"He will be able to hear the still small
voice of the air." Hi, I'm Ana, the Ethical
Systems Nerd with the April 25th episode of
Nerd Notes.
(Nerd Nodes theme music
plays)
Today is the birthday in 1849 of Felix Klein,
who would probably be vaguely disappointed
that he's best known, at least in nerd
circles, for the Klein bottle and not for
his profoundly influential research in the
fields of geometry, number theory, group
theory, abstract algebra and mathematical
physics, or his work as a journal editor,
author, or his basically establishing the
advanced high school mathematics curriculum
for the 20th century.
But it's probably better than being
remembered for his signature on the
Manifesto of the Ninete-Three, a World War
One propaganda coup, in which 93 prominent
German scientists, scholars, and artists,
with the notable exceptions of Albert
Einstein and Hermann Hesse, galvanized
national support for German military actions
by signing a pro-war treatise.
Klein conceived the Klein bottle as a three
dimensional equivalent of a Möbius strip.
These are both what are known as
non-orientable surfaces, meaning there's no
consistent way to define a perpendicular or
'normal' vector.
If you were to walk along such a surface,
you could end up back at your starting
point, but upside down.
Ironically, or perhaps in intellectual self
defense, Klein also did extensive
theoretical work on the gyroscope, whose job
it is to tell you which way is up.
A Möbius strip can be made by putting a
twist in a piece of paper before taping its
ends together. A Klein bottle requires a
little more work to create, but you can
search online and order blown glass Klein
bottles, a 'Klein stein', which is a
functional but highly inconvenient and hard
to clean beer mug, Or even a combination
hand knit Klein bottle hat with matching
Möbius scarf.
25 years to the day after the birth of Felix
Klein, Annie Jameson, the granddaughter of
the founder of Jameson and Sons Irish
Whiskey and married to an Italian
aristocrat, welcomed her second son,
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi.
Marconi enjoyed a highly privileged
childhood being educated by private tutors,
one of whom provided him with a solid
'grounding' in the new theories of
electricity. At the age of 18, he was living
in Bologna and hanging around the
university, where he was exposed to the work
of Heinrich Hertz and given the opportunity
to attend lectures and use the laboratory
facilities. Marconi spent the 1890s
experimenting with prototype wireless
receivers, adapting and developing
components to perform telegraphy over
wireless and working on increasing the range
over which he could send messages.
Apart from his family money, Marconi was
unable to find much support for his work in
Italy. So he moved to Britain in 1896, filed
for a patent, and spent a few years doing
demonstrations at increasing range.
On March 17, 1899, the first wireless
maritime distress signal was sent, and later
that year, wireless telegraphy came to the
United States in a demonstration from the
S.S. Ponce at the America's Cup yacht races.
Wireless telegraphy was a perfect fit with
the great age of ocean liners, allowing news
and personal correspondence as well as
distress signals to be sent to and from
ships at sea. Marconi recognized this and
set up a company to provide wireless
services between ships and land stations.
In March of 1912, Marconi boarded the
Lusitania, bound for New York and had
presumably an uneventful and productive
voyage. He had been offered passage on the
upcoming maiden voyage at the Titanic, but
the Titanic's public stenographer was the
newly hired and unknown George Frederick
Turner, a lifelong clerk, looking forward to
his first and unfortunately last ship
posting. So Marconi opted for the known
entity of the Lusitania stenographer, a
preference which may have saved his life.
Thanks to the wireless telegraphy onboard the
Titanic, the Carpathia was able to arrive on
the scene within 2 hours of the ship sinking
and rescued over 700 survivors from the
lifeboats floating in the water, including
one of the two radio operators, Harold
Bride. Harold, despite being so seriously
injured he would have to be carried off the
Carpathia, would join his friend and the
Carpathia radio operator, also named
Harold. in the Carpathia's radio room,
sending the names of survivors on ahead to
anxiously waiting family, friends, and
newspaper reporters in New York.
Marconi was also waiting in New York and
took the opportunity for some of the best
publicity he could ever ask for.
Boarding the Carpathia with a reporter to
talk to the Harolds.
Three years later, Marconi would again board
the Lusitania on its 201st crossing, bound
for New York under Captain Turner, who had
been the Lusitania first captain and
returned after Commander Daniel Dow,
preternaturally protecting his perfect record
of never being involved in a collision or
serious incident at sea,
took two months sick leave due to the stress
of traveling the submarine infested waters
of the North Sea during World War One.
Captain Turner dropped off Marconi, took
some time to testify on a hearing with the
Titanic disaster, loaded his ship with
passengers and possibly with explosive
contraband, and set off on May 1st, 1915,
bound for Liverpool, a destination the ship
would never reach, as it was torpedoed off
the coast of Ireland with the loss of almost
1200 lives, precipitating the entry of the
United States into World War One.
Captain Turner, although remaining with his
ship, was rescued from the wreckage.
While Marconi's experiments hadn't been
appreciated in his native Italy as a young
man, that all changed once the technology
was established and he was welcomed into the
Italian establishment.
When that establishment became Fascist,
Marconi did too, being appointed by
Mussolini as president of the Royal Academy
of Italy, placing him on the Grand Council
of Fascism until his death from a heart
attack in 1937.
Both Klein and Marconi were unsuccessful in
avoiding political entanglements, which they
each professed a desire to avoid, while also
going along with the flow and enjoying the
fruits of high ranking positions within
their respective national establishments.
Klein, writing after World War One to his
English former graduate student Grace
Chisholm Young, the first woman to write a
PhD thesis in mathematics at Göttingen,
thanks in part to Klein's support, declined
to distance himself from his signature on
the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, saying
"Everyone will hold true to their country in
good times and bad.
" Both men believed that the rest of Europe
treated their homelands unfairly.
In Marconi's case, he went on a grand tour
across Europe and Brazil to stress the point
that Italy's genocide in Ethiopia was no
different than what many other European
countries had done in Africa, which may have
been true, but was not quite the defence it
must have sounded like in his head.
As well as the birthdays of Klein and
Marconi, today in 1792 saw the mayor of
Strasbourg, Philippe Friedrich Dietrich,
concerned about the European backlash to the
French Revolution, commission fellow
Freemason Rouget de Lisle to write a song to
rally French soldiers.
The song was written that very night and is
known today as La Marseillaise.
On the same day in Paris, the guillotine
made its debut as the official form of
execution in France, a role it would fulfill
until 1977.
A year and a half later, the guillotine
would take the life of Philippe Friedrich
Dietrich, who got on the wrong side of
Robespierre, although he would be
posthumously pardoned and named a hero of
the revolution. The guillotine and La
Marseillaise have their birthdays on April
25th. (La Marseillaise playing)