Geek Birthday!
Today is the Birthday of noted Geek, Buckminster Fuller
Usually called a "futurist", Bucky got his start in the sheet metal trade as a machinist, had a hard time fitting in to college (got expelled from Harvard). He found work as a mechanic and meat packer, as well as a stint in the Navy.
He started experimenting in the late 40's with geodesic domes while teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He's been called the inventor of the geodesic dome, but that isn't exactly true, what he did do was develop much of the mathematical research regarding geodesic domes and received a patent relating to it.
One of the first environmentalists, Fuller often called Earth a spaceship (flew it space, has finite resources, and requires regular maintenance to continue functioning) He even tried to get people to say "out" instead of "up" because when we go up we're really traveling away from the Earth's core.
Fuller's legacy can be seen anywhere there's one of the geodesic domes he loved, though their popularity never surged the way he'd hoped. Scientists even named the C60 molecule a buckyball (the family is also known as fullerenes, or more properly, buckminsterfullerenes) after Fuller.
The following image was painted by Boris Artzybasheff for a 1964 Time magazine cover about Fuller, and was used in 2004 for a USPS commemorative stamp.
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Permalink Reply by Joleen Ruffin on -
Very geeky Phil!
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Permalink Reply by Phil Yale on -
Two geek birthday's today (or is one a nerd?)
One of the problems geeks have is that often their ideas so ahead of others that they aren't accepted or understood in their time, so their names either fall from history or are given to some obscure measurement (Hertz, Coulomb, Tesla) or process (Fourier transform, Lorenz oscillation, etc.). There are those exceptions where the stars align and the geek triumphs, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being modern examples.
Julius Plücker (1801 – 1868) is one of those cases of a geek whose name is largely gone from history except for an occasional answer in Trivial Pursuit. Here we have a German physicist who taught at several of the major Universities of his time, made significant changes in the study of geometry, and was also pioneer in the investigation of cathode rays that eventually lead to discovery of the electron.
In 1858 as a professor of physics at the University of Bonn he published his research on vacuum tubes with his friend Heinrich Geissler. These mainly focused on the action of the magnet on the electric discharge in rarefied gases. He found that electrical discharge caused a fluorescent glow to form on the glass walls of a vacuum tube, and that the glow could be made to shift by applying an electromagnet to the tube. These studies where later used as a basis of “cathode-ray” tubes (CRTs).
Plücker, then began working on spectroscopy of gases, he was the first to use a type of vacuum tube (by then called a Geissler tube...yeap after his former colleague) where different gases could be used to make different colors (we now call these “neon” lights). He noted that the “spectral lines” or differences in color could be used to identify to gases that had emitted them. According to his colleaguee Johann Hittorf, Plücker first noticed the three lines of the hydrogen spectrum which a few months after his death were recognized in the spectrum of solar flare proving that the sun was made mostly of hydrogen.
In 1865 Plücker returned to the field of geometry and invented what was then known as line geometry. (now it's a branch of projective geometry)
The second birthday today is on the other end of the spectrum, the successful geek.
Orville Clarence Redenbacher (1907 - 1995) born in Brazil, Indiana, and grew up on his family's farm where he sold popcorn from a roadside stand. He graduated from High School in the top 5% of his class, attended Purdue University, was a member of the Marching Band and graduated with a degree in agronomy.
In 1951, he and Charlie Bowman bought the George F. Chester and Son seed corn plant in Valparaiso, Indiana. They renamed the company "Chester Hybrids," and tried tens of thousands of different hybrid strains of popcorn before finding the "RedBow" hybrid. An advertising agency suggested using the name Orville Redenbacher to market the corn. They did and launched their “gourmet popping corn” in 1970.
By the mid 70s, They had captured a third of the market for unpopped popcorn. In 1976, Redenbacher sold the company to Hunt-Wesson Foods, Which in time was sold to the giant ConAgra.
Redenbacher then moved to Southern California (Coronado to be exact) and continued to promote his popcorn always appearing in his trademark bow-tie and glasses. -
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