Electronics history

[Jazz P Bass]

Great discussions guys! Can you imagine the joy experienced by the first person to notice that different gases turn those electrons different colors? Man, what an exciting time that must have been.

Actually, Kershoff & Bunsen, by using the spectrometer that they devised, noticed that each Element emits when heated or absorbs when cooled a distinct light frequency.

[überfuzz]

Wha? "Daftie", he must have been as good at delivering as well as receiving a good Scottish sendup, undermining the excessive formality of academia. Amongst other things "brickbats" orbiting Saturn. But he sure was a wiz at understanding lots of things and putting them into equation format, what a gift. The four truths of electromagnetism were the Grand Unified Theory of the time, even Einstein was impressed. What would we do without him?

When I was a student at the university a lecturer told us that Maxwell at some point in his carrier was assigned the task of examine why some steam engines, sometimes, were unstable. Two weeks later he had put together the mathematics revolving the control of systems through feedback, i.e. how to set up transfer-functions.

He was most definitely on the same level as Einstein, in some sense he even surpasses Einstein. Maxwell was a pioneer in unification, as you say. It had never really been done prior to Maxwell's equations. Einstein's unification of mass and energy is a major contribution, but not a first when it comes to unify natural phenomenon.

I have a hard enough time explaining transfer functions to my crustomers, gotta use up a lot of chalk.

Well it takes a genius to explain such that even a layman understands. ;-)