The Garages of Silicon Valley
© Norman Sperling, February 1, 2012
We're all familiar with giant computer-industry corporations. Here in Silicon Valley, we have hundreds of them. But they didn't start out giant, they started out basic and bare-bones. I drove around the Valley a couple weeks ago to look at some of their birthplaces. See pictures of these and many companies' first buildings at scaruffi.com. (HP and Google were founded in garages just around the corners of the houses shown.) You can also find them on satellite imagery.
1939: Hewlett Packard garage, 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto: quite rustic, with not-quite-even wooden planks. Narrow 1-car garage (no house had a 2-car garage in 1938!). Were it not for the bronze plaques in front of the house (a duplex, private residences), absolutely nothing would call attention to the garage. Unassuming. It's well-painted because the garage is now owned by Hewlett-Packard and maintained as their honored birthplace. A private tour inside, that I didn't see: by Brian Solis.
1956-57: 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View: where Shockley Semiconductor got started. This pioneering transistor company was a terrible place to work. Experts fleeing Shockley founded Fairchild, Intel, Kleiner, and others. Now at the corner of a gigantic shopping center (redeveloped in 2012), a WalMart stands on the opposite corner. The building is hard to recognize! It's now an "International Market" selling halal meats. The historic, main part is extremely plain, basic, slab-sided, undistinguished. The newer front segment is much better looking. The Geek Atlas says there's a plaque but I didn't find any.
~1958: 844 E. Charleston Road, Palo Alto: Fairchild Semiconductor , 1957- . Invented integrated circuits. Moore's Law 1965. Begat the "Fairchildren" LSI, Advanced MicroDevices, and many more. Very plain light-industrial building, with only a few faint touches of styling. Modern for the 1950s. 2 bronze plaques out front tell how the commercial integrated circuit chip was invented there, but you'd never notice the building if it wasn't pointed out. 2 suites are for rent as of January 2012.
1975: Apple's garage, 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos. The front actually looks rather like my house, though the spacing between houses is quite a bit wider. It has a double-width garage, where mine has a single. Extremely unassuming, less adorned than most of the houses on the street. No plaque. This front lawn has the smallest tree on the block (perhaps a big old tree had died). The garage is absolutely unassuming.
1998: Google's garage, 232 Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park. Somewhat newer, with a classy mailbox and tile address on the garage. No sign or plaque visible. Clean and trim but plain. Some neighbors haven't been maintained in decades, others are junior palaces.
Nobody would pick any of these as a place of future greatness. These ventures all started very small and plain and unadorned, all hope and work. Nothing big or rich till long after they outgrew these cradles. If the beginning work hadn't fostered sales and expansion, we'd never have heard of any of them. It doesn't matter how tiny your accommodations (I say, typing away in a corner of a closet), what counts is where you take it from there.
Great Guidebooks for Scientific Travelers
Reviewed and © by Norman Sperling, October 3, 2011
Duane S. Nickell: Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler: Visiting Physics and Chemistry Sites Across America. Rutgers U. Press 2010. Paperback $19.95. 978-0-8135-4730-5.
and Guidebook for the Scientific Traveler: Visiting Astronomy and Space Exploration Sites Across America. Rutgers U. Press 2008. Paperback $21.95. 978-0-8135-4374-1.
Most of the travel books I've filtered through in planning my Great Science Trek specialize in factories, oddities, architecture, history, pop culture, technology, and politics. Travel books for scientists are rare - just a few on geology and observatories. Do you know any others? Duane S. Nickell is starting a series to fill this niche. Rutgers University Press has set up "The Scientific Traveler" series, and Nickell has written its first 2 volumes.
Each chapter begins with a gem-quality tutorial. To understand gigantic particle accelerators, start with the essay on particle physics. To get why you should examine meteorite collections, start with the essay on meteorites.
Taking advantage of his modern, tech-savvy audience, Nickell wastes no space on maps or directions. He gives addresses, phone numbers, and websites, from which visitors can get all they need. He cites admission fees as of presstime, which everybody knows can change.
Nickell found a whole lot of chemistry places I'd never heard of, and points out aspects of astronomy and physics places that I never thought of - such as rooms where important things occurred on the campus where I teach (certainly not my room). He has chapters on the scientists themselves plus their universities, labs, accelerators, museums, and monuments. "Chemicals in Industry", for example, features places that make glass, borax, paper, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, toothpaste, beer, and whiskey.
Some kinds of technology lie in plain sight but go uninterpreted. Wind farms, for example, occupy impressive stretches of hills and deserts, but none has a visitor center or even a gift counter. A display of varieties of windmills, a demonstration of a generator, and a few relevant models and publications for sale, would make a respectable roadside stop. Other energy forms with sites-to-see include oil, coal, nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar.
Astronomers flock to places with the darkest skies, and buy up all the land to prevent disturbing lights from encroaching. Several such astronomy villages have sprung up. I can only think of one other place where followers of a science build their vacation homes together: Scientist's Cliffs, Maryland. Are there others?
The books are well-produced, well-illustrated, and reasonably priced. The rare misspellings won't cause any problems. But use an actual map rather than trust a statement like "15 miles southeast" because it might not be southeast.
Science people should consult these both for novel day-trips in their own areas, and for sights to visit while traveling. I tallied the listings I've visited so far: 36 of 57 in the Astronomy/Space volume, but only 25 of 92 in Physics/Chemistry. I'm going to enjoy some more sights!
Classic Science Magazines Available in Long Sets
© Norman Sperling, September 18, 2011
In the 1970s and 80s I was probably the biggest dealer in Sky & Telescope back issues, and bought and sold a good number of related magazines, too. I continue to sell quite a number of old and antiquarian books, but the only back-issue business I've paid attention to since I started running The Journal of Irreproducible Results in 2004 is, naturally, JIR.
In the last 2 years, half a dozen retiring astronomers, my age and older, have contacted me about selling large back runs of Sky & Telescope, and occasionally other magazines.
S&T now sells a CD package with 70 years' worth of their issues, including index. Scientific American also sells its contents that way. Of course there's nothing like the real thing. The feel of the real magazines is important. You can read a whole lot more pages, with a whole lot more enjoyment, on paper than on a screen. So the magazines have value.
Right now, friends and I have S&T sets for sale near:
* Cleveland (especially eager to sell)
* Boston
* St. Louis
* Chicago
* San Francisco.
(locations are important because shipping costs a lot.)
They'd be mighty heavy and bulky to sell on my Great Science Trek, but I could probably fit one set at a time into the trailer. Should I try to sell them online? At conventions? By wide eMailing? Which institutions are on-the-make these days?
Magazine runs I want to sell to good homes, preferably by summer 2012:
* The Journal of Irreproducible Results
* Scientific American
* Physics Today
* Mercury
* Astronomy
* Sky & Telescope
* The Sky
* The Telescope
* The Planetarian
* Isis
* Journal for the History of Astronomy
* Geoscientist
* Quarterly Journal of the RAS
* Observatory
* Griffith Observer
* Leaflets of the ASP
Contact me at normsperling [at] gmail.com
William R. Corliss, Scientific Anomalist
© Norman Sperling, August 20, 2011
One of the most interesting and scientifically-important people I ever met was the independent scientist William R. Corliss. Since the 1970s, he was by far the world's finest collector, categorizer, and ranker of scientific anomalies. He made himself the world's greatest authority on things that don't fit the paradigms of the times.
I had a long meeting with him in 1988, and corresponded several times with him afterward. He was always a scrupulous scientist and a quiet, reserved, proper gentleman. Bill died of a heart attack on July 8th, age 84.
Science always notices a lot of things, and it takes time to fit these pieces into the puzzle - sometimes months, sometimes centuries. Until they fit, the odder pieces are anomalies. Narrow-minded swallowers of paradigms-they-are-taught ignore them whenever possible, and pooh-pooh them when they're brought up. Broader-minded investigators of Nature comb through them for items that might, now, fit; or items that now point more clearly in some novel direction. Yet others (including most astronomers who mentioned Corliss) browse through anomalies simply because they're neat, or fun, or inspiring, or awesome, or remind us that we don't know everything and may never.
Bill spent enormous numbers of hours combing scientific literature for such anomalies, often driving to Washington, DC, to use the Library of Congress and other scientific libraries. He was looking for evidence about how Nature works.
Just what constituted an anomaly changed with the times. Early on, when plate tectonics was the "challenger" paradigm, he sought out nuggets that supported it; later, when it became the "dominant" paradigm, he sought items to the contrary. He supported Chip Arp's challenge to interpreting galaxies' red shifts as distance markers. He was very slow to accept that Arp seems to be, simply, wrong ... but he always followed the evidence. Several items that Corliss plucked from scientific literature surely are mistaken, but more are valid, though (as with everything else in Science) subject to refinement and reinterpretation.
Bill compiled his findings into vast topical compendia. Most of the drawings were commissioned from geologist/illustrator Jack Holden, who is also a JIR contributor, though Corliss and Holden never met. A few of his books were marketed rather widely by large publishing companies. All the rest were published by The Sourcebook Project, which was Bill, his wife Virginia, and their barn. We retail several of his books.
Bill was best known as an "anomalist", most praised by the Society for Scientific Exploration, and bloggers of the "unknown". He had many fans among seekers of cryptids, UFOs, and other things beyond Science.
Bill experienced organized Skeptics as debunkers, enforcers for mainstream-paradigm-as-law, and thus enemies of anomalies. He definitely recognized that some claims are indeed bunk, deserving and needing debunking.
The scientific establishment usually ignored him. A few, like Joe Ashbrook, acted visibly uneasy at the mention of his compilations. That always confused me, because all Bill quoted were scientific publications.
He read JIR, and quoted it in his bimonthly newsletter, always with tongue pointedly in cheek.
Bill lived on a farm north of Baltimore. He was a man of his times: though he did commission a website for his wares, the torrent of spam scared him away from eMail. His website doesn't take credit cards, and directs customers to mail checks. Every communication I got from him over several decades was typed on a typewriter, not a word-processor.
I hope ways are found to preserve his files and keep his work available to the public.
Not So Hot
© Norman Sperling, July 30, 2011
Reference books and websites copy one another. Hardly anybody digs back into the original records to find out what really happened.
With global warming attracting so much attention, the Weather Underground's weather historian, Chris Burt, is exploring the actual original reports of record high temperatures. He's been passionate about weather records for 40 years. I know, because 40 years ago he was a student of mine at Princeton Day School. Mostly I taught astronomy, but there was a panel of weather instruments alongside the planetarium, and Chris wanted to do things with their information. He tended the instruments and recorded the data and noticed patterns (the barograph showed a "noon hump") and posted findings on the bulletin board.
Chris also haunted the Princeton office of Weatherwise magazine, and went on to study meteorology at the University of Wisconsin. More recently he has published 2 editions of the book Extreme Weather.
He finds that a lot of the equipment was not just old but primitive, used in non-standard ways, and/or reported in substandard ways. The highest temperature that stands up to modern scientific standards is 129 degrees Fahrenheit, at Death Valley. All reports of higher temperatures have problems, and many are probably or clearly erroneous. In other words, don't rely on those old reports.
Global-warming-critics cite the ultra-high records to say that it used to be hotter, so there's no problem. Chris shows that they are probably wrong on historical counts. They also seem to be wrong on scientific issues, judging from the private remarks I hear from the overwhelming majority of scientists at American Geophysical Union conventions over many years. Politically, they appear to be little short of craven stooges, as revealed in Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, published by Bloomsbury in 2010.
Chris posted his preliminary report at Weather Underground. Now, he's on a United Nations committee to scientifically examine the reports of highest temperatures. Look for their official results in Spring 2012.
Steampunk Style
© Norman Sperling, March 28, 2011
Last weekend's Steampunk convention really dazzled in style.
"Plain" and "Steampunk" don't intersect. Look at the details on the finest Queen Anne Victorian houses at images.google.com or flickr.com. I saw goggles with wonderful elaborate brasswork, the 2 sides assertively different. Steampunkers make fantastic corsetry, hats, featherware, gearworks, brassworks, glassworks ... shiny and colorful and intricate and brash. It was such a feast for the eyes that I wandered the dealers and halls agog.
Practically all of it came from handcrafters. A few smallish companies create T-shirts, and publish the fiction that drives the genre. No big corporations, no mass production.
Practically the only person who arrived there not wearing showy goggles (Steampunk's universal icon) was me. I'd intended to buy some anyway, but that made it imperative. I bought. Now they ride the brim of my pith helmet. Not that it matters in steampunkdom, but it's a real pith helmet, that is built out of pith (a natural styrofoam-like substance from certain reeds). I bought it in Nairobi in 1980 while chasing a solar eclipse.
Genuine Victorian stuff does not attract the Steampunkers. A dealer with antiquarian microscopes, books, rulers, and slide rules had very few customers. The dealers who sold a lot have fantastically elaborated, gaudy goods. Their late-1800s aesthetic is wildly embroidered; the real thing itself is way too sedate.
Enormous elaboration continued into the 1900s (think Duesenbergs in the 1920s and '30s). Then the tides of fashion flipped toward sleek, hiding detailed inner workings under shells of each year's favorite shapes.
Telescopes, microscopes, cars, appliances, and a host of other complex devices still hide all their intricacies. While electronic circuit boards remain ugly and static, pipes, chains, gears, belts, and other moving stuff can be made attractive and interesting. It's time to bring those out of hiding, shine them up, and celebrate the harmony of their workings. Dyson has led vacuum cleaners this way, and Harley-Davidson never left, so many more should follow.
Now is the Time to Expand the Budget ... of Paradoxes
© Norman Sperling, February 19, 2011
While the Skeptics' movement, as official organizations of people, only dates from the 1970s, there have been skeptics of pseudoscience for hundreds of years. One of the most interesting was a prickly Victorian named Augustus De Morgan.
De Morgan responded tartly in the Athenaeum magazine to assorted balderdash he read in a wide variety of books, and to letters which people sent him. His writings for the Athenaeum were rather like those of some bloggers today. He had a short fuse. Politeness was not a priority.
After he died, his widow published De Morgan's ripostes as one of the first Skeptics' books, A Budget of Paradoxes. I treasure my copy of the second edition, published in 2 volumes in 1915.
I got them from the estate of Joe Ashbrook, editor of Sky & Telescope magazine. Joe's signature inside the front cover says he bought it on June 24, 1935, when the book was 20 years old, and Joe was 17. Over the rest of his career he wrote a great many interesting notes in it. Joe especially used the book's many short biographies; back then, we didn't have the research resources we have now.
But the Budget only publishes De Morgan's retorts. The first half of each dialog isn't there, and can only partly be inferred from what is. Back when De Morgan wrote, and when the Budget was published, there was a perfect reason for that: the copyrights to the other side of the dialog didn't belong to De Morgan, and the writers were usually hostile to him.
Now those copyrights have long expired. And now a huge amount of Victorian text is on-line and otherwise more accessible.
So now that it is possible, somebody should put together the complete version: the claims as well as the disproofs, the bunk as well as the debunk.
It could be published in electronic formats. It could also be printed-on-demand so no publisher has to bet how many others will want to buy a copy, after I buy the first one.
What similar worthy projects, never done before, are now doable?
First Editions Are Different
© Norman Sperling, February 13, 2011
A big antiquarian book fair was just held in San Francisco. It seems that books are not going out of style, and old books keep climbing in value.
You probably know famous old Science books from recent paperback nth-editions. You know how important the authors, and the books, were. You may even have read the books.
That would tell you what an author said ... but not with the same impression that the original book gave to its original readers. The real first edition is different.
It's clothbound, not paperback. It's a quality production job that feels substantial. The first edition's cover and frontispiece don't depict the author full of age and honor and glory, because he wasn't yet. When the first edition got to the readers, the author was rather young, no hero, not particularly well known, and hadn't been glorified at all. And the book therefore looks like it: the author's name is not as big and bold as the title. The subtitle plays an important persuasive role.
When important Science books get published, the authors are full of hope, but the publishers, who have actual money at risk, are full of fear. So most first editions have short press runs to reduce the risk of warehousing unsold leftovers. Therefore, with such a tiny supply of first editions, if a book becomes famous, demand can drive prices very high. I've been collecting old Science books for decades but only have a few important first editions.
Compare first editions to later editions. By the time those were printed, the authors and publishers knew that they'd sell a lot, so the press runs were much longer. The persuasive roles of the binding, the title, the subtitle, the author's name, and the frontispiece, all changed from the first edition. Of course the contents are updated and enriched, too.
Demand can continue for decades after the book is out-of-date, and even after the author dies. Degenerate late editions look different, and may persist as volumes in big series of "important books", with muddier and muddier type as the years drag on. Publishers of even-later paperbacks assume you already know the contents are important. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, illustrates this with a long shelf with over 100 editions of Darwin's On The Origin of Species.
If you're interested in an old Science book mostly for its contents, a reprint or a low-price late edition serves perfectly well. The bulk of my library is that way. But the originals certainly tell a different story!
Astroscan Memories
© Norman Sperling, January 15, 2011
A recommendation by Sky & Telescope magazine last month, following a [.pdf] review last July, rekindled an old glow. The Astroscan telescope - my first big project - was once again named one of the 3 best inexpensive telescopes ... 34 years after it was introduced!
I remember its development clearly.
It was meant to be a superior first telescope, and it is. It has also proven to be a superior second telescope: folks keep it after they graduate to something bigger, and use it for a quick session, and as a convenient portable. Because people keep their Astroscans, remarkably few are offered on the used market.
Robert Edmund was taking over Edmund Scientific Company leadership from his father Norman. Norm has enjoyed retirement in Florida ever since. Robert had studied business management and knew how to run a going concern in changing markets. His telescope line was not doing well. Telescope leadership belonged to Criterion, Unitron, Questar, and Celestron, and Edmund Scientific wanted to earn its way to the top tier. The Astroscan was his opening salvo.
Robert Edmund hired me as a consultant in 1975, when I was 28. I was planetarium director at a private school, an hour's drive north of Edmund's. I was young and unknown and had even rougher edges than now. My ideas were unconventional, and entirely untested in the market. I contributed to a lot of Edmund's smaller astronomy projects, too.
I had observed observers observing in amateur, public, and school settings, and discovered that some of the wisdom of my elders wasn't wisdom. Telescope setup took frustratingly long, mountings were clumsy and shaky with narrow pivot points and long overhangs, eyepieces were tough to squint through, and views were underwhelmingly faint and dull. To improve on those, I preferred quick setup with minimal moving parts, stubby bodies, wide fields of view with wide exit pupils and bright contrast, lightweight and cheap. Those all shouted "Rich-Field".
Dr. Harvey Davis of the Lansing Astronomical Society introduced me to the principles of rich-field telescopes in the late 1960s. He was a friendly young math prof at Michigan State, where I was an undergrad. In the early '70s my friend - everybody's friend - Roger Tuthill made an RFT with an optical window (the success of which spurred us to do the same with the Astroscan). Roger's scope had a conventional cylindrical tube with a simple handle, so the only characteristics in which it was a predecessor of the Astroscan were the window and being an RFT. It didn't sell well at all.
No one in all history had ever gotten Americans to buy a LOW-power telescope, and we knew this was a huge hurdle. I assured Edmund that the telescope would please its users, but I explicitly never promised that anyone would buy it, and I wondered whether the expensive project would ever turn a profit. When Marketing VP Jack Sharff claimed that people would buy it, I thought that was bravado more than business sense. Sharff assured me that making it "popular" was his task, not mine. A good thing, because I understood almost nothing about marketing back then.
I wanted to make the eyepiece's exit-pupil an enormous 6 mm, because that's about the widest a dark-adapted human eye can take in. So, figuring from that, I championed a 4 1/4" f/4 (which the company nudged to f/4.2 for manufacturing convenience). Astroscan's richfield view - 3 degrees wide - means that finding things is easy, and keeping them in view is easy. It also means that hundreds of deep-sky objects are unusually contrasty, making them more obvious to beginners. The tradeoffs are minor: no astrophotography (which we wouldn't wish on novices anyway), planets look too tiny, and only a few double stars would look good. But any novice scope would only show pleasing detail on Jupiter and Saturn, the other planets being too small, featureless, and/or faint. So we swapped decent views of 2 objects (Jupiter and Saturn) to get superior views of hundreds of deep-sky objects.
I expounded on telescope design, exit pupils, and surface brightness in "Of Pupils and Brightness", Griffith Observer, January 1985.
At least as important as the optics, I wrote Astroscan's behavioral specifications. I remember blathering on and on for maybe 2/3 of a page singlespaced that I could have shortened enormously had I known the term "user-friendly". I didn't have the term, but I did have the concept. In beginner telescopes, it meant minimizing adjustments to fiddle with, and shortening the setup time (competitors, then and now, often take 15-20 minutes). Our setup time target was 3 minutes. We got it down to 10 seconds, and NO user's attention-span is too short for that.
While I did the optical and behavioral design, a brilliant young optical engineer, Mike Simmons, created the mechanical design that satisfied our needs. Simmons figured out that pushing the tube into the mounting made sense, and Simmons figured out that the ball-in-socket would work best. He was right. He advocated a very large sphere, with just the focuser-end of the tube sticking out. However, manufacturability, aesthetic appearance, and the awkwardness of a large-diameter sphere pointed the company to a smaller sphere, with more of the cylinder sticking out. This, however, is top-heavy, so to balance it, 2 semicircular slugs of cast iron surround the mirror. The extra weight, and the need for it, offended Simmons, and he left Edmund's soon after. I haven't seen him since the early '80s.
The shell satisfied all my specifications, including being nearly student-proof (it's meant to be checked out by students and carried home on a school bus). An industrial designer did the detail work. It's cast in 2 pieces of ABS plastic (one with the focuser insert, one without) and glued together.
In the fall of 1976, just before the first ads came out, I asked Robert Edmund what amount of sales he'd consider successful. He said 800 units by Christmas. Privately I thought that unlikely. Well, they sold 3,000 Astroscans in those first 3 months, which taught me another business lesson: there are DISeconomies of scale, as well as economies of scale. For example, the company couldn't produce the telescopes fast enough, and had to add shifts. Part of the optical design was meant to use an excellent, but slow-selling eyepiece that Edmund had a thousand of. They ran out, and had to scramble, buying every eyepiece on the world market that could possibly work - some Astroscans were shipped with Clave Plossls worth almost as much as the entire scope! Robert Edmund soon had Penn State's Dr. David Rank design the RKE eyepiece line, stimulated by the need to make a new eyepiece for the Astroscan. I'm happy that the company has sold in the neighborhood of 100,000 of them.
It was Robert Edmund who selected and hired and coordinated all the various people whose work combined to make Astroscan a success. He paid for all the work and assumed all the risk. He paid me quite well. In addition, the Edmund family and company ALWAYS treated me exceptionally well, and very often did me favors far beyond a conventional business relationship. Then and now, I regard my relationship with Edmund as one of the best I have ever had. I consulted for them for 9 years, 1975-84, but I have been a customer of theirs for 50 years, and endorse them as a fine set of people.
+++
Nobody since then has hired me to design a telescope, and such a project is beyond my personal resources. But I still get ideas.
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Parts of this post appeared on the Old Scope list in February 2002.
Memories of Brian Marsden
© Norman Sperling, November 21, 2010
My friend Brian Marsden, longtime director of the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams and the Minor Planet Center, died on November 18th, age 73.
In addition to being a world-class celestial mechanic and puzzle solver, he was one of the very nicest people I ever met. Always cheerful, quick to laugh, happy to talk good astronomy with anybody (amateur or professional, young or old), always trying to get the science right. He was everybody else's friend, too. That's a splendid attitude to emulate!
