The 1920s: Science and Technology: People in the News

THE 1920s: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

In 1921-1922 naturalist Carl Ethan Akeley used the motion-picture camera he had patented in 1916 to make the first movies of gorillas in their natural habitat in Africa.

In May 1922 George Frost, eighteen-year-old president of the Lane High School Radio Club in Chicago, fitted the first automobile radio to the passenger door of a Ford Model T.

In 1928 pioneer astronomer George Ellery Hale secured a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to construct an observatory on Mount Palomar for the California Institute of Technology. The telescope at this observatory was larger than the one at Cal Tech's Mount Wilson Observatory, for which Hale had also secured funding and which he directed from 1908 until 1923.

In the 10 July 1920 issue of Scientific American Ralph Howard expounded on the importance of the heatand wear-resistant fiber asbestos, detailing its use as a fireproof insulation material for pipes, boilers, automobile spark plugs and brakes, stove lining, and domestic roofs, walls, and ceilings. He wrote that the material "contributes to the world's progress and makes life safer and more complete in an almost infinite number of ways."

In October 1923 Reuben Leon Kahn brought attention to his newly developed test for syphilis by testing forty serum samples in fifteen minutes. The standard Kahn test proved to be simpler, faster, and more sensitive than the widely used Wassermann test for syphilis.

In 1927 Irving Langmuir, a chemist with the General Electric research laboratory, invented atomic-hydrogen welding, making it possible to weld stainless steel, which could not be joined by older welding methods.

In November 1922 A. C. Mace, associate curator of the Egyptian Division of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, participated in the excavation of King Tutankhamen's tomb at the Thebes Necropolis in Egypt. Mace was part of a team led by the British archaeologist Howard Carter.

On 3 August 1921 Lt. John B. Macready performed the first aerial crop dusting. Working for the Ohio Agricultural Experimental Station, he used a light airplane to dust a six-acre catalpa grove infested with leaf caterpillars in Troy, Ohio.

In the 20 March 1920 issue of Scientific American H. W. Nieman and C. Wells Nieman proposed a method of communicating with intelligent Martians by using wireless telegraphy or flashes of light to send a series of Morse code signals that could be graphed as increasingly complex patterns and pictures.

In 1923 paleontologist George Olsen found the first fossilized dinosaur eggs. A member of the Central Asiatic Expedition to the Gobi Desert led by Roy Chapman Andrews and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Olsen found the 95-million-year-old eggs in a cluster near the bones of the newly discovered dinosaur Protoceratops andrewsi.

On 27 February 1920 airplane pilot Major Schroeder set a new altitude record of 32,020 feet. After his oxygen supply ran out, he became unconscious and lost control of the plane. Never fully regaining consciousness, he leveled the plane at 2,000 feet and landed safely. When witnesses found him, they discovered that the frigid temperature at the extreme altitude he had reached had frozen the fluids in his eyes.

In 1920 pioneer biochemist Harry Steenbock isolated carotene, which is found in orange and yellow vegetables and contains vitamin A. By 1924 he and German chemist Adolf Windaus, working independently, had discovered that the ultraviolet rays in sunlight increase the amount of vitamin D in some foods.

In May 1922 H. E. Winlock, director of the archaeological excavations sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Thebes Necropolis in Egypt, described one of the greatest finds of the dig season (December 1921-May 1922): the Hekanakht Papers. Dating from 2004 B.C. and detailing agricultural practices of that time, these letters and scrolls are among the oldest documents in the world.