The Wright Brothers

Wilbur and Orville were born in Indiana and Ohio, respectively; neither sought education beyond high school, though both showed an aptitude for mechanicsand independent study from an early age. In 1878 the Wright brothers first became interested in flight when their father brought a toy whirligig home forthem to play with. They tinkered with the basic design and built their own models, displaying an inventiveness that would stay with them throughout theirlives.

When the brothers heard of Otto Lilienthal's fatal glider crash in 1896, theybegan to seriously consider the problem of flight. They meticulously studiedcontemporary aeronautical research--including that of American engineer Octave Chanute (1832-1910), a pioneer of the biplane --and observed the flights of soaring birds.

They first tackled the problem of controlling the machine in all three axes of movement (up and down, side to side, forward and backward) without resorting to the pilot twisting or shifting his body weight as Lilienthal had. Afterobserving buzzards control their flight by twisting their wing tips, they settled on wing warping as the best method of maintaining balance.

To test their theories, the Wrights traveled to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an ideal site for wind and terrain. Following experiments with a biplane kite,they built several gliders, each more sophisticated than its predecessor. During the process they discovered errors in the mathematical tables that Lilienthal had created to explain lift. To achieve the correct calculations, theybuilt their own wind tunnel with a homemade pressure-testing device to checkthe amount of lift in various wing configurations.

By the time they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1902 with their last glider, the Wright brothers had solved the basic problems of control. They gave this glider narrower wings which curved much less than the previous ones. They also mounted a tail assembly on the back that acted as a rudder, with control wires linking it to the wing-warping mechanism. Before returning to Dayton, Wilbur Wright flew the glider 622 feet (189.71 m) in just 26 seconds.

The Wrights immediately prepared for powered flight the following year at Kitty Hawk. They needed a gasoline engine to provide the power, but none in existence was light enough. Consequently, the resourceful brothers designed and built their own four-cylinder, 12-horsepower engine.

They also worked on propellers for the craft, only to discover that little was known about how they worked. They soon realized that a propeller was nothing more than a wing moving in a circular course and finally designed and builttwo blades that would be mounted at the rear of the plane so the craft wouldbe undisturbed by propeller turbulence. In addition, the blades would spin in opposite directions to prevent torque from pulling the craft to one side.

The Wrights returned to Kitty Hawk in September 1903, ready to try their powered machine. Storms, engine problems, and the need to devise a takeoff systemslowed progress. Then, on December 14, 1903, the brothers were ready and Wilbur, who had won a coin toss, took the first ride. Unaccustomed to the engine's power, he rose too steeply, stalled, and then plowed into the sand, slightly damaging the craft. On December 17, Orville took his turn. He rose into the air, climbing to about 10 feet (3 m), and landed 12 seconds later, some 120feet (37 m) beyond the takeoff point. The Wrights flew three more times thatday, with Wilbur covering 852 feet (259 m) in a 59-second flight. In the next two years, the brothers built improved models of their aircraft and, by 1905, they were staying aloft for as long as 38 minutes and covering a distanceof 24 miles.

In 1908, they sold the first military airplane to the U.S. Department of War;this same year Orville established several aloft records in excess of one hour before crashing and injuring himself. Fortunately, he fully recovered andthe Wrights formed both a German and an American company to manufacture airplanes. Although they never became wealthy due to patent infringements and lawsuits, the brothers were universally hailed as the first to unlock the secretsof flight through their determination, experimentation, and inventiveness.

By: Aman Sherwani

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany, the first child of a bourgeois Jewish couple. The young Albert displayed an early interest in science, but he was unhappy with the principles of obedience and conformity that governed his Catholic elementary school. At the age of ten, he began attending the Luitpold Gymnasium, though most of his education consisted of the study and reading he undertook on his own under the guidance of his Uncle Jakob and the young medical student and family friend Max Talmud. Talmud recommended popular science and philosophy books that put an abrupt end to the boy's short-lived but intense religious fervor, perhaps to the relief of his nonobservant parents.
When his parents moved to Italy in 1893, Einstein dropped out of school and renounced both his German citizenship and his Jewish faith. He applied to study at the Zurich Polytechnic, an advanced Swiss technical institute. However, he failed the entrance examinations and was not accepted until spending a year of preparation at a Swiss secondary school. Between 1896 and 1900, he participated in a teachers' training program at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he met his lifelong friends Marcel Grossman and Michele Angelo Besso, as well as his first wife, Mileva Maric. Following the completion of his program in 1900, Einstein went on to work as a teacher and tutor in a series of posts in Germany and Switzerland. He finally settled in Bern, Switzerland, in 1902, where he received a job as a technical expert in a patent office. In Bern, Einstein married Mileva and the couple raised two sons together.
The year 1905 has been termed Einstein's annus mirabilis, or miracle year, because it was in this year that the scientist published three of his most important papers and completed most of the work for his doctoral degree, which he received in 1906. Einstein's papers dealt with quantum theory, Brownian motion, and special relativity. In subsequent years, he expanded his theory of special relativity to account for accelerating frames of reference, so that he could then theorize that the laws of physics (including both mechanics and electrodynamics) are the same for all observers in all frames of reference. This theory, known as general relativity, was fully formulated by 1915. In 1919, scientists verified general relativity through measurements taken during a solar eclipse, and Einstein was catapulted into a position of international prominence. However, while his relativity theory won him popular fame, it was his contributions to quantum theory that won Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1922.
For most of Einstein's life, he worked as a university professor. He began at the University of Bern in 1909, but also taught at Prague and Zurich before ultimately settling at the University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. Although Mileva and their sons initially lived in Berlin with Albert, the couple separated shortly thereafter and in 1919 obtained an official divorce. Einstein remarried that same year, to his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, and lived with her until her death in 1936.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Einstein became increasingly active in politics and international affairs. He was a strong supporter of Zionism and traveled on a lecturing tour to the United States in 1922 to raise money on behalf of a new Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Einstein's Zionism was primarily cultural rather than nationalistic; he wanted to preserve the values of social justice and intellectual aspiration that he associated with the Jewish people. In addition to his Zionism, Einstein was also a militant pacifist during and following World War I. He was critical of nationalism and committed to the idea of a single world government without any need for armed forces. Throughout the 1920s, he participated in numerous peace campaigns and wrote articles on international peace and disarmament. However, when Hitler's National Socialist party came to power in Germany in 1933, Einstein began to rethink his rigid pacifist stance. When the Nazis began targeting him in their anti-Semitic propaganda, Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy of Sciences and accepted a full-time position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Einstein departed further from his pacifism during World War II, when he actively participated in the war effort, working for the US Navy and writing a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he urged him to accelerate the nation's nuclear weaponry development. However, Einstein never advocated the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and worked until his death in 1955 in a campaign for international peace and nuclear disarmament.

Einstein's greatest contributions to physics were his synthesis of mechanics and electrodynamics through his relativity theory, and his challenge to Newtonian physics through his quantum theory. However, the impact of his ideas was not limited to science: Einstein's achievements influenced philosophy, art, literature, and countless other disciplines. As an individual passionate in his convictions and outspoken in his politics, Einstein transformed the image of the scientist in the twentieth century. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that TIME Magazine selected Albert Einstein as "Person of the Century," hailing him as "genius, political refugee, humanitarian, locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe."

By: Aman Sherwani

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born on Dec. 25, 1642, in Woolsthorpe, England. His father died before he was born, and when he was only three his mother, Hannah Newton, remarried and moved away, leaving him to be raised by an uncle. He was sent to the local grammar school, and for a time it was expected that he would grow up to manage his mother's property. But he nonetheless persisted in the pursuit of his wider interests, and after leaving the grammar school he enrolled at Trinity College, at the University of Cambridge, in 1661. He received his bachelor of arts in 1665, and was named a fellow of the College two years later.
Meanwhile, in the turbulent year of 1666, while England fought with Holland and suffered plague and a terrible fire in London, Newton made three of his greatest discoveries. In the field of optics, the study of light, he developed and proved his theory that white light is composed of a mixture of other colors of light, which, when split apart by a prism, form a band of color called a spectrum. This was a revolutionary advance, and equally revolutionary was his work in mathematics, where he developed a binomial theorem and worked out a method of calculating the slope of curves and the area under them, paving the way for the field of math known as calculus. But his most important innovation was the concept of gravity, the attraction between bodies in space that holds planets, moons and comets in orbit, and draws falling objects toward the earth. His theory of gravity, however, remained incomplete and unverifiable; it would not be published for two decades.
In 1669, Newton was appointed professor of mathematics at Trinity College. In January 1672, he was elected to the Royal Society, a loose organizations of scientists and intellectuals. Shortly thereafter, he presented a paper detailing his discoveries in optics, and developed a rivalry with the scientist Robert Hooke, who harshly criticized Newton's research. This rivalry would percolate throughout the 1670s, as Newton continued to work out the mathematics of gravity, and would flare up in the mid 1680s, when Newton finally published his work, some of which Hooke felt had been stolen from him. Newton's research was organized into a three-volume book, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), known to posterity as the Principia. It set forth Newton's three laws of motion, and proceeded to set forth the theory of gravitation, and back it up with rigorous mathematical proofs. Although the theory had many detractors at first, the scientific community would ltimately embrace it, and the Newtonian world-view would dominate physics until the 20th century.
Principia made Newton an English celebrity. He was elected to Parliament in 1691, and after surviving a nervous breakdown in 1693, was appointed warden of the mint in 1696, and master of the mint three years later. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1703, upon the death of Hooke, and was knighted in 1705. As his fame grew, he worked to buttress his own reputation, bringing the Society under his tight control and carrying on a feud with the German mathematician Leibniz over the issue of who had developed calculus first. Newton never married, and was tremendously pious: he dedicated his later years to the interpretation of scripture, and a mighty effort to understand the relationship between biblical prophecy and history. He died on March 20, 1727, and was buried with great honors in Westminster Abbey.

 By: Aman Sherwani