Louis Daguerre The fourth transformation was the ability to image the real world in real time.
Louis Daguerre, a French artist well known for spectacular panoramas, capitalized on the earlier work of Johann Schultz (who discovered the light sensitivity of silver salts) and of his own colleague, Joseph Niepce (who produced the first photographic image in 1820), to produce the first practical camera system in 1837.
Zacharias Jansenn
The fifth transformation provided access to the micro world.
A Dutch spectacle maker named Zacharias Jansenn constructed the first compound microscope about 1590. Although his crude instrument could only magnify between 3X and 9X, it revealed an entirely new world to scientists and engineers.
Without any formal training in optical engineering, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a minor functionary in the town of Delft, perfected the lens grinder’s art and improved Jansenn’s system of lenses to obtain magnifications up to 270X. Although Leeuwenhoek is remembered for discovering the world of microbes, the scaling laws and miniaturization in solid-state electronics and integrated circuits envisioned by modern-day engineers such as Robert Dennard would not have been possible without van Leeuwenhoek’s breakthroughs in microscopy.
Michael Faraday The sixth transformation was the discovery and application of the peculiar electrical properties of semiconductors.
Michael Faraday started out as an apprentice bookbinder. Largely self-educated, he became fascinated with electricity after attending a lecture by Sir Humphry Davy. Best remembered for demonstrating the relationship of electricity and magnetism, Faraday's observation of the effect of temperature on the conductivity of silver sulfide was the first purposeful demonstration of semiconduction in materials.
In 1874, Carl Ferdinand Braun, a professor of physics at the University of Strasbourg, developed the first practical semiconductor device, the “cat’s whisker diode.” He also built the first cathode-ray oscilloscope (1897) and shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Marconi (1909).
The invention of the transistor by Bell Labs researchers in 1947 can be directly linked to the transformational insights of Faraday and Braun.
Charles Babbage Another foundational enabler is the ability to manipulate numbers automatically.
Charles Babbage, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was something of an eccentric. He loved fire and once had himself baked in an oven at 265 degrees Fahrenheit for five or six minutes, just to see the effect. He also hated music and was followed by people in the street who “tormented him with songs and fiddling.”
Babbage’s analytical engine, first conceived in 1834, had essentially all of the capabilities of a modern electronic calculator. In developing the analytical engine, Babbage stood on the shoulders of the unknown Greek who developed the Salamis counting board (ca. 500 BCE); John Napier, who publicly propounded the concept of logarithms in 1614; and William Schickard, who developed the first adding machine (called the Calculating Clock) in 1623.
Babbage’s creation was lost to history until 1937 when Harvard graduate student Howard Aiken rediscovered the work. There is a spirited debate about who really built the first modern computer. Some argue for Aiken who developed Mark I with IBM in 1943. Others argue for Konrad Zuse who developed the first programmable system in 1941. Still others argue for John Vincent Atanasoff whose Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1937-1942) first used a binary structure and electronics. However, Babbage is generally credited with the seminal idea.
 |
|||
| John Taylor |
John Taylor, a nuclear engineer by training and 32-year Sandia employee, is manager of the Integrated Technologies & Systems Strategic Planning Support Department. He has a passion for history, as well as engineering, and has authored or coauthored two books on the Civil War in New Mexico and one on the history of Catholicism in the Rio Abajo.
*Illustrations from public domain sources
©2010 Sandia Corporation | Questions and Comments | Privacy and Security | 
News release RSS feed