On this day in 1852, the great physicist and educator Edward Bouchet was born. Although he lived a good and useful life, he also lived a tragic life. As most African-Americans of that time and to a lesser extent today, there were not many professional options for him. In 1874, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He was ranked sixth out of class of 124 students. He later went on to get his PhD in physics from Yale, writing his dissertation on geometrical optics. He was the first African American to get any kind of PhD from an American university, but he was only the sixth person of any kind to get a PhD is physics.

Given his qualifications, he should have been hired as a college professor somewhere. But he was not. And notice: he was born in Connecticut. He wasn’t trying to get by in the south. Racism was and is a thing all over the nation. As a result, Bouchet spent his entire career working at high schools. Most of his career was spent at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) — a Quaker founded school because most schools in Philadelphia would not accept African-American students.

After 26 years at ICY, he left because the school changed (following the philosophy of Booker T Washington) toward industrial education rather than the traditional classical education. I understand the thinking behind this, but it is wrong. We are going through it now across the nation. The idea is that children should be trained for jobs, but we’ve seen where this leads: poorly paying jobs and more inequality. Regardless, this led Bouchet to a series of teaching jobs in various locations before retiring due to poor health.

Edward Bouchet was clearly a brilliant man who we should have cherished. Instead, we provided him with a kind of torture. We allowed him to show his greatness in education and then denied him the opportunity to utilize it throughout his life. Even still, he doubtless had a huge positive effect on his students. He stands as a proud example of human self-actualization. And he is yet another example of a great man that our nation spurned.

Happy birthday Edward Bouchet!

On this day in 1892, the great physicist Arthur Compton was born. He was primarily interested in high energy particles and light and how they interacted with matter. For example, he showed that JJ Thomson was right and that x-rays scattered by the first 16 elements of the periodic table were polarized. He did extensive work on cosmic rays, showing that there were more at the poles than elsewhere. He correctly deduced that they were charged particles being changed by the earth’s magnetic field. He was also very important in the Manhattan Project.

Compton is most known, of course, for the Compton Effect. This is very similar to the Photoelectric Effect. What Compton noticed and explained was that x-rays scattered by free electrons change wavelengths — reducing their energy. This is notable because it showed that photons were acting like particles. Generally, light is absorbed or not. Similarly, a particle can have part of its energy reduced by a collision. The Compton effect shows that light can do the same thing.

After the war, Arthur Compton went on to head Washington University in St Louis where he oversaw the liberalization of the school. Under him, the university was desegregated in 1952. But it is unclear how much credit he should get for that. He retired at 62 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 69.

Like a lot of scientists of his time, he was very interested in the subject of free will. He pushed the idea of free will as a two stage process and thought that quantum indeterminacy made actions “free.” This is nonsense. I don’t believe in free will at all, and I find attempts to prove it pathetic. The two-stage model is just a fancy way to tap dance around the issue. But in this way, Compton is like Newton: outside of the confines of science, he was lost in a sea of magic thinking. This is not to put him down. The fact that he grappled with these questions at all makes him much more serious than most people — scientists especially.

Happy birthday Arthur Compton!

On this day in 1588, the great intellectual Marin Mersenne was born. He was a mathematician, philosopher, theologian, scientist, and most of all, music theorist. But what was most important about him was how he built relationships. He was friends and correspondents of some of the greatest minds of his time including: Étienne Pascal (father of the more famous Pascal), Constantijn Huygens (father of the more famous Huygens), René Descartes, and Galileo Galilei. Those last two, he spent a lot of time and energy defending. He also put together the Académie Parisienne, which was a direct predecessor of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society.

Marin Mersenne’s greatest work was Traité de l’harmonie Universelle, for which he earned the moniker “father of acoustics.” It deals with string vibrations and how they relate to tone. This was something Mersenne spent a lot of time on. He also developed the physics of spring oscillations.

One of his many great contributions to knowledge is his early study of what have become known as the Mersenne primes. These are prime numbers that are of the form 2 to the n power minus one. For example, 3 is the first Mersenne prime because 2 to the power of 2 minus one is 3. These are extremely rare. Only 48 of them have ever been calculated. The 48th one is an enormously large number that my spreadsheet died trying to create:

Just to be clear, that’s a 3 followed by 619 zeros! But here is something really interesting: if n is not prime, then M_n is not prime either. The funny thing about Mersenne, however, is that he put together a list of the Mersenne primes up to n=257. But he screwed up. He included n=67 and n=257, which are not prime. And he didn’t include n=61, n=89, and n=107 — all of which are prime. But I don’t blame him. That’s tedious work!

In addition to his direct contributions to knowledge, he translated a tremendous amount of work, especially that of Greek mathematicians. He also helped Galileo translate a number of his works. Basically, Mersenne was a very valuable guy to have around during an intellectual revolution.

Happy birthday Marin Mersenne!

On this day in 1896, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was born. He was very interested in how especially children learn. And what makes him interesting compared to, say, Freud, is that he didn’t see humans as just a bag of dysfunction. There is a tendency in psychology generally to focus on the abnormal, or even worse, to define the normal as abnormal. I always think of him along with Abraham Maslow as having a more positive view of human psychology.

Piaget is best know for his four developmental stages: sensorimotor (0-2 years); preoperational (2-7); concrete operational (7-14); and formal operational. There are two general, but connected, developmental aspects to this, although I’m sure an expert on Piaget would find this a great oversimplification. First, there is the development of empathy. Second, there is the development of abstract thought. I’m not sure exactly how these interact, but clearly abstract thought is necessary for empathy. For example, psychopaths are capable (often even brilliant) at abstract thought but do not have much in the way of empathy. But as a child grows, it develops empathy before it has fully mastered abstract thought. I think this means that empathy is a primitive form of abstract thought and much more fundamental to who we are as a species. But it makes you wonder about the “Let him die!” crowd.

Piaget himself was an incredibly precocious child. He was very interested in zoology when he was young and published a number of papers on mollusks by the age of 15. In college, his interests turned to philosophy and psychology. He got interested in developmental psychology while working at a boys school in Paris. While grading “intelligence” tests, he noticed a pattern that younger boys tended to get certain kinds of questions wrong that longer boys did not. This led to the startling insight that younger children think in a different way from older children. Up to that time, it was generally thought that children were just less experienced adults, who were otherwise the same.

On a practical level, I think there is much good about the old way of seeing children. Today, children are too often “protected” from the adult world. I’m not suggesting that children ought to be forced to see the harsh realities of the world. But there is much good that comes from allowing children to interact with adults intellectually. In other words: children should be seen and heard. I also think that our obsession with not allowing children to know about sex and coarse language is a mistake. I always remember this great Julia Sweeney story about dealing with her daughter’s question about frog reproduction. By and large, I think it is a good overview of how one should interact with children. And how the occasional tactical lie might be useful.

Piaget had a long and distinguished career. He was also probably the greatest constructivist thinker, where he pioneered new ways of looking at education. The basic idea is very simple. We create models of the way the world work. And as we acquire new knowledge, we integrate it into those models. I like this idea very much because it completely explains the way I think and how I go about learning new things. I think everyone does this, but of course, we are usually too involved using the process to think about it.

Happy birthday Jean Piaget!

On this day in 1811, the inventor Elisha Otis was born. But before we get to him: yes, I know. This is the second day in the row that the birthday post has been about a 19th century American inventor named Elisha. But there weren’t a great many options today. Last year, I featured the beautiful and talented Dolores del Rio. And there were other people from the film business like John Landis and Martin Sheen. I suppose I could have done Tony Bennett, but for whatever reason I just don’t like his work, even though in a technical sense he’s very good. And maybe I should have featured crime writer P D James who is 94 today. But having never read any of her work, I didn’t feel I should. So we get Otis. And it turns out that Otis is a really interesting guy.

Otis was born in Vermont and spent his entire life in the northeast. He moved around a lot because he was unsuccessful for most of his life. Like a lot of people at that time, he was just trying to make ends meet. And so he moved from place to place and job to job. But the thing about Otis is that he was an inventor by nature—always looking for ways to improve the way things were done. At one point, he designed and built his own gristmill, a device used to turn grain into flour. When he found he couldn’t make enough money with it, he retooled it into a sawmill. When that didn’t pay the bills, he started building wagons.

At this point, tragedy struck: his wife died, leaving him with two boys: an eight-year-old and a baby. He struggled on for another two years, before moving and starting over. He found work in a toy factory. Probably bored with the work and not keen on his pay, he started thinking. He invented a “robot turner,” which allowed bedsteads to be made four times as fast. How exactly the bedsteads were part of the toys, I cannot say. For doing this, his boss gave him a $500 bonus. (Very roughly, I think that’s about $50,000 today—maybe more.) That I find remarkable, because that isn’t so much the way it works today. But it really does help when boss and employee aren’t separated by distance and unbridgeable class gulfs.

With the money he got, Otis moved on again. He started a business where he was working on a new system for stopping trains almost immediately. This is kind of interesting, because it would seem that Otis was a careful man. And this would lead him to greatness. But not yet. He was using a stream to power his operation. But the city of Albany diverted the stream for its own purposes and so he was put out of business. So off Otis move again. And then again, moving to Yonkers where he managed a sawmill—actually he was there to retool it into a factor for making bedsteads. This is where the dramatic music comes in. Imagine it now.

While working at the sawmill, he found use for an elevator. But, being a careful man, he was concerned about the biggest problem with these things: cables broke, elevators fell, and people were hurt. So he invented a system at the top of the elevator car. As long as there was tension on the cable, the brakes were pulled away from the elevator shaft. But if the cable broke, the tension was gone, and the brakes slammed onto the side of the elevator shaft, stopping the car. You can see this in the following illustration from his eventual patent:

At first, Otis didn’t think that much of the invention. And you can kind of see why: it is quite simple. But it is also brilliant. And perhaps his greatest insight was his concern for safety. Regardless, he eventually started what would become Otis Brothers & Co. At first, this business too wasn’t doing well. It was only after a very flashy demonstration of the break at the 1854 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (World’s Fair) in New York that the orders started coming in. Otis died only seven years later of diphtheria, but his two sons took over what he had left to them. The rest, as they say, is history.

Happy birthday Elisha Otis!

Afterword

Here is Pete Jive doing a very energetic and fun version of Jim Croce’s “Careful Man”:

On this day in 1835, one of the greatest American inventors Elisha Gray was born. He’s most interesting because almost no one has ever heard of him. Despite this, he probably invented the telephone. We all know Alexander Graham Bell because, of course, of the company name. And there is the stupid little narrative of the first telephone transmission, “Mr Watson: come here; I want to see you.” That, at least, has the advantage over most stories we are told in grammar school of actually being true.

Bell, of course, got the patent first and so made all the money from the telephone. But it does bring up this issue that I have been grappling with for years. How should a society reward creative work when multiple people develop the same ideas at the same time? We see the same thing with airplanes between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss. I don’t like the system we have for many reasons, but this random aspect of it is quite troubling.

Don’t get the wrong idea, however. Gray was enormously successful. For example, he invented the fax machine. In 1887. Really! He called it the teleautograph, and it allowed handwriting to be transmitted via the telegraph. The company he founded would (through a circuitous route) went on to become Xerox. He was (like many inventors of the time) a telegraph man. It was, after all, the internet of its day. And being an electrical engineer, most of his work was based on the telegraph.

Another such application was the harmonic telegraph. It was a way of sending musical tones over a wire. It is one of the first electronic musical instruments and the first device that can be said to be a musical synthesizer, although it more along the lines of your grandmother’s old electric organ. But this was in 1875.

As I sit here, my partner is fighting with the hardware of our top secret amazing “I never thought we would be able to do this” invention. And as a result, we were not able to go out and do field tests today. I don’t mean to compare myself to Gray, and as much as I admire my partner, I don’t mean to compare him to Gray either. But we are doing this work outside our regular work. So I’m quite interested in the fact that Gray did his greatest work after he retired. The creative instinct in humans is strong. So I find it offensive when conservatives and neoliberals claim that if we don’t allow creative people to become billionaires, we won’t have progress. I think it is rather the opposite. Although I don’t question possible riches as being a motivator, without a certain level of financial stability, nothing creative gets done.

Happy birthday Elisha Gray!

On this day in 1875, the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung was born. When I was kid, I loved Jung. His work was so interesting. Freud seemed so bizarre to me, although there were things I liked about his work. But what I liked most about Jung was that he didn’t focus on dysfunction. He provided a description of why people were the way they were without necessarily labeling it as abnormal.

My favorite work, of course, was Psychological Types. Not only does it cover his whole system, but it provides a great deal of background information. He looked at other writers who had classified people into different types, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” What was especially nice about his system was that he didn’t classify types as normal and abnormal. That was especially important regarding introversion and extroversion, because introverts had long been labeled as damaged.

Now, of course, with the Myers-Briggs test books on the subject are everywhere. But they’ve also changed the theory somewhat. I don’t mind that, but it is interesting. Jung wasn’t some kind of oracle. And Jung thought that women were always (or nearly so) feeling types and mean thinking. That’s clearly not the case, although there does seem to be a strong tendency in that direction. I just took the HumanMetrics test and it said I was an INFP, although I am just as likely to come out as an INTP. Not that this necessarily means anything. I know the types are a model of how people are, but I’m not that sure of how fundamental they are. But it does explain to me why many (even most) perfectly nice people see the world so differently than I do.

Jung’s greatest work is undoubtedly The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. But it is overwhelming. Again, I don’t necessarily accept it. In particular, I don’t acception the notion of a collective unconscious. But we do share archetypes that are ingrained from our evolution. I have no doubt that the other great apes share some of the same ones, and probably also sparrows and frogs. The book itself is very interesting in the the way that Jung uses eclectic knowledge to pull the theory all together. But one must be very careful with Jung, because he was very good at that kind of thing, regardless of the truth. But there is no doubt that there is at least a core truth to it.

When I was young and fearful of death, I took a great deal of comfort in Jung’s answer to whether he believed in God, “I know.” At this point, I’m not even sure what he meant. He was a mystic. And as a fellow mystic, I could easily answer that question in the same way, without it being in the least bit comforting to my frightened young self. The question is too vague. What is meant by “God”? I would be interested in hearing Jung’s answer to the question, “Do you believe a God that loves you?” That’s where we would potentially part company. But it is regardless a very good answer to the question, because he took a very boring question and made it interesting.

Happy birthday Carl Jung!