My Science School

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.

 

Picture Credit : Google

When we are talking about astronomy, it is hard to not mention Johannes Kepler. A German astronomer and mathematician, Kepler was one of the central figures in the scientific revolution of the 17th Century. For the thought that our solar system had planets travelling in circles around the Earth was forever debunked by Kepler and his laws of planetary motion.

Born into an economically weak family in Germany in December 1571, Kepler’s intelligence was apparent from an early age and he won a scholarship to the University of Tubingen. Studying to become a Lutheran minister, it was here that Kepler was introduced to the ideas of heliocentrism by Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus.

Backs heliocentrism

Kepler found work teaching mathematics at Graz, Austria and spent his spare time studying astronomy. It was during this time, in 1596, that Kepler wrote his first outspoken defence of the Copernican system with the sum as the centre of the solar system.

This was a dangerous stance at those times when popular belief and religious thoughts placed Earth in the centre of the solar system. The political and the religious difficulties of the era meant that Kepler was banished from Graz.

Brahe’s data

Fortunately for Kepler, he found an opportunity to work as the assistant of renowned Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and so moved with his family to Prague (now in Czech Republic). Having built an observatory and used it to track the motion of planets, Brahe possessed the most accurate astronomical observations of the time.

Even though Brahe was impressed with Kepler’s studies during an earlier meeting and had therefore invited Kepler to work with him, he also mistrusted Kepler, fearing that he might supersede him as the best astronomer of the time.

Mars mystery

This meant that Brahe shared with Kepler only a small part of all the data that he had at his disposal. Brahe tasked Kepler with solving the mystery surrounding Mars, whose movements were among the most puzzling problems in astronomy at the time. Some believe that Brahe did this assuming that the difficulty of the problem would keep Kepler occupied long enough, during which time Brahe was hoping to perfect his own geocentric model with Earth as the centre of the solar system. If this were indeed the case, then Brahe might have unwillingly given the part of his data that led Kepler to his correct model of the solar system.

Kepler is believed to have said that he would solve the Martian problem in eight days, but it took more like eight years. Brahe died in 1601 and Kepler managed to gain possession of Brahe’s vast observations as well.

Kepler published what are now known as the first two laws of planetary motion in 1609 in Astronomia Nova, considered to be among his most important work. It took him almost another decade to conceive what is now known as the third law of planetary motion. For, he first arrived at the idea on March8, 1618 and discarded it, only to recall it months later when he realised that it was the fruit of his “labor of seventeen years on Brahe’s observations”.

The three laws

In short, the three laws of planetary motion can be given as follows: (1) Planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus; (2) The radius vector describes equal areas in equal times; and (3) The squares of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances.

Even though Kepler never called these as the first, second and third laws of planetary motion, that is how they are now known. Apart from placing the sun at its rightful place in the solar system and allowing us to better appreciate planetary motion, these laws also led English polymath Isaac Newton to his law of gravitation. Our understanding of the universe was never the same again.

Accused and cleared 

Long after his own death, Kepler was accused of poisoning Brahe in order to get his hands on the latter’s closely guarded noted. This happened in 1901, when scientists found mercury in the remains after opening up Brahe’s grave.

Kepler’s name, however, was cleared when Brahe’s body was exhumed again in 2010. Chemical analyses of the bones indicated that the mercury levels were not high enough to kill him, putting to rest the conspiracy theory.

 

Picture Credit : Google