, he said, there is little he could do; he had already filled the ten appointments-at-large that had been authorized to the White House. Albert left, trying to hide his disappointment. On the way out the young Naval orderly said he should go to Annapolis, just in case any of the approved appointments had failed their entrance exams.

So on Albert went to Annapolis, and asked to see the Superintendent. It was three days before the Superintendant saw him.  He was told that there were no vacancies; but the Superintendant asked an examining officer to talk to Albert. After that interview a disappointed Albert returned to Washington, and the next morning boarded the train for the return trip to Nevada.

Just before the train was scheduled to leave, a military orderly walked through the train, calling his name, and brought him back to the White House. The interviewer at Annapolis had sent a message to the White House that Michelson appeared to have genuine talent; and President Grant had relented and approved Albert as an additional appointment!

In later years, Michelson liked to tell that story, and he chuckled that he had begun his career with an “illegal act,” since President Grant made an additional appointment beyond his authorized number.

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