The Hacker’s Almanac for Monday March 12, 2007

Download The Hacker’s Almanac for Monday March 12, 2007. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for future episodes.

It’s the birthday of German physicist, Gustav Kirchoff, born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1824. His father was a lawyer and a Prussian patriot and expected him to join the civil service. Kirchoff was a gifted student and wary of bureaucracy. Luckily, university professorships were held by officers of the state at the time and so Kirchoff was able to enter academia. He went to the Albertus University of Königsberg where he studied math and physics.

At the university, Kirchoff formalized a series of laws governing the behavior of circuits that are still widely used today. He’d begun work on them while still in secondary school and didn’t complete them until finishing his doctorate. He derived the laws through mathematical and physical logic based largely on the work of Georg Ohm. Taken together, his laws make it possible to calculate the current, voltage, and resistance in electrical circuits with multiple loops and are the basis for the circuit simulation software that is used to design most modern electronic products.

After graduating, he married Clara Richelot, the daughter of one of his professors and moved to Berlin. The city was in an uproar. Many of the German states were in rebellion against the monarchy and there was fighting in the streets. After a few years, Kirchoff moved to take a post in Heidelberg where he met the chemist Robert Bunsen. The two quickly became friends and collaborated on a series of experiments to study the chemical composition of the sun. In the process, they discovered two elements caesium and rubidium. Kirchoff had earlier completed a series of observations of the light emitted by incandescent objects which he compiled into the Laws of Spectroscopy, a major building block in the invention of quantum mechanics.

Kirchoff suffered from a disability that confined him to a wheelchair for most of his life and by 1875 he was no longer physically able to conduct experiments and so he took up the chair of theoretical physics at Berlin University where he spent the rest of his life working on a four volume treatise on mathematical physics that became a standard in German universities for the next fifty years.

Kirchhoff died in 1887, and was buried in the St Matthäus Cemetery in Schöneberg, Berlin only a few meters from the graves of the Brothers Grimm. (Kirchoff biography)

It’s the birthday of astronaut Wally Schirra, born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1923. Schirra’s father had been a pilot during World War I and after the war he worked as a barnstormer, touring the country performing aviation tricks along with his wife, Florence, who worked as a wing walker. Schirra was flying his father’s plane by the time he started high school.

After college, he joined the Navy in time to serve during the final months of World War II, but didn’t see combat. He was one of the first pilots trained on jet aircraft and so he was loaned to the Air Force when the Korean war started. During the course of the war, Schirra flew 90 combat missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.

In 1959, Shirra was one of the first seven astronauts selected for the space program. He spent three years in intensive training before his first launch in the Mercury 8 capsule. The capsule was orbited around the earth six times over about 9 hours before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

He went on to command Apollo 7, the first manned American flight to successfully make it into space. Apollo 7 spent eleven days in orbit during which time Schirra caught a cold. He took Actifed on the advice of a NASA surgeon and later worked as a spokesman for the company. During the flight, the Apollo 7 crew conducted the first television broadcast from space, for which Schirra won an Emmy. He said,

“Feeling weightless . . . it’s so many things together. A feeling of pride, of healthy solitude, of dignified freedom from everything that’s dirty, sticky. You feel exquisitely comfortable . . . and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such an ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, without sweat, without difficulty as if the biblical curse in the sweat of thy face and in sorrow no longer exists, As if you’ve been born again.”

(Space Quotes)

Schirra is retired and lives in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.

This entry was posted in Hackers Almanac. Bookmark the permalink.

0 Responses to The Hacker’s Almanac for Monday March 12, 2007

  1. mort says:

    Schirra was also the “color man” with Walter Cronkite on broadcasts of the Apollo moon missions of 1968-69 including Apollo 13 that almost ended tragically and the moon landings themselves. This was the best ‘reality’ TV ever broadcast.

  2. mort says:

    I remember Schirra as expert ‘color man’ for Walter Cronkite’s broadcasts in 1968-69 of the Apollo moon missions, including Apollo 13 when they almost died and the landing & moon walks. That was the best ‘reality’ TV ever.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *