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How Marie Curie Discovered Radium
How was radium discovered in an unventilated shed? Why was radioactivity discovered and called radioactivity? What is, arguably, the most influential Ph.D. dissertation of all time? Well, it all has to do with a fascinating woman named Marie Sklodowska Curie. Table of Contents Marie Curie’s Early Life How Radium Was Discovered The Radioactive Study References…
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JJ Thompson’s Discovery of Electron: Cathode Ray Tube Experiment Explained
JJ Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 and there are tons of videos about it. However, most videos miss what JJ Thomson himself said was the motivating factor: a debate about how cathode rays move. Want to know not only how but why electrons were discovered? Table of Contents The Start of JJ Thomson How…
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How Wilhelm Roentgen Started The X-ray Craze
X-ray was the first scientific discovery that wasn’t made famous through scientific publishing. In fact, despite the fact that Roentgen wrote a startlingly prophetic and accurate paper about the discovery of this new ray in December of 1895, most scientists learned about it through their morning papers! Therefore, the discovery of the x-ray should really…
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The Physics of How X-rays were Discovered
There are quite a few videos about how Roentgen discovered the x-ray, but most really skimp on the physics. What was he doing, why was he doing it, how did he discover the medical x-ray and why did he (correctly) conclude that he had found a high energy invisible light? Table of Contents The Start:…
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How Wilhelm Roentgen Discovered X-rays
So, why is an x-ray called an x-ray? The short answer is that when Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895, he called them x-rays outright because x stood for unknown and he knew he had found a new, previously unknown ray. Ok, bye! But I still haven’t answered how did Roentgen know he had discovered…
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Wilhelm Roentgen Biography: How X-rays Were Discovered
On November 8thof 1895, a shy and diligent scientist named Wilhelm Roentgen saw a flicker on a fluorescent screen and changed our world with his discovery of what he called (and we still call) “x-rays”. But who was Roentgen, how did a dirty picture almost derail his life, and why did he discover x-rays? Table…
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How the X-ray Machine was Discovered and Works
On November 8th of 1895, a man named Wilhelm Roentgen turned on a covered vacuum tube and accidentally discovered the x-ray and changed our world. This is not that story. Instead, this video is about how (and why) Roentgen had an x-ray machine in the first place. The x-ray machine was not made to create…
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The Origin of the Cathode Ray Tube: Physics of the Geissler tube to the Crookes tube
Let’s start in early 1857 in a laboratory in Bonn, Germany. That is where a physics professor named Julius Plücker was working with an instrument maker named Heinrich Geissler to create odd glass tubes that were, according to Plücker, “incomparably beautiful[i].” Geissler and Plücker didn’t know it, but these Geissler tubes would change the world. …
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The Trials of Howard Armstrong
Wait, how can a good invention lead to the inventor’s destruction? Table of Contents Armstrong’s Struggle The Frequency Modulation Sarnoff’s Mistake Armstrong’s Rise The Law Suit Armstrong’s Death References Armstrong’s Struggle However, at the same time Armstrong was dealing with several lawsuits. The longest of which was with Lee de Forest. De Forest had invented…
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Howard Armstrong, David Sarnoff And the Influential Superheterodyne Receiver
The superheterodyne method is where two signals are mixed to make a lower frequency signal that is easier to deal with, and, according to Wikipedia, “virtually all modern radio receivers use the superheterodyne principle.” But where did it come from and how does it work and why (and how) did it usher radio broadcasting into…