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Alexander Bain (inventor)
Alexander Bain (12 October 1810 – 2 January 1877) was a Scottish inventor and engineer who was first to invent and patent the electric clock. He invented the Telegraph Clock, which was a technology of synchronizing many electric clocks placed anywhere in the world; they would all have the exact same time. He also invented and patented the technology of the facsimile machine for scanning images and transmitting them across telegraph lines hundreds of miles away. He installed the railway telegraph lines between Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, for recording messages, to regulate the safe movement of trains, marking time, giving signals, and printing information at different locations. He invented a chemical telegraph technology of being able to transmit across a telegraph line messages at up to 1000 words per minute, while at the time Morse's telegraph could only produce 40 words a minute. Early life Bain was born in Houstry, near Watten, Caithness, Scotland. He was born o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Watten, Highland
Watten () is a small village in Caithness, in the Highland area of Scotland, on the main road ( A882- A9) between the burgh of Wick and the town of Thurso, about twelve kilometres (eight miles) west of Wick and close to Wick River and to Loch Watten. The village is on The Far North railway line but trains stopped calling at the village in 1960. The railway station is now a private house. The village is within the parish of Watten, which has the parish of Bower to the north, that of Wick to the east, that of Latheron to the south and that of Halkirk to the west. Loch Watten is the largest body of water in Caithness. The name of the village and loch appear to come from the Old Norse ''Vatn'', meaning water or lake, and the loch is famous for its brown trout fishing. The local public house is also named "The Brown Trout" after the local produce. Prisoner of war camp A military camp was built in Watten during World War II, in early 1943, and at the end of the war this becam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mechanics Magazine
Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor. He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement. Early life He was born about 1787, the son of Rev. Joseph Robertson and Isobel Mathieson of Stewarton, Scotland. Rev. Joseph Robertson was Minister of Leith Wynd Chapel, Edinburgh, Scotland, but banished from Scotland for performing illegal marriages. ''The Mechanics' Magazine'' Robertson founded ''The Mechanics' Magazine'' in 1823, and edited and largely wrote it until the year of his death. It was a low-priced scientific weekly, and the first publication of its kind. To begin with he was in close alliance with Thomas Hodgskin: they had met in Edinburgh. It took advantage of a stamp tax exemption for technical weeklies not dealing in news. Robertson also devised a way of generating cheap content by an ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir William Thomson
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 182417 December 1907) was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its contemporary form. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, was its president 1890–1895, and in 1892 was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. While the existence of a coldest possible temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to his work, Kelvin is known for determining its correct value as approximately −273.15 degrees Celsius or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit. The Joule–Thomson effect is also named in his honour. He worked closely with mathematics pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ampere
The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to electrons worth of charge moving past a point in a second. It is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836), considered the father of electromagnetism along with Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted. As of the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, the ampere is defined by fixing the elementary charge to be exactly C ( coulomb), which means an ampere is an electrical current equivalent to elementary charges moving every seconds or elementary charges moving in a second. Prior to the redefinition the ampere was defined as the current that would need to be passed through 2 parallel wires 1 metre apart to produce a magnetic force of newtons per metre. The earlier CGS system had two definitio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electrical Telegraph
Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems called ''telegraphs'', that were devised to communicate text messages quicker than physical transportation. Electrical telegraphy can be considered to be the first example of electrical engineering. Text telegraphy consisted of two or more geographically separated stations, called telegraph offices. The offices were connected by wires, usually supported overhead on utility poles. Many different electrical telegraph systems were invented, but the ones that became widespread fit into two broad categories. The first category consists of needle telegraphs in which a needle pointer is made to move electromagnetically with an electric current sent down the telegraph line. Early systems used multiple needles requiring multiple wires. The first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against France. The modern Royal Navy traces its origins to the early 16th century; the oldest of the UK's armed services, it is consequently known as the Senior Service. From the middle decades of the 17th century, and through the 18th century, the Royal Navy vied with the Dutch Navy and later with the French Navy for maritime supremacy. From the mid 18th century, it was the world's most powerful navy until the Second World War. The Royal Navy played a key part in establishing and defending the British Empire, and four Imperial fortress colonies and a string of imperial bases and coaling stations secured the Royal Navy's ability to assert naval superiority globally. Owing to this historical prominence, it is common, even among non-Britons, to ref ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greenwich Mean Time
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the Local mean time, mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a consequence, it cannot be used to specify a particular time unless a context is given. The term 'GMT' is also used as Western European Time, one of the names for the time zone UTC+00:00 and, in UK law, is the basis for civil time in the United Kingdom. English speakers often use GMT as a synonym for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). For navigation, it is considered equivalent to UT1 (the modern form of mean solar time at 0° longitude); but this meaning can differ from UTC by up to 0.9s. The term GMT should thus not be used for purposes that require precision. Because of Earth's uneven angular velocity in its elliptical orbit and its axial tilt, noon (12:00:00) GMT is rarely the exact moment the S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Earth Battery
An Earth battery is a pair of electrodes made of two dissimilar metals, such as iron and copper, which are buried in the soil or immersed in the sea. Earth batteries act as water activated batteries. If the plates are sufficiently far apart, they can tap telluric currents. Earth batteries are sometimes referred to as telluric power sources and telluric generators. History One of the earliest examples of an earth battery was built by Alexander Bain in 1841 in order to drive a ''prime mover''—a device that transforms the flow or changes in pressure of a fluid into mechanical energy. Bain buried plates of zinc and copper in the ground about one meter apart and used the resulting voltage, of about one volt, to operate a clock. Carl Friedrich Gauss, who had researched Earth's magnetic field, and Carl August von Steinheil, who built one of the first electric clocks and developed the idea of an " Earth return" (or "ground return"), had previously investigated such devices. Daniel Dr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Observatory, Greenwich
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG; known as the Old Royal Observatory from 1957 to 1998, when the working Royal Greenwich Observatory, RGO, temporarily moved south from Greenwich to Herstmonceux) is an observatory situated on a hill in Greenwich Park in south east London, overlooking the River Thames to the north. It played a major role in the history of astronomy and navigation, and because the Prime Meridian passes through it, it gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the precursor to today's Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The ROG has the IAU observatory code of 000, the first in the list. ROG, the National Maritime Museum, the Queen's House and the clipper ship ''Cutty Sark'' are collectively designated Royal Museums Greenwich. The observatory was commissioned in 1675 by King Charles II, with the foundation stone being laid on 10 August. The old hilltop site of Greenwich Castle was chosen by Sir Christopher Wren, a former Savilian Professor of Astronomy; as Greenw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded on August 10, 1846, it operates as a trust instrumentality and is not formally a part of any of the three branches of the federal government. The institution is named after its founding donor, British scientist James Smithson. It was originally organized as the United States National Museum, but that name ceased to exist administratively in 1967. Called "the nation's attic" for its eclectic holdings of 154 million items, the institution's 19 museums, 21 libraries, nine research centers, and zoo include historical and architectural landmarks, mostly located in the District of Columbia. Additional facilities are located in Maryland, New York, and Virginia. More than 200 institutions and museums in 45 states,States without Smithsonian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Electromagnetic Force
In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of atoms and molecules. Electromagnetism can be thought of as a combination of electricity and magnetism, two distinct but closely intertwined phenomena. In essence, electric forces occur between any two charged particles, causing an attraction between particles with opposite charges and repulsion between particles with the same charge, while magnetism is an interaction that occurs exclusively between ''moving'' charged particles. These two effects combine to create electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of charge particles, which can exert influence on other particles via the Lorentz force. At high energy, the weak force and electromagnetic force are unified as a single electroweak force. The electromagnetic force is responsible for many ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pendulum
A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position. When released, the restoring force acting on the pendulum's mass causes it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. The time for one complete cycle, a left swing and a right swing, is called the period. The period depends on the length of the pendulum and also to a slight degree on the amplitude, the width of the pendulum's swing. From the first scientific investigations of the pendulum around 1602 by Galileo Galilei, the regular motion of pendulums was used for timekeeping and was the world's most accurate timekeeping technology until the 1930s. The pendulum clock invented by Christiaan Huygens in 1658 became the world's standard timekeeper, used in homes and offices for 270 years, and ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
