Marcel Grauls – Page 20

Elpee

"You know how it feels when you're making love and the phone rings every few minutes," said Peter Goldmark many years after the invention of "his" LP. “Well, that's how I felt one night when I listened to a new recording after lunch with friends in New York that they were very proud of. It happened during the first part. There was a click, silence, some strange noises, and then the music continued. Again and again the music of Johannes Brahms was interrupted. I counted twelve sides for the four parts and eleven intermissions, eight of which were not foreseen by the composer. So eight terrible moments in one rendition. I was enchanted by the music and at the same time the recording got on my nerves. Gritting my teeth, I asked my friends to play the concerto again, so that I could experience the horror again.'

Electromagnetic fields

Heinrich Hertz, called Heins by his friends, is the man who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves for the first time in history. He was the first to generate radio waves and also to determine their length and speed. He also showed that light and radio waves are of the same nature and have the same speed, namely 300,000 kilometers per second. This makes him the true founder of wireless telegraphy and radio. But also television, communication via satellite and radar, you name it. He died very young so he didn't get to experience any of those uses.

In addition to light bulbs, the Philips factories in Eindhoven mainly marketed radio sets in the 1930s. Already in 1932 the millionth copy was shipped. A Philips delegation that visited RCA (Radio Corporation of America) at Rockefeller Center in New York in 1936 included the promising young engineer Alexandre Horowitz. Despite the crisis, RCA was a thriving company at the time, pouring millions of dollars into the development of television, among other things. Undoubtedly an inspiring place for the Philips engineers.

Electrical motor

Michael Faraday laid the foundation for everything we know today about electrical and magnetic phenomena. In 1831 he discovered the way in which mechanical energy could be converted into electrical energy. He thus became, as it were, the inventor of the electric motor. The greatest British genius of the first half of the nineteenth century was born the son of a poor blacksmith in the suburbs of London. He barely went to school and had to earn his living as a child as an apprentice to a bookbinder. His parents were members of the Sandemanians, a cult that viewed nature as "a book written by the finger of God."

Doppler effect

One fine day in 1845, a Dutch scientist had a brilliant idea to find out if the Doppler effect really existed. He drove a locomotive with a bugler on board on the railway between Utrecht and Maarssen. On the platform, a music connoisseur absolutely listened with a number of experts to the tone of the passing horn player. They found that the tone of the approaching blower rose, that it was at its highest as it passed the platform and that it became increasingly lower after passing the locomotive. Although the horn player always blew the same note. The experiment was repeated several times. The difference in tone also appeared to decrease or increase as the locomotive drove slower or faster. With this, the young meteorologist Christophorus Buys Ballot (1817890) had proven the theory of Doppler in practice.

On September 29, 1913, the 55-year-old world-famous German engineer Rudolf Diesel took the boat from Antwerp to Harwich, England. When the ship arrived at six o'clock in the morning, he had disappeared. The British and Germans lived at odds in those days. Barely a few months later, the First World War would break out. Had Diesel underestimated the situation and had he been killed by the German secret service? He had mismanaged his wealth and lost most of his fortune through various misfortunes. Had he committed suicide in a depressed mood? The hard work had ruined his health. Had he ended up in the sea after another heart attack?

Frozen products

Clarence Birdseye, the American inventor who devised that you could freeze meat, fish and vegetables in such a way that they remained tasty, was not easy to catch. If you click on the internet bookstore Amazon, you will still find a book about growing forest plants in your garden. He wrote it together with his wife. It gives an overview of two hundred wild plants that you can easily bring to bloom with Birdseye's book. As a twelve-year-old boy in Brooklyn, New York, he placed small advertisements in the newspaper offering to put animals on, or even better: to teach the customer how to do it yourself.

Few old newspapers are as interesting as the British ones. Each day they contain one or more pages of the famous obits, an abbreviation of obituaries or in memoriams. The obligatory obituaries of singers, actors, writers, politicians and athletes are only a small part of it. Mathematicians, ornithologists, booksellers, hoteliers, priests, technicians, engineers… it doesn't matter, if they have been even a little special in their profession, they get a generous place. In a reader's response to Sir Godfrey Hounsfield's obituary in The Independent, a certain Heather Rowe writes: 'We were together in a walking club who went on long country walks in the 1960s, the walks that you say gave him his best ideas. I often found him a bit absent and vague; he never said anything about his work.

Correction fluid

Betty Nesmith was born Bette Clair McMurray in Texas in 1924. She did not enjoy going to school and when she was seventeen she looked for a job as a secretary. "Although I couldn't even type properly," she later recalled. She married Warren Nesmith in early 1942, who was sent to the front in Europe as a soldier shortly afterwards. That same year she had a child, Michael.

Betty was on her own and worked hard to make a living. Her boss trained her as a typist and finished secondary school through evening classes. When her husband returned after the war, her marriage broke up. But she made a career and made it to executive secretary at Texas Bank in Dallas.
In the early 1950s, she was confronted with a new electric typewriter fitted with a greasier ink ribbon. The letters were more beautiful and more powerful on paper.

The story of the cornflakes, an American word that simply means 'corn flakes' in Dutch, begins somewhere in the nineteenth century in the town of Battle Creek in the American state of Michigan. There then settled a group of Seventh-day Adventists, an evangelical movement with a strong emphasis on health. The old men of this Church urgently needed one of their children to study medicine. Then they could give their movement a scientific basis. Their eye fell on John Harvey Kellogg, the clever son of the local broom merchant. John did not disappoint the elders, he studied well and became a doctor of excellent reputation. He became head of the local sanitarium, founded a health institute and built it into the best-known health resort in the United States. Anyone who had money and a little ailment had to go to Kellogg.

Elpee

Electromagnetic fields

Electric razor

Electrical motor

Doppler effect

Diesel engine

Frozen products

CT scanner

Correction fluid

Cornflakes