by John Browne
7. ‘Black elephant in pastra vitrea with deep blue eyes, tusks and legs’. Purchased from Claudio Gianolla, Antiquario, San Marco 2766, 30124 Venezia.
8. Cappellin Venini and Company was founded in 1921 and the following year its first glass objects were exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In 1925 the company split up and Martinuzzi became the director of the new Venini and Co.
9. The glassmaking industry was not the only one to be concentrated in a specific area; the move was part of a broader Venetian economic plan for consolidation.
10. Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, p. 130.
11. Agricola, De re metallica, p. 592.
12. Agricola, De Natura Fossilium (New York: Geological Society of America, 1955. Translated from the first Latin edition of 1546 by Mark Chance Bandy and Jean A. Bandy), p. 111.
13. Cristallo glass was first produced around 1450 by Angelo Beroviero. The presence of iron oxide in sand and plant ash, which was often used as a fluxing agent, gave poor-quality glass a blue or green colour. Adding the right amount of manganese oxide would largely take out the colour of the glass, but a weak yellow or grey tint would persist. Muranese glassworkers used very pure silica and purified the plant ash into a white salt to remove most of the iron oxide from the glassmaking ingredients. Only a small amount of manganese oxide then needed to be added, reducing the chance of unwanted yellow tints. The result was a product that resembled quartz rock crystal. Quartz is atomically very similar to glass, as both are made from oxygen and silicon in a roughly 2:1 ratio. But in quartz the atoms are arranged in a rigid lattice, while the atoms in glass are disordered and resemble a liquid.
14. To produce a clear reflection, a flat, thin and clear piece of glass is needed. The difficulty in producing this meant that for a long time polished metal mirrors produced a clearer image than those made from glass. In ancient Greece and Rome, a mixture of copper and tin, or sometimes bronze, was used to make small mirrors, usually for personal grooming.
15. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 16–17.
16. Vannoccio Biringuccio in Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 20.
17. Mark Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror (New York: Basic Books, 2003 [ebook]), location 1813/5102.
18. Ibid., location 1818/5102.
19. Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 47.
20. Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, location 1844/5102.
21. In 1674 George Ravenscroft invented lead crystal glass by adding lead oxide to silica. The clear, heavy glass refracts light at a greater angle than normal glass, resulting in diamond-like sparkling when it is cut in facets. English lead crystal made Venetian glasswork unfashionable. In 1674, Ambassador Alberti noted that the glassworkers of Murano residing in London ‘ … are unemployed; they die of hunger or emigrate’. Patrick McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 163.
22. James Chance was one of few graduates to receive first-class honours at Cambridge to go into a career in business. Many continued in academia, while those leaving the University would go into the Church, the armed forces or a career in law. All were more highly regarded than business. Of those graduating in the top ten in mathematics between 1830 and 1860, only 3 per cent chose business as a career. The same was true at Cambridge when I studied there in the 1960s. A few weeks before I graduated in 1969, I saw Brian Pippard, one of my most distinguished professors, coming towards me along King’s Parade. As he passed, he turned to his colleague and said: ‘This is Browne. He is going to be a captain of industry. Isn’t that amusing?’ A career in business was generally regarded as a waste of potential for students at the University.
23. Chance had agreed to purchase the rights for Bontemps’ manufacturing techniques in return for five-twelfths of the profits. The development of patent law and the ability to profitably transfer know-how was important to securing a competitive advantage and rewarding innovation. Bontemps was not so certain about the security of patents, writing to Lucas in 1844 that ‘A patent in general is fit only for an inventor, who has no manufactury of his own, and who wishes to sell the use of his invention’.
24. Lancet, Vol. 1, 22 February 1845, p. 214 (London: John Churchill, 1845).
25. Charles Ryle Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 16.
26. The Times, 2 May 1851, in Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace (Chichester: Phillimore, 1986), pp. 41–2.
27. Ibid.
28. The Times, in Beaver, The Crystal Palace, p. 37.
29. Bessemer invented new methods for the production of glass lenses and plate glass. He also designed a new reverberatory furnace, which was sold to Chance Glass.
30. Paxton built the glasshouse to house a giant Amazonia lily he had grown. In awe at the sheer size of the plant, which had leaves over a metre and half in diameter, he used the rib structure that supported the leaves as a design for his glasshouse.
31. Before Paxton submitted his proposal, the Building Committee planned to build a brick and iron building four times the length of St Paul’s cathedral with a huge iron dome placed at the centre. Many considered it a monstrosity. Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace was as pragmatic as it was aesthetic. Glass was cheaper than brick and could be assembled far more quickly.
32. Toby Chance and Peter Williams, Lighthouses: The Race to Illuminate the World (London: New Holland Publishers Ltd, 2008), p. 108.
33. In 1854 the Crystal Palace was moved, strut by strut, pane by pane, to a new site on Sydenham Hill in south London. But on 30 November 1936, a small fire in the staff lavatory at the Crystal Palace quickly swept through the building, fuelled by the wooden floors and walls. All that remains today are the bare foundations.
34. Punch, 2 November 1951. The magazine, which also coined the name ‘Crystal Palace’, continued: ‘We shall be disappointed if the next generation of London children are not brought up like cucumbers under glass’ (Chance and Williams, Lighthouses, p. 109).
35. Cylinder-splitting glass was mechanised at the end of the nineteenth century, producing sheets up to 13 metres in length and almost 2.5 metres wide. Machine-blown glass, using compressed gas, was not introduced to Great Britain by Pilkingtons until 1909.
36. Ribbon glass had been produced for decades prior to Pilkington’s invention. Pilkington Glass had developed the process with Henry Ford early in the twentieth century, who was trying to further reduce the cost of his automobiles. However, this ribbon glass still required grinding and polishing.
37. This is the Shard, which opened in July 2012 with a laser show across London.
38. The Music Lesson, Hiroshi Sugimoto (1999), author’s collection.
39. Jonathan Miller, On Reflection: An Investigation of Artists’ Use of Reflection Throughout the History of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 124.
40. Republic (X, 596) in Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror, p. 104.
41. Glass lenses, named for their resemblance to lentils or, in Latin, ‘lenses’, had been sold by spectacle makers since the middle of the fourteenth century, but the telescope was not invented until over a century later. In October 1608 the General Estates of The Hague received a petition from Hans Lippershey for a patent to build an instrument for ‘seeing faraway things as though nearby’. Patent Application of Hans Lippershey, 2 October 1608. The Hague, Algemeen Rijksarchief, MSS ‘Staten-Generaal’, Vol. 33. F. 178v.
42. Michael Hoskin, The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 112.
43. Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus, 1543. Along with Galileo’s observations, the accurate observations of Tycho Brahe, who set new standards for astronomy in the sixteenth century, and the new laws of planetary motion formulated by Johann Kepler, were crucial in formulating a plausible account of a Sun-centred model of the Universe.
44. Galileo’s Principle of Inertia provided an explanation for this ‘problem’. According
to his principle, a body moving at a constant speed will continue moving at that speed unless it is disturbed. As the Earth, and everything on it, moves at a constant speed, no force is felt.
45. Hoskin, The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy, p. 112.
46. Glass bends or ‘refracts’ different colours of light by a different amount. This is why Newton’s glass prism produced a rainbow. For an image to be produced close to the lens, the light must be sharply refracted using a more curved, and so thicker, lens. But this lens will also increase the discrepancy in refraction between different colours of light, so that a blurred image is produced. Using a thinner, more gently curved lens produced a clearer image, but the much longer focal length meant that a much longer telescope tube was needed.
47. Herschel understood that telescopes collect light ‘in proportion to their apertures, so that one with double the aperture will penetrate into space to double the distance of the other’. The brightness of a star decreases rapidly with its distance from Earth, and so a mirror which collects more light can see stars which are further away. Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, location 2024/5102.
48. Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, location 2024/5102.
49. Many of Herschel’s telescopes were not made from silvered glass, but from speculum metal, a brittle and hard casting composed mainly of copper and tin.
50. The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1646), in Frank Kryza, The Power of Light (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), p. 36.
51. Many historians believe that it really is no more than a legend. Experiments have even been carried out to replicate the event; even with the intense Sicilian sun, the army’s bronze reflectors would probably have resulted in little more than smoking and charring of the enemy’s wooden ships.
52. He used the same mirror to melt gold ducats. Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, p. 387.
53. Leonardo’s design used a mosaic of silvered glass pieces stuck to the bottom of the curved basin. In a note he wrote: ‘With [this device] one can supply heat to any boiler in a dyeing factory. And with this a pool can be warmed up, because there will always be boiling water.’ Kryza, The Power of Light, p. 57. See also the image from Leonardo’s notebook reproduced in this volume.
54. Bessemer’s son, in Bessemer, An Autobiography, p. 36.
55. Shuman’s hot box trapped heat in the same way as greenhouses do. Glass traps heat because it is transparent to electromagnetic radiation of optical wavelengths (visible light) which is emitted from the sun with a high intensity, but it is opaque to electromagnetic radiation of longer wavelengths, such as the infrared radiation that is dominantly emitted from the ground. Light enters in through the glass and is absorbed by the ground. When the energy is re-emitted as infrared radiation, it cannot pass through the glass and so the heat becomes trapped.
56. Kryza, The Power of Light, p. 11.
57. A. E. Becquerel, ‘Mémoire sur les effets électriques produits sous l’influence des rayons solaires’, Comptes Rendus, 9, pp. 561–7 (1839).
58. Pearson and Fuller’s work at Bell Labs was not originally aimed at creating a photovoltaic device; instead they were attempting to produce a better silicon transistor.
59. Yergin, The Quest, p. 570.
60. Silicon has four electrons in its outer shell, like carbon, and so bonds together to form crystals, in the same way that carbon atoms bond to form diamonds. To knock an electron out of this crystal structure requires a lot of energy and so, as an electrical current consists of flowing electrons, pure silicon at best can carry an extremely small current. A better semiconductor can be created by ‘doping’ the crystal with atoms of other elements. Either these atoms add extra electrons to the crystal, or they act as a ‘hole’ into which electrons can fall, so that a larger current can flow. If the semiconductor has an excess of electrons it is called an N-type (N for negative) semiconductor; if it has an excess of holes it is called a P-type (P for positive) semiconductor. A solar cell is made from a layer of N-type silicon sandwiched with a layer of P-type silicon. An electric field is created across the two layers between the negative free electrons and positive free holes. When a photon is absorbed by the solar cell it breaks apart an electron-hole pair into a free electron and a free hole, which are then swept to opposite sides of the device by the electric field. This flowing current can be harnessed as electrical power.
61. Silicon is an important tool on both the renewable and non-renewable sides of the transition. Shale gas is released from rock formations by the injection of sand (silicon dioxide) and water at high pressure.
62. ‘Vast Power of the Sun Is Tapped By Battery Using Sand Ingredient’, New York Times, 26 April 1954.
63. IBM 11230, Initial Press Release, IBM Data Processing Division, 11 February 1965.
64. In 2002, an unprecedented survey was carried out over the Thunder Horse field, producing around 28 terabytes of data, a billion times greater than the memory of the IBM 1130. It took BP’s High Performance Computing Center in Houston about a month to process this data; but only two years earlier the same job would have taken almost two years, too long to be of value for the project.
65. Inside vacuum tubes hot filaments emit electrons that are then subsequently attracted to a positive voltage plate. As the plate is cold, and so does not emit electrons, the current flows in only one direction. If a negative voltage plate is placed between the filament and the positive plate, electrons are deflected away and current does not flow. Turn this plate off and current will flow as before. By turning the central negative plate on and off the vacuum tube can be used as a switch. The vacuum tube will also act to amplify the electrical signal put into the central negative plate.
66. Shockley’s interest in semiconductors began during the Second World War, when he developed technology for the detection of radio waves. During the war, Shockley also influenced the decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he helped to produce a report on the probable casualties if Japan was invaded.
67. Bardeen and Brattain used a conducting fluid to create an electric field at the surface that broke down the surface state and so enabled current to flow.
68. The name of the transistor comes from ‘transfer resistor’. Soon after the invention, co-worker John Pierce was walking by Brattain’s office and was called in. Asked about a possible name for the device he recalled: ‘I thought right there at the time, if not, within hours, I thought vacuum tubes have transconductance, transistors would have transresistance.’ There were resistors and inductors and other solid states, capacitors and tors seemed to occur in all sorts of electronic devices. From transresistance I coined transistors.’ Shurkin, Broken Genius [ebook], location 1889/5785.
69. Transistors are made from a stack of three semiconductor layers, either NPN or PNP (see note 60, above, for an explanation of doped semiconductor layers). The bottom layer acts as a source of charge carriers, the top layer acts as a drain of charge carriers and the middle layer acts as a channel through which charge carriers can (sometimes) flow. When the source and drain are attached to a battery, current cannot flow through the semiconductor layers. For example, in a PNP transistor, electrons will only flow from the negative battery terminal into the P-type semiconductor; both the positive battery terminal and the other P-type semiconductor that join the circuit are positively charged and so the charges will repel and no current will flow.
If, however, you inject some electrons into the middle layer of the sandwich through a ‘gate’, the electrons will move into the P-type semiconductor and a small current will flow. This small current acts as a switch that allows a much larger current to flow through the channel amplifying the original signal. In this way transistors act as both a switch and an amplifier.
70. Fortune, March 1953, p. 129, in Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius (London: Macmillan, 2006), p. 120.
71. At the time germanium was more readily available at the necessary purity than silicon. The first silicon transistor was not invented until 1954, but soon proved its w
orth. Silicon transistors work at high temperatures, vital for the military applications in which the first semiconductor devices were used.
72. Fortune, March 1953, p. 128.
73. Shockley wrote: ‘I experienced some frustration that my personal efforts, started more than eight years before, had not resulted in a significant inventive contribution of my own.’ Driven by his anger at not having followed through his transistor idea, Shockley set about designing a new and better type of transistor. He accomplished this a few months later. The ‘junction transistor’ is the forerunner of virtually all transistors used today. Shurkin, Broken Genius, pp. 107–8.
74. Christophe Lecuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 133.
75. In computer factories, hundreds of lab coat-clad women would attach individual wires by hand to the join the devices.
76. Fairchild had a problem with the fragility of their silicon transistors: it would take little more than a sharp pencil tap against their transistors to stop them working. Jean Hoerni solved the problem when he discovered that the oxide layer usually washed off the semiconductor would actually protect its surface. He proved the invention to his co-workers by spitting on the surface.
77. Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 108.
78. At first no one knew how to do this and many saw little potential in the idea; it required such a step change in production that the first integrated circuits would be very expensive. Only the military would pay a premium for small improvements in weight and reliability. Yet Noyce saw the potential for his idea to revolutionise the computing industry and continued to support research into the development of the integrated chip at Fairchild. Gradually the importance of the idea became apparent. Noyce regarded his invention as a breakthrough in a process problem, rather than the discovery of any new science. Whenever asked when we would get his Nobel Prize for his achievement he always responded sardonically, ‘They don’t give Nobel Prizes for engineering or real work.’ That situation I hope will change soon with the recent creation of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, of which I am chairman. Noyce was never awarded a Nobel Prize, but would undoubtedly have shared the Prize given to Jack Kilby had he still been alive in 2000.www.qeprize.org. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, p. 110.