The History of This Website

lemmatalogic.com is a placeholder website for add-on domains. I used it as a simple linear document with subjects related to science and technology. I removed most of the content but left some, especially the article about Heaviside, all below the Glassblowing text.

 I really do not want to convince anyone of anything. But some may find some of the information useful. If so, enjoy.

Glassblowing
So, apart from science, technology and inventing, one of my activities is glassblowing in a hotshop. I learned the very basic of glassblowing at the Morris County School of Glass several years ago. I took several 6 week courses and had some excellent instructors, of whom Hannah Muller stood out. I met my benchmate Charlie there, who is as obsessed with glassblowing as I am.

We moved our activities to Glassroots in Newark. The hotshop there is managed by the very gifted lead glassblower Jason Minami. He is a glassblower who has an uncanny connection with hot glass. He understands hot glass and makes it do, or rather guides it to do, what he wants to achieve. For anyone who tried glassblowing, it often seems that hot glass has a mind of its own and actually fights the artist.

Here I am in the Glassroots hotshop, working on a bottle shape, preparing to transfer to a punty.

I have done this now for about 5 years and finally, mainly under the guidance of Jason and my continued collaboration with Charlie, who is a daring experimenter, start to get somewhat of a grip on some of the techniques.

The reason to write about it is not because I have reached expertise. Not by a mile. But I am obsessed with ringed blown glass and after many, many failures it seems I am making some progress. I will keep this as a record of what I try, what seems to work and what fails and why.

Two of my favorite object shapes are bowls and bottles, which both have their idiosyncrasies in the creation process. Early in my glassblowing efforts I came across the two excellent videos by Powell Scott in making ringed bowls.

Here is a blown bottle on the pipe, ready for transfer. I had to do many, many trials before finally mastering this seemingly simple but beautiful shape.

 

No Good Glass Ring Molds

Creating colored rings in a blown glass object can be done in at least two ways: You apply the colored rings on a bubble or parison or the rings are already part of the set-up. Applying colored rings by rotating colored glass off from a punty on a parison on a pipe is certainly possible, but extremely difficult to get an “incalmo” effect. I have tried it several times and found the technique interesting but difficult with not the desired effect.

Creating an “embedded” rings piece requires, well, glass rings. Preferably all of the same diameter and different colors. When stacked in a cylinder, and having all rings tack-fused to each other, you have the basic set-up for a blown ringed piece.

This is the, for me, stunning thing. While we have a technical solution for almost anything, there are literally NO MOLDS to fuse frit (or ground glass) into a ring. Especially for rings that are required for the ringed bowl, which would be a ring of about 2 -2.5 inch outside diameter and an inside opening of about 1.5-2 inch leaving a ring with a thickness of about ¼ inch.

The only somewhat useful mold I found was a Colour de Verre re-usable mold for napkin rings.  While the created rings are beautiful, they are too large and too thin for making the required cylinders. I tried it and below is a picture of the molds before fusing.

 

I also made a circle, with the intent to drill the inside opening out with a diamond hole drill. I found the risk of breaking the glass and the work involved too much, and for now I have not pursued that technique.

It really comes down to making your own rings, or making your own molds. I have considered many options and worked on some that work. Two options that I probably will try is 1) using a stainless steel muffin tray, burn in the tray in an oven, then lightly sandpaper it and coat it several times with kiln wash for release. I will use a center piece of pipe covered with fiber paper to create the opening and fill the created ring with glass frit.

A second option is to use a stainless steel donut tray. The size of the donuts fit with the requirements of the size of the rings. Both the muffin and donut tray have a slightly conic shape, facilitating the release of material from the mold. I believe I can sufficiently shape any stack of rings with the jacks to create a cylinder. Unfortunately, the problem with the donut tray is the nonstick coating that all of them have and which has to be removed. This is yet another issue to be addressed and I have placed in on the back burner.

Ringed Bowls

The technique was invented by Boyd Sugiki, I believe. Boyd turns out to be Jason Minami’s teacher, which explains a lot of how both seem to “know” and “understand” hot glass. Boyd and Jason (as well as Hannah) are these ultra-patient instructors who never seem to get upset with a student. Not only do they understand glass, they understand people also. Anyway, the technique of Boyd is as follows. He blows 2 or more colored cylinders of equal diameter. After cooling, he cuts rings from the cylinders with a diamond saw, re-stacks the rings into a cylinder again, but now with different colored rings. He stacks the colored rings as a cylinder in a kiln, heats up the stack until the rings are fused together. Then he picks up the rings from the kiln on a blow pipe and heats the stack of rings in the glory whole and blows and shapes it into a piece. You can see the amazing result on Boyd’s website. For instance his blown sculpture of light and dark blue rings takes your breath away.

How do I know Boyd? He gave a course in making bowls at Glassroots. The details of this course can be seen online in a video posted at the Corning Studio website.

Powell Scott took the effort to video record his efforts to create the rings which he calls the set-up, and then blow the ringed bowl a nine-ringed bowl no-less. It gives an impression, but not really the skill and effort required, how to get to the final result.

Different Ring Techniques

I contacted Powell which some questions about making the rings, and he very graciously responded. My initial reaction was (what the heck did I know about glassblowing?) if there were no other ways to make the rings. Powell was not aware of any alternatives. I had considered 3 alternatives, without of course knowing the obstacles that these would experience. 1) use glass frit (basically ground glass) in a ring mold and fuse it in a kiln, This creates opportunities to have different colors and patterns of colors in a ring. 2) use a glass rod, drill a hole in it, stack the rings with holes in a kiln and pick it up, and 3) use glass sheet and cut or drill rings from these. The last options would allow you to have very thin colored rings. I have modified this technique to an easier path. That is, use clear glass rings cut from a cylinder and add a thin ring cut from sheet between them. Or in the alternative have clear (or colored) cylinder blown rings and add a thin layer of frit glass fused to it in a kiln, I explain later why.

Here are two stacks of cut slices of a color rod with holes drilled.

 

And my construction to drill holes in glass circles. I still have the circles, but have not used them yet for a couple of years now.

 

Anyway, Powell was intrigued about the glass sheet rings. And while I was still struggling cutting rings from sheet glass, he designed a contraption to make the glass drilling easier and he actually created a tumbler from these rings. It was an amazing piece of work and you can see it at Powell’s Instagram Account. Here are his pictures of that effort.

I can take credit for the idea, but the reduction to practice (as it is known in patent vernacular) is clearly Powell Scott’s achievement.

It also hit me that my glassblowing technique was not advanced enough to actually try to create a ringed object as I was completely unable to control shape, thickness and keeping rings parallel. So, I gave up the ringed technique and had additional training in glassblowing technique by Boyd Sugiki, Nadine Saylor and Jason Minami. Instruction videos by Nikolaj Christensen were also helpful.

State of Technique

The following picture gives an impression of the state of my skills later in 2022.

Ringed Bowls Again

I still had a set of cut rings and I wanted to move on from bottles to something else for a while. So, Charlie and I tried a novel approach. The Glassroot hotshop has a shovel-like implement on which I could put 4 rings next to each other and heat it in the garage. After sufficient heating Charlie would stack the rings on a piece of maple wood and I would blow a bubble into it. The rings would sometimes not be hot enough or cooled to fast and would break when blowing a bubble in it and drop off from the bubble.

A solution was to create a wooden mold that would hold and align the rings and allowed the bubble to be forced against the inside of the rings. Sometimes the rings would break, but overall this worked. The following show a picture of clear glass rings holding a colored ring. After careful heating and blowing with an extra gather and using Boyd’s bowl technique I would first get the following result.

You can see improving results of creating a parallel structure during blowing from left to right. The better structure was created by more aggressive paddling of the bottom right from the start on the pipe.

In order to better hold the rings or rather force the rings on the bubble, I used a self-made wooden mold like shown below. It can open and close, so the rings are forced into a cylinder shape when I blow a bubble into it.

This method does work and with practice I got better and better bowls. However, with the blown bubble it was not really possible to work the inside and outside of the bubble on the pipe as the bottom was closed off, of course.

In the Kiln

I decided to give it a more serious approach and arranged lessons with Jason Minami to get instructed on kiln picked-up cylinders. Jason’s very first exercise was for me to create a more stable platform for the stack to be fitted on the pick-up pipe. For the pick-up platform you take a first gather from the furnace, hold up the pipe to let the glass flow back on the pipe. Then place the pipe in the glory hole and blow until an opening is created in the glass. Further open the opening at the bench and then hold the jacks vertical and push the glass back on the pipe. Then shape the glass on the pipe with the jacks or on the marver into a cone shape. The pipe opening now sticks out. By cooling the so formed cone and later heating only the top of the cone you have a more-or-less stable relatively cool platform for the pick-up. Go to the kiln and pick-up the stack.

This set-up makes a tremendous difference as the cylinder does not flop around on the pipe after pickup. I then carefully heated the cylinder and worked its inside and outside, shaping the end into a parison, eventually closing the cylinder off. Later I would close the cylinder off with a cookie dropped from a punty on the marver as not to lose colored glass to the bottom. There are several other tricks I learned from Jason in this. All good. The most counter-intuitive trick was not to push the glass off the pipe from the moil after gathering. Many glassblowers do that in order to create a thin neck. Jason’s technique is to keep the moil glowing hot. He calls it your “money in the bank.” That keeps the glass fluid at the moil, while you cool the bottom and then blow. The hot glass at the moil or neck will expand during blowing and pulls the glass off the moil. With sufficient glass thickness everything stays stable. In contrast when you strip glass from the moil all the glass is at the bottom. Even when you don’t heat deep, the neck becomes more or less fluid and makes the piece a flopping creation, causing a struggle to keep everything stable.

Anyway, these are some of the results using Jason’s lessons.

And here is another one:

I gave the “shovel” based approach another shot, but now creating a stable cone on the pipe as taught by Jason before I blew a bubble into the stack. This requires some careful work with the jack as you want to create a stable pick-up platform with a bubble sticking out. The way I did that is by creating a bubble from the first gather, then creating a neckline near the edge of the pipe and pushing the glass back, and shaping the remaining bubble into a cylinder that fits into the pick-up. This requires a bit of exercise, but it works well. Below is an example of the result.

 

New Rings

All the above were made from rings cut from previously blown cylinders, then cut, etc. I still want to use frit made rings. So, I ordered stainless steel rings from Speedy Metals, a small diameter internal ring and a larger size external ring, to fill up the space with frit and fuse it in the kiln. I did the filling at the Glass Underground Studios in Warren, NJ, where the staff is extremely friendly and helpful with my projects. They helped me with selecting the right covering of the rings with fiber paper for easy release after fusing and with creating the firing schedule for the kiln.

Here are the rings in “uncovered” state.

 

And here on a firing board with rings covered and filled with red and yellow frit. I make marks on the thin fire paper to align and center the steel rings.

 

And this is the result after firing and grinding. The white stuff is the residue of the fiber paper that washes off under water and brushing it with an old soft toothbrush.

 

And this is the result of the red/yellow stack blown into a bowl

 

I am told the result is very “artistic”. And I agree. But from a technical point of view it is a failure. Jason had already warned me that the frit rings are pure colors and have the melting property of these “soft” or “hard” colors and bleed through during blowing and are very difficult to control. The blown and cut  rings have a strong base of clear glass and have a more similar blowing behavior, making blowing and keeping parallel rings easier.

Back to the Drawing Board

There are several variations that work or may work. The first one is to use frit rings between blown rings. While perhaps not ideal, it seems that the blown/cut rings will stabilize the structure, as compared to using only blown rings. Well, that worked very well. The following picture is of a bowl made from a combination of blown rings and frit rings. The result was beyond expectations, with rings maintaining the parallel structure. You can see one frit ring which was made from yellow and red frit.

 

One side effect is that the frit ring on the inside is raw fused frit and uncovered by clear glass, as a result of the approach taken. You can feel it, as it has a slightly rougher texture than the blown rings.

Part of My Ring Set

The picture below shows a set of rings I already made. Some are blown/cut, others are frit made. Also included is the remainder of a red cylinder, which I can cut further if needed and a clear glass cylinder, ready to be cut.

More Rings

One approach taken, was to make clear rings from a clear glass cylinder. Place the rings of a firing board, wrap it with slightly higher fiber paper and hold it in place with pins. And then put a thin layer of frit on each clear ring. Then fire the covered rings in a kiln.

Below you have the stack of rings created that way. Unfortunately the fiber paper dam is not very tight and colored glass was bleeding down.

But basically, you have clear rings with a thin cover and some bleeding.

Here are the rings, picked-up from the kiln and shaped and formed into a parison on a blowpipe. The ring structure is well maintained.

And below this you can see the final result in the shape of a bowl. The bleeding through is extensive. I call it the Bleeding Heart Bowl. But technically it works very well to have thin colored rings in a clear glass object.

 In fact, the shadows demonstrate the very thin rings that have been formed as an inherent part of the glass.

Here is a second bowl created in a similar manner. The bleed-through is more controlled leading to a thin ring in a clear glass set-up.

The following image shows a stack of rings. Rather than clear thin rings I use clear blown rings to create a stack.

Such a stack is shown next:

The rings will be ground to remove any burs. The bowl created from this set-up is shown in the following image. The color rings are thus a type of insert.

The creation of these sheet glass rings is a pain in the neck, and a bit dangerous, as the drill sometimes catches on the piece and rotates it, so it become like a very sharp rotating knife. I always have cut-resistant gloves on when I work with this set-up.

So, I the set-up was successful. Jason Minami heated a stack of 1 inch high blown/cut clear rings, with inserted sets of 2 sheet glass cut rings in a kiln to about 1250 F. I picked up the tack fused rings on a blow pipe and created the following high bowl.

That worked extremely well. It also shows that the intervening rings do not have to be sheet rings. The inside open diameter of the color rings was smaller than of the blown rings, which contributed to the expansion of the ring height. The diameter of the bowl is about 30 cm.

Next Round

As every glassblower probably knows: there are at least two aspects of glassblowing: 1) the technique/skills and 2) the artistic execution. Next I want to expand some of the technique but also use more colors and designs.

To that end I have created some wild colors cylinders, as shown next.

These cylinders are made from color overlays, with contrasting sheet glass shards and blown out. Next they were cut into rings.

My assumption is that during tack fusing the sheet glass expands slightly. Based on that I have cut remnants of sheet glass into tiny pieces and tack them to the upper surface of the cut rings by using Bullseye glass glue (glasstac). Presumably the glue burns off in the kiln.

Here is one of the cut rings with the pieces of (green) shards attached.

The rings are ready to go as a stack into the kiln. I am already preparing other rings with combinations of different color sheet glass. And then Jason Minami leaves Glassroots. This is a setback, as my personal skills are somewhat shaky still. So, I need to prepare for the next steps.

Here is the next update.

I worked with Charlie on creating a bowl using a set of the above rings, with tiny green shards glued to the top, using Bullsey glass glue. The expectation is that the heat of the kiln during tack-fusing will burn off the glue. I placed a clear ring on top that I will sacrifice for making the jackline.

Here is a picture of me working on the picked-up rings on the blowpipe. I enlarged the picture so you can see the ring structure and the clear ring on the moil. I will shape the ring structure into a narrow parison form capped with a clear cookie, so I don’t lose color to the bottom.

 Charlie’s assisting was critical in ultimate shaping by cooling the punty and keeping bowl shape by paddling back and front. Critical aspect in shaping the bowl is first opening the shape on the punty with the parchoffis and then “breaking in” the edge with paper, so the rim does not flare wide.

Here is a picture of the bowl. You can clearly see the green ring effect from the shards and the wide rings cut form the cylinders shown earlier above.

Ron Johnson is now Glassroots’ senior glassblowing artist and he also is a gifted glassblower. I am happy to say I took a lesson with him and I will continue with the “ring project.”

After March 2024

So, Jason has left Glassroots and Ron Johnson is for now lead glassblower. My benchmate, Charlie Willis, had a relapse of his sciatica and had back surgery, which puts him out of glassblowing until September. In order to keep working with hot glass I now take lessons with Ron.

The left bowl was made under Ron’s guidance in the picture below, using ‘rings with shards’ a technique that works well and I will continue with later.

Back to using steel rings as molds

In order to make thinner and denser glass rings I re-used the steel rings with fiber paper lining and frit powder in the kiln at Glass Underground. Here is the set-up:

The results were OK, but one of the drawbacks of the steel ring set-up, is the time it takes to complete even a small set of rings. I was looking for more of a production-type set-up that quickly creates 20-30 rings in one batch. (I am an engineer, after all).

Anyway, I made the following bowl from the above rings with Jeremy Unterman, the new hotshop lead at Glassroots and we had great fun doing it.

After I expressed my concerns about using steel rings as molds, Meryl Raiffe of the Glass Underground suggested I give it a shot with Silkemat a refractory fiber sheet that is wetted with a Rigidizer and can be applied as a re-usable mold. I was a bit concerned about its thickness and (in)-ability to follow/hold the form of a 2 inch ring. I tried several ways to get a nice repeatable shape of a ring. For instance, I used the bottom of a donut pan as a negative mold. Here is a picture of my ‘molding’ effort.

The results were not satisfactory. Then Marthe, who is an accomplished knitter and crafts person, suggested I use a round wooden stick she has for knitting purposes, to push a proper hole in the wetted Silkemat. Rather than using the entire mat, which bunches up, I cut squares, placed them over a large steel ring with a wooden (curtain) ring in it and push the stick to form a ring dimple with the steel ring preventing expansion. See the picture below for the result.

And below the final result after being dried at 200F in the oven.

 

This work fairly well, with quick filling with powder frit, the following set came out of the kiln. There are some burs on it, but these are easy to sand down.

I also bought Modeling Glass binder to make a glass frit paste. First, I had to make a ring cutter to cut 2.5 inch rings out of the paste. Then I made the paste from 00 frit and below you see a result. The ring cutter is made from plastic biscuit cutters in a set and I glued two concentric biscuit cutters on piece of plastic.

This made production of the rings extremely easy. And I made a batch of a couple of dozens of them. Here is a result in the kiln before firing.

Here they are after firing.

The size and thickness are excellent. Only the yellow is dull. I exchanged some e-mails with Lois Manno, the developer of modeling glass. She suggested that firing in the gloryhole of the glass may strike the yellow and they may come out bright.

I made a stack of thick rings and combined with Modeling Glass rings (see below) and I will post the result after I try to make a bowl out of that stack at Glassroots.

 

So certainly, Modeling Glass is an easy, convenient and reliable way to create glass rings on a production scale.

Yet, another way that I considered but had not yet executed, is commissioning Glass Underground’s Doug to program their CNC-watercutter Wazer to cut rings from sheet glass. I had 3 sheets of 3mm COE 96 glass and Doug did a great job of cutting 2 times 8 rings from each sheet.

Rings, Rings, Rings

I have now an abundance of rings of different quality and diameter. This forces me to create matching sets of cylinders at Glassroots, which I am working at. Glassroots will upgrade its glass furnace in July and close for the rest of the summer. So, I will have to work on making (and cutting) cylinders in the near future. Jeremy suggested using a blow-pull approach to quickly create a cylinder. So, I will try that.

Corning Course

The good news is that my application at Corning for a week’s course conducted by Boyd Sugiki was accepted. Boyd is the inventor, I believe, of the cut-cylinder rings method, or faux-encalmo method, and I am looking forward to being instructed by the Master so to speak.

Fortitude
Strength of mind that allows one to endure pain or adversity with courage. (see: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Fortitudinous)

Lemma scientists, engineers and inventors

Sometimes one can use an unproven lemma and start building a theory upon it; even though its correctness is questioned by others.

Dissent from existing theory or practice, especially by scientists or inventors who are not part of the "establishment" is a known aspect of the history of science. Often, these researchers are difficult people, sometimes identified as "crackpots". They often challenge the fundamental beliefs of current science. Sometimes their transition into acknowledged science is relatively smooth. Others may have much more trouble.

With no significant source of income, often ignored or ridiculed by contemporaries, they manage to lead the way into new directions. Some of them receive recognition posthumously, even fewer receive recognition during their life time. Many of them are forgotten.

In science, technology and engineering almost nothing is easy. Every solution appears to bring its own problems. The safe way is to remain on the proven path. To realize that the proven path may be wrong and that a new approach may be required abhors many if not most people. It usually means dissent, disagreement and struggle. Despite popular belief that scientists embrace change and new theories, the opposite is arguably the case. Exceptional efforts are made to explain new phenomena or to address an apparent paradox with the tools and means of an existing theory, rather than apply a new theory.

Developers of new theories are usually first vetted to assess their status in the establishment. Different kind of pressures will be brought to bear for the daring scientist to either recant the new theory or at least to express severe doubts about its validity. Theorists from outside the establishment may be ignored completely or are labeled as crackpots.

This attitude of skepticism is not unreasonable. There are not that many truly novel and valid theories; many theories are truly crackpot ideas, or supporting experiments are flawed. Experimental errors or uncertainties have demonstrated to contribute to creating invalid theories. The science community has demonstrated often the culpability to new unproven theories to instill at least a sense of skepticism. Cold-fusion comes to mind. Though, the skeptics were able to quickly disprove the occurrence of that phenomenon.

To take a new path against disapproval of authority or common belief is almost an impossible challenge. It takes an unbelievable conviction, stubbornness, intuition and intelligence. And yes, fortitude.

Two influential "lemma scientists" who made a tremendous impact on science were Joseph Fourier and Oliver Heaviside. They are both connected to explaining transmission of signals. Both have developed insights into fundamental aspects of mathematics which were initially doubted and of which the theoretical correctness was eventually proven. What is striking is how convinced both men were of the correctness of their assumption and the tenacity with which they calculate their way to a solution. Both men have written books with page after page of equations. A lesser person would most likely have given up half way, being convinced that all of this will lead nowhere. A nice overview of Fourier Analysis can be found in The Mathematical Experience by Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh.


Oliver Heaviside

Oliver Heaviside is an almost forgotten "self-taught" scientist. Almost forgotten, we should add, as many of us still will recognize the name in the Heaviside Step Function, much applied by Heaviside himself to investigate transmission effects.

Heaviside should have been honored with a Nobel Prize. There is no part of electromagnetic and electrical sciences that he did not influence or help develop. The modeling of behavior of signals in electrical network analysis as we currently apply is from his hand. His "lemmata" approach especially in his Operational Calculus was often criticized, while he was fueling the flame of criticism by maintaining that mathematics is an experimental science. However, no one was able to come up with a better way to describe transients in electrical transmission, until it was finally accepted that Laplace transforms could do the trick. A publication on the Laplace transform, just before WWII, changed the acknowledgment of Heaviside's contributions in standard Electrical Network Analysis text. His name disappeared virtually overnight from textbooks published post-WWII.

An instructive website comparing Heaviside's Operational Calculus with Laplace transforms can be found at "Heaviside, Laplace and the Inversion Integral". A more detailed explanation is provided in "Heaviside Operational Rules Applicable to Electromagnetic Problems" by I.V. Lindell. It provides a further explanation of Heaviside's favored series expansions.

Heaviside had an acid pen and a sharp tongue and his polemics are still very funny to read. If you think your professor was difficult: this was one scientist who did not suffer fools lightly. (see: the eminent scienticulist Preece). The same excellent site of www.archive.org also has some major Heaviside works. Please visit this site for Heaviside' Electrical Papers Part 2. This work contains some of the comments by Heaviside on Preece's technical skills.

Not unlike Fourier Heaviside starts with some assumptions and calculates his way to a solution. He started his scientific career with working on his uncle's (Wheatstone) theory. With no formal training in mathematics and physical theory he ends up with pretty much creating the foundation of electrical theory and articulating electro-magnetic theory. Ido Yavetz in his excellent but difficult to find book "From Obscurity to Enigma" makes the case how Heaviside after going through extensive calculations always went back to a fundamentally physical interpretation of the results. Yavetz details Heaviside's belief in the existence of a transmission medium, perhaps the aether, for propagating a field. In several chapters Yavetz points at Heaviside's "inability to resist a caustic remark". This is a great book, that is now available in a Kindle edition. Recently (2011), a cheaper paperback edition of this excellent book has been published by Modern Birkhäuser Classics.

Heaviside, a man of incredible brilliance and courage, a superstar scientist and unjustly forgotten.

Paul Nahin wrote the outstanding "Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude" which I can recommend to anyone who likes reading autobiographies, but even more so to people who are interested in the history of sciences. Pupin received a patent for inventing the "loading coil", which enabled long distance transmission of signals of limited bandwidth without using amplifiers by flattening and lowering the attenuation of a transmission line over the limited bandwidth. The actual invention of the concept is by Heaviside, picked up by several researchers such as John Stone Stone. The reduction to practice is by George Campbell (the inventor of the wave-filter). The patent and the money went to Pupin. Pupin was a highly productive inventor. He was also pretty good at self promoting and earned a Pulitzer price for his autobiography. In this book he claims that his insights explain why radio communication between planets would be impossible.

Because of the controversy it is easy to assume that Pupin was a fraud. That he was certainly not. However he was wrong at some occasions. For instance Pupin obtained Patent 519,346 entitled "Apparatus for Telegraphic or Telephonic Transmission" in 1894, wherein he claims improving the impedance by adding capacity to cable sections. However, he got it somewhat right in and obtained the relevant Patent 652,230 in 1900 over Campbell. He was a bright scientist and a gifted inventor. His patents can be found on Google's Patent site. This site is worth a visit as it allows searching on pre-1976 US Patents.

An analysis of the 'loading coil' affair by James Brattain can be found in the book "The Engineer in America" under "Introduction of the Loading Coil". An analysis what happened inside AT&T in pursuing the 'loading coil' patent is described in Wasserman's "From Invention to Innovation". Norbert Wiener was upset by the treatment of Heaviside and wrote the book "The Tempter". A highly recommended but difficult to find book is "From Obscurity to Enigma: The work of Oliver Heaviside, 1872-1891" by Ido Yavetz. A very good book that puts Heaviside in the context of articulating Maxwell's laws is "The Maxwellians" by Bruce Hunt.

Preece receives a much more deferential treatment in Russell Burns' book "Communications: An International History of the Formative Years".  Preece, at that time the Engineer-in-Chief of the GPO, who is of course a very influential civil servant, is more in support of Marconi than of Oliver Lodge. A understatement on page 296 is "Indeed, the suggestion has been made that Preece was being vindictive...."  Oh, really? Reading Burns' book one realizes that Preece was the contemporary of Hertz, Lodge, Fitzgerald, Heaviside and Marconi.  As a "practical man" he consistently is on the wrong side of scientific arguments.  Still, he achieves a fairly exalted and influential position related to the science of which he learns very little, it seems.

Oliver Heaviside is the named inventor on at least one British Patent (No. 1,407) in which he establishes himself as the inventor of coaxial cable to limit inductive coupling between adjacent cables. A description of this patent can be found in Nahin's book of which a section can be found here. UK Patent 1407, including the provisional specification can be downloaded by clicking here. This copy of the Heaviside patent was found on the web-site of the German Patent Office and can be downloaded here.

The patent addresses the issue of inductive coupling. The coaxial cable is actually one of several solutions that Heaviside provides to this problem in his specification. His other solution is a cable with two pairs of circuits, thus forming a 4 conductor-core cable. The filing date of the patent is April 6, 1880. UK patents at that time did not require claims. Though the Patent includes the declaration "...but what I claim is, -" it does not have claims. Lacking enforceable claims and means to pursue infringers in court, it must have been an almost insurmountable task for Heaviside to pursue infringers on this patent. Heaviside probably, based on this experience, must have decided that patents were not for him.

The above does not imply that we should pity Heaviside's active period. First of all, Heaviside was not a man to be pitied. He was quite opinionated and very well able to defend himself. Secondly, in a time in history wherein certainly in Britain social class was extremely important, Heaviside, without any formal education, positioned himself as a leading and very much respected scientist who was recognized, corresponded with and consulted on important and critical issues and at least the equal of other scientific giants of that period. Heaviside's is a story that would fit very well in an American rags-to-riches novel, with the exception that it took place in one of the unlikeliest places. Britain, despite what we are sometimes led to believe, actually has a history of offering leading scientific positions based on merits, rather than class. Faraday is certainly an example of that. However, it is sad that Heaviside was not able to convert his scientific skills into at least some level of wealth or comfort as was achieved by people like Thomson (Kelvin) and Pupin. This, I believe, made his later period uncomfortable, certainly much less comfortable than he deserved, and it affected his productivity and his engagement to scientific issues.

In a strange write-up the IEEE contends that "As on (sic) old man, Heaviside spent his final years comfortably, although his mental powers diminished. "I have become as stupid as an owl," he once bluntly stated. Heaviside died at the age of 74." IEEE editors should read the IEEE published "Sage in Solitude" and remove that paragraph from their website.


Ohm's Law

Everything has to start somewhere. Modern network analysis arguably starts with Kirchhoff.  Kirchhoff was inspired by Georg Simon Ohm, the discoverer of Ohm's law. How does one discover a law like Ohm's if there are no voltage meters, no reliable or standard voltage or current sources and no standard resistors?  It was believed that if there was something like a resistance, which was debated, then it would be a dependency between current and voltage that was described by a logarithmic relationship.

The story of Ohm is actually a fairly dramatic one. And considering the importance and the brilliance of the discovery it is a fairly unknown story. Joseph Keithley in his Electrical and Magnetic Measurements book provides an outstanding essay on Ohm.

One may find more information on Ohm and Ohm's law on this Wikipedia website. The part that caught my eye was the statement that Ohm "He used a galvanometer to measure current..." The Ørsted effect, showing that the deflection of compass needle depends on a current, was discovered in 1820. In the same year Johann Schweigger built the first galvanometer, also called a multiplier or multiplicator. See this website.

Excuse me.....when did this happen? And how?

Most of us know when something was invented. If not the exact year, then at least a reasonable time frame, let's say within 20 or 30 years give or take. Ohm's law for instance is from 1826. His reliable and actually quite consistent and repeatable power sources are thermoelectric elements. In 1826.

What about the use of the first industrial steam engine? That was in 1712. And not sometime in the early or mid 19th century as many people believe. It was invented by Newcomen. The first steam engine was an absolute brilliant piece of engineering and a demonstration of an almost unbelievable grasp of scientific concepts reduced to practice. Contrary to what most people will tell when asked how the first steam engine worked, the engine works under atmospheric pressure. No technology existed at the time to create sufficient high pressure steam. A model of a Newcomen steam engine is shown at this website. The model is available as a kit. The website also shows a video of the working model. The striking feature is the asymmetrical operation of the engine. A nice description of the Newcomen engine can be found here.

The first trans-atlantic telegraph cable? That one was completed in 1858. The first trans-atlantic telephone cable was not realized until 1956, almost 100 years later. The technology for voice transmission was much more of a challenge and radio transmission worked quite well and was cheaper.

Formal switching expressions

While Boole is famous for Boolean algebra, he was actually best known in his time for his methods of solving differential equations. The Boolean algebra as applied in switching expressions is an invention by Claude Shannon and presented in his Master Thesis in 1936. Shannon provides several example circuits such as a counter, a ripple adder and a factor and prime table generator including a control circuit.


Complex is more likely than simple and not necessarily engineered

Engineers are trained to create technical solutions that are efficient and perform their task with for instance the fewest possible components. That is why certain structures and circuits are recognized as being 'engineered.'

We are familiar with the concept of building complex constructions from simple building blocks. An inherent assumption behind creating complex structures is that availability of a set of certain primitive building blocks is required. When we analyze (or reverse engineer) the complex construction we should find the primitive building blocks. This is such an elementary idea that it is probably for most people beyond trivial.
Virtually all our thinking and analyses of naturally occurring phenomena is based on finding the simplest element, the simplest and smallest particle or expression. When things are complex we want to reduce them to their simplest representation.

One example of such an engineering approach is in the design of digital circuitry. Herein one may apply a representation of all states of a circuit using primitive elements and eliminate all parts that do not contribute to a required state. Karnaugh diagrams are used to minimize circuitry.

The opposite approach is to use the maximum number of different digital functions to create a simple digital design.

A fairly complex digital design is the one that calculates a sum of two binary numbers. Such an expression has to calculate a residue as well a carry for several cycles if the numbers comprise multiple digits. The smallest addition of two single binary digits involves a XOR and an AND function, which may be considered the primitive building blocks of a ripple adder, which is what the name is of a full adder expression. The simplest expression for a ripple adder is for the full addition of 2 binary digits, which involves determining one residue and one carry digit.

So what, if one has run out on XOR and AND functions? The next reasonable step is to create the XOR and AND function from adequate connectives, such as NANDs. What if there are no NAND functions? It turns out that at that stage, one is not able to create the simplest of simple ripple adders, which is the addition of two bits.

It reasonable to assume that an addition of two words of two bits with a ripple adder is more complex than an addition of two bits. The reason for that is that additional layers of interconnected logic have to be provided.

One simple, but time consuming experiment, is to create and run a software program with the correct structure of the 2 by 2 bits ripple adder (or any n by n ripple adder) and start applying any of the 16 possible single binary logic functions (and not the adequate connectives) but not the XOR and AND function. One has to check all possible results of addition against the known correct result, which is time consuming. Chaos is to be expected, right?

The surprising fact is that the more complex expression of multi-digit ripple adders can be and are created from other than binary XOR and AND single functions. So while it may not be possible to use certain functions to create the simplest device (the single digits tipple adder) it is possible to create the more complex expressions.

From a logic perspective: complex is more likely than simple! Furthermore, the more complex solutions are not what we would generally consider to be engineered solutions.

Hiding in Plain Sight

One of the more intriguing developments by Heaviside is the coaxial cable and the patent that he obtained. This patent (GB 1407) is mentioned in all the leading biographies and technical books about Oliver Heaviside. My impression was that I would have no problem finding a copy of the patent on-line. Nothing of the kind. I did numerous extensive web searches, mainly using Google, and came up empty. One obvious source was the UK Patent Office (UK Intellectual Patent Office) or even the European Patent Office. But, at least I was not successful.

Finally, I found a copy of the Heaviside patent here on (of all places) on the website of the German Patent Office. And not through a search of the site, but by going through an obscure folder listing of documents.

The patent is very much worth studying. Not only for the coaxial cable, but for its other solution to eliminate inductive effects. I would say that the provided solution is a typical Heaviside one.

To my surprise, it is still very difficult to find a copy of this patent by conducting a simple Google search. It is definitely there. Hiding in plain sight.


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