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ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein is known all over the world as a brilliant theoretical physicist and the founder of theory of relativity. He is perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20^th century. Some of his ideas made possible the atomic bomb, as well as television and other inventions.

He was born in 1879 in a small German town. The England family soon moved to Munich, where Albert went to school. Neither his parents, nor his school teachers thought much of his mental abilities. His uncle often joked: "Not everybody is born to become a professor".

In 1895 Albert failed the entrance examination to a technical college in Zurich. A year later, however, he managed to pass the exam and entered the college.

After graduating from the college, Einstein started to work at Swiss Patent office in Bern. In 1905 he wrote a short article in a science magazine. This was his "Special Theory of Relativity", which gave the world the most famous equation relating mass and energy (E=mc²), the basis of atomic energy.

Later, he became a professor in several European universities and in 1914 moved to Berlin as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. After ten years of hard work he created his "General Theory of Relativity".

In 1921 Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

A Jew, and a pacifist, he was attacked by the Nazist, and when Hitler came to power in 1933 he decided to settle in the United States.

In 1939 Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, at the request of several prominent physicist, outlining the military potential of nuclear energy and the dangers of a Nazy lead in this field. His letter greatly influenced the decision to build an atomic bomb, though he took no part in the Manchattan Project. After the war he spoke out passionately against nuclear weapons and repression.

Einstein died in 1955. The artificial element einstenium has been named in his honour.

NEWTON

Newton was born in the year in which Galileo died. At school he was a strange boy, interested in constructing mechanical devices of his own design, curious about the world about him, but showing no signs of unusual brightness. He seemed rather slow in his studies until well into his teens.

In the late 1650s he was taken out of school to help on his mother’s farm, where he was clearly the world’s worst farmer. His uncle, a member of Trinity College at Cambridge, detecting the scholar in the young man, urged that he be sent to Cambridge. In 1660 this was done and in 1665 Newton graduated.

The plague hit London and he retired to his mother’s farm to remain out of danger. He had already worked out the binomial theorem in mathematics.

At his mother’s farm something greater happened. He watched an apple fall to the ground and began to wonder if the same force that pulled the apple downward also held the moon in its grip.

(The story of the apple has often been thought a myth, but according to Newton’s own words, it is true.)

Newton theorized that the rate of fall was proportional to the strength of the gravitational force and that this force fell off according to the square of the distance from the centre of the earth. (This is the famous “inverse square” law).

Newton calculated what the moon’s rate of fall ought to be considering how much weaker earth’s gravity was at the distance of the moon than it was on the surface of the planet. He found his calculated figure to be only seven-eighths of what observation showed it to be in actuality, and he was dreadfully disappointed. The discrepancy seemed clearly large enough to make nonsense of his theroy. Newton put the problem of gravitation to one side for fifteen years.

In this same period, 1665 – 1666, Newton conducted startling optical experiments. Kepler’s writings on optics had aroused his interest. Newton let a ray of light enter a darkened room through a chink in a curtain and pass through a prism of glass onto a screen. The light was refracted, but different parts of it were refracted to different extents, and the beam that fell on the screen was not merely a broadened spot of light, but a band of consecutive colours in the familiar order of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, and violet.

Newton prism experiments made him famous. In 1669 his mathematics teacher resigned in his favour and Newton at twenty – seven found himself a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1672.

Possibly the greatest intellect that the world has produced, Newton was otherwise a rather poor specimen of man. He was ridiculously absent – minded and perpetually preoccupied with matters other than his immediate surroundings. He was also extremely sensitive in his reaction to it. More than once he resolved to publish no more scientific work rather than submit to criticism.

Newton’s experiments with light and colour led him to theorize on the nature of light.

It seemed to Newton that there was no way of preventing spectrum formation when light passed through prisms or lenses. Therefore Newton in 1668 devised a new type of telescope, that concentrated light by reflection from a parabolic mirror, rather than by refraction through a lens. He built a larger one in 1671 and demonstrated it to King Charles II, then presented it to the Royal Society.

The writing of “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (or “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”) was begun in 1686. It is generally considered the greatest scientific work ever written. The Principia Mathematica consists of three books. The first two are about the problems of motion, the third of the system of the world, which is a general summary of the law of gravitation.

Newton was respected in his lifetime as no scientist before him. When he died he was buried in Wesiminster Abbey along with England’s heroes. The great French literary figure Voltaire, who was visiting England at that time, commented with admiration that England honoured a mathematician as other nations honoured a king. The Latin inscription on his tomb ends with the sentence. “Mortals: Rejoice at so great an ornament to the human race.”

Newton, among his many weaknesses, had the great virtue of modesty. Two famous statements of his are well known. He is reported to have said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He is also supposed to have said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world: but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.

FARADAY

Faraday (September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867) was one the ten children of a blacksmith, who moved with his brood to London. It is a rare labouring family with ten children that is affluent, so there was no question of an education for young Faraday and he was apprenticed to a bookbinder.

This, as it happened, was a srtoke of luck, for he was exposed to books. Officially he was concerned only with the outside, but he could not help opening the pages as well. Faraday’s second stroke of luck was that his employer was sympathetic to the young man’s desire for learning and allowed him to read the books and to attend scientific lectures.

In 1812 a customer gave Faraday tickets to attend the lectures of Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. Young Faraday took careful notes which he further elaborated with coloured diagrams and these he sent to Banks, president of the Royal society, in the hope of getting a job that would bring him into closer contact with science. Getting no answer he sent others to Davy himself, along with an application for a job as his assistant. Davy was enormously impresses, as much by the flattery implicit in the gesture as by the clear ability of the youngster. He did not oblige Faraday at once but when an opening as his assistant occurred, he offered the young man the job. Faraday took it in 1813, at the age of twenty-two – at salary that was smaller than the one he had been earning as a bookbinder. Almost at once Davy left for his grand tour of Europe and took Faraday with him as secretary and valet.

Faraday became director of the laboratory in 1825, and in 1833 the one-time bookbinder's apprentice became professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution.

In chemistry Faraday made his first mark in 1823, when he devised methods for liquefying gases, such as cardon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen bromide, and chlorine, under pressure. He was the first to produce temperatures in the laboratory that were below the zero mark on the Fahrenheit scale. He may just be viewed as a piopeer in the modern branch of physics called cryogenics (the study of extreme cold.). Here he gave further cause for resentment, for in Faraday’s reports on gas liquefaction, he did not (in Davy’s opinion) give due credit to Davy’s prior work in the field.

In 1825 occurred his greatest single contribution to organic chemistry. He discovered benzene, a key role in Kekul’s development of a means of representing molecular structure.

In addition Faraday carried on Davy’s great work in electrochemistry. Davy had liberated a number of new metals by passing an electrie current through molten compounds of those metals. Faraday named this process electrolysis. He named a compound or solution that could carry an electric current an electrolyte. All these names still exist unchanged and are used constantly in science.

In 1832 Faraday further reduced the matter of electrolysis to quantitative terms by announcing what are now called Faraday’s laws of electrolysis.

Faraday’s laws put electrochemistry on its modern basis. In his honour the quantity of electricity required to liberate 23 grams of sodium, or 108 grams of silver or 32 grame of copper (that is, to liberate an “equivalent weight” of an element) is called a Faraday. Also, the unit of electrostatic capacitance is the farad, in his honour.

Faraday, at the time, was giving enormously popular lectures in science for the general public. His theory of the lines of force (which he publiched in 1844) was not taken too seriously at first. However, when Maxwell came to tackle the matter of electromagnetism with precise mathematical tools, he was to end with the same picture mathematically phrased, that Faraday had drawn in simple words.

In later years Faraday made more discoveries in connection with electromagnetism and its interaction with light.

When he was eventually offered the presidency of the Society by Tyndall, however, he declined and he also declined an offer of knighthood. He was intent on being plain Michael Faraday.

He requested during life that he be buried under “a gravestone of the most ordinary kind” and this was done.

MAXWELL James Clerk – Scottish mathematician and physicist

(November 13, 1831 – November 5, 1879)

Maxwell, born of a wellknown Scottish family, early showed signs of mathematical talent. At the age of fifteen he contributed a piece of original work on the drawing of oval curves to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The work was so well done that many refused to believe such a young boy could be the author.

At Cambridge, which he entered in 1850, he graduated second in his class in mathematics.

Maxwell was appointed to his first professorship at Aberdeen in 1856.

Shortly after he graduated, Maxwell made his major contribution to astronomy in connection with Saturn’s rings. Maxwell showed, from theoretical considerations, that if the rings were actually solid or liquid, the gravitational and mechanical forces upon them as they rotated would break them up. However, if they consisted of numerous small solid particles, they would give the appearance (from Saturn’s vast distance) of being solid and would be dynamically stable, too. All evidence since his time has strengthened Maxwell’s view. The rings do indeed consist of myriads of small bodies, making a very dense kind of “planetoid belt” about the planet.

About 1860 Maxwell brought his mathematics to bear upon another problem involving many tiny particles, this time the particles making up gases, rather than Saturn’s rings.

Every gas is made up of molecules in rapid motion in various directions. Maxwell considered the molecules as moving not only in all directions, but at all velocities, and bounding off each other and off the walls of the container with perfect elasicity. Along with Boltzmann, who was also working on the problem at this time, he worked out the Maxwell – Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases.

In 1871 Maxwell was appointed professor of experimental physics at Cambridge. He was the first to hold a professorschip in the subject.

While at Cambridge he organized the Cavendish Laboratory, named in honour of the eccentric English scientist Henry Cavendish of the previous century. A generation later the Cavendish Laboratory was to do great work in connection with radioactivity.

The crowning work of Maxwell’s life was carried on between 1864 and 1873, when he placed into mathematical form the speculations of Faraday concerning magnetic lines of force. In doing so, Maxwell was able to work out a few simple equations that expressed all the varied phenomena of electricity and magnetism and bound them indisolubly together. Maxwell’s theory showed that electricity and magnetism could not exist in isolation. Where one was, so was the other, so that his work is usually referred to as the electromagnetic theory.

He showed that the oscillation of an electric charge produced an electromagnetic field that radiated outward from its source at a constant speed. This speed could be calculated by taking the ratio of certain units expressing magnetic phenomena to units expressing electrical phenomena. This ratio worked out to be just about 300 000 kilometers por second, or 196 300 miles per second, which is approximately the speed of light.

Furthermore. Since charges could oscillate at any velocity, it seemed to Maxwell that there should be a whole family of electromagnetic radiations of which visible light was only a small part.

Maxwell believed that not only were the waves of electromagnetic radiation carried by the other, but the magnetic lines of force were actually disturbances of the other.

In one respect, however, Maxwell’s intuition was at fault. He rejected the notion that electricity was particulate in nature, even though that was so strongly suggested by Faraday’s laws of electrolysis.

Almost the last accomplishment of Maxwell’s was his publication of the hitherto unpublished electrical experiments of Cavendish, showing that strange man to have been fifty years ahead of his time in his work.

Maxwell died, before the age of fifty, of cancer.

When Einstein’s theories, a generation after Maxwell’s death, upset almost all of “classical physics”, Maxwell’s equations remained untouched as valid as ever.

ROCKEFELLER

John Rockefeller was born in 1839. He is considered to be the pioneer of the oil industry of the United States. The state of oil business in the USA by the 20^th years of the 19^th century was high and stable and Russian industrialists were interested to purchase oil – field equipment in America. In those years John Rockefeller became involved in the Standard oil business. He was the only man who could solve the issue of granting a credit to one of the Russian oil companies. Mr. Rockefeller knew everything about the oil riches of Russia. Once the millionaire was asked to send a letter to the supplier, recommending that Russian company as a purchaser known to him and suggesting that the company receive the same discount as Standard Oil. John Rockefeller was known as economical and thrifty (бережливый). One situation which took place in reality characterizes him well: in the situation described above he quickly agreed to grant a credit to the Russian company because had noticed and approved a small patch on one of its director’s shoes. He told the director of the bank that they could give this man a loan, because he did not waste money, did not drink or smoke. According to his associates, Mr. Rockefeller was very tight with money and he liked economical people.

The success of oil industry, the prominent figure of which was John Rockefeller, may be referred to the American management practices. In the 1920s, the heads of many well – known American corporations started transferring to the so – called «divisional» organizational structure. This was characterized by the affiliates of the company being delegated all powers to make day–to–day operating decisions. The independent Standard Oil Company of California was a regional branch of the American oil giant. Moreover, the Californian subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company was itself divided into relatively independent companies engaged in oil production, refining, supplies, sales and the like. As practice shows, the American oil companies experience well suited to some Russian companies.

John Rockefeller lived very long life, he died in 1937 at the age of 98.

MADAME TUSSAUD

Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz in 1761 in Strabourg, France. Her father, a German soldier from Frankfurt, died before her birth, and her mother moved to Berne in Switzerland, where she was employed as housekeeper to Philippe Curtius, a German – born doctor and talented modeler in wax.

When Marie was six she was taken to Paris by her mother to join Dr. Curtius who became a successful artist and Marie became his pupil. In 1770 Dr. Curtius opened an exhibition of life-size wax figures which immediately became popular. By 1778, Marie was competent enough to model Voltaire, a radical writer and a friend of Dr. Curtius. This figure can be seen in the Grand Hall of the present exhibition. Two years later she was appointed art tutor to the sister of Louis XVI and she lived for the next nine years at the Palace of Versailles.

At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 she returned to Dr. Curtius. He was soon involved with the revolutionary movement. His exhibition continued to flourish. It was during this period that Marie was commanded by the regime to take death masks from the decapitated heads of the victims of the guillotine. Some of the original death masks are still displayed in the Chamber of Horrors, for example that of Marat, a fanatical anti – Royalist.

Dr. Curtius died in 1794 at his country house on the River Seine, leaving Marie as his sole heir to run the exhibition. A year later she married François Tussaud, a civil engineer, and by 1800 she had given birth to a daughter who died, and to two sons, Joseph and Francis. Marie, known since her marriage as Madame Tussaud, was only concerned with the future success of her business, she was disappointed in her choice of husband, and in 1802 she decided to move to England with her elder son. She arrived with thirty wax figures to London and set up the Lyceum Theatre, but this arrangement soon failed and she decided to tour with her exhibition throughout the British Isles.

During the next thirty three years she visited every major town and city. She kept her show up to date by making new figures and ensured that newspapers and posters reported the changes. During that time she successfully combined the roles of artist and businesswoman. At the end of a visit she packed up the figures and moved on to the next place, conveying the collection along hazardous routes in horse drawn caravans – the only means of transport in the early 19^th century. Another difficulty was that she spoke little English.

By 1835 at the age of seventy four her traveling life became too tiring and she decided to settle the exhibition permanently in London at the Bazaar, a building near Portman Square in Baker Street. Madame Tussaud’s last work was a self – portrait made eight years before her death, she died on the 15^th of April, 1850. Her business was continued by her sons and grandsons. In 1884 the exhibition was removed from Baker street to a specially constructed building in Marylebone Road. Bernard Tussaud, the great – great – grandson of Madame Tussaud was the last in charge of the exhibition, he died in 1967.

On the 18^th of March, 1925 the exhibition suffered a fire, but three years after disaster Madame Tussaud opened again. The exhibition was restored and nowadays its expending and updating is underway, creating a major renewal of interest. A lot of famous people are shown here, among them the members of the royal families of France, England and Russia, kings, presidents, actors, sportsmen and even world – known murderers. You can see the figures of Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, Liza Minnelli, Elvis Presley, Marie Antoinette, Henry VIII and his six wives, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Sir Winston Churchill, Hans Christian Andersen and many others. The most impressive are two shows: the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana and the Battle of Trafalgar. The latter was opened in 1966 and has become one of Madame Tussaud’s most memorable exhibits.