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The Heretofore Unpublished Letters of Ernest Glitch
Roger Curry writes "Letters to Michael Faraday in 1856 from previously unknown victorian experimentalist Ernest Glitch have recently been discovered. The history of science may need to be revised. His letters, and accounts of his work, would appear to indicate the observation of laser action in air, a Victorian Nitrogen Laser, more than a century before Maiman first demonstrated his ruby laser. Also, in a letter dated 8th July 1856 he notes the crystallisation of the fullerene C60 some 150 years before Kroto. Amazingly, there are also accounts of a Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engine detailing the use of hypergolic propellants and deLaval nozzles, a Victorian Tesla Coil, with reference to a possible medieval Coil, and Manned Flight achieved long before the Wright Bros., using Multiple Valve-less Pulse Jets."
Is it just me or is /. really getting heavily into the Bad Science articles?
hoax? Get it, get it, the "It's Funny, Laugh" icon should be a hint. The guy's name is "Glitch" for crying out loud.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
What about the Internet? Al Gore still invented that, didn't he? I hope so.
For someone writing letters in the 19th century, his signature Looks disturbingly like typeface....
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells had written comedy we probably would have gotten something like this
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
No comment required ;-)
Just too funny though - very well done.
Poor Hodges.
Ok, now we know who to blame when there is a serious glitch.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Main Entry: heretofore
Pronunciation: 'hir-t&-"fOr, -"for, "hir-t&-'
Function: adverb
Date: 13th century
: up to this time : HITHERTO
i think someone wise and learned needs to start moderating the posted news a little closer. /. is starting to turn into the online edition of Joe Average's "Discover" magazine.
These letters mean nothing. Jules Verne "wrote" about the submarine and a time machine too, doesn't mean he invented them. For all we know these could be test manuscripts for Sci-Fi never realized. Science requires incontrovertable physical evidence, or at least a complete mathematical description if the hypothesis is currently untestable due to physical limitations. These letters provide neither, and very well may be a hoax. Have they tested the ink and paper to _prove_ it was even written that long ago?
-J0ey4
Sierra has known about this for some time now.
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
This isn't even a good hoax. The letters sound like they were writen by the same guy who wrote the dialog for Resident Evil 1.
Barry, you saved me!
NAAAAAGGHHH
It turns out that Aristotle pioneered the use of hyperthreading in x86 microprocessors way back in ancient Greece. Only problem was he couldn't get any decent uptime, what with the lack of electricity and all...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Glitch to Hodges: "You knew this job was dangerous when you took it, Fred".
-jhon
Yeah, and Hugo Gernsback invented TV, Radar, yadda yadda in 1911.
... when I see it. I am an American!
... of "HOAX". This is the homepage:
http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/
Back to your lives citizens.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Clearly a hoax, but very funny:
"As an interesting sidenote, Hodges has sustained peculiar fern like scarring and ramifications on his skin where he touched the prime discharge brass. I have endeavored to draw these for you Faraday, please forgive the penmanship. Hodges` hand was still smoking when I started the sketch, I hurried somewhat, as he was pleading to go to the horse doctor."
"The position of the gap is critical to these phenomena, and afforded me much experimentation, apparently to the detriment of Hodges. Just as I was observing a continuous luminous glow appearing between the top conductors, upon each discharge, Hodges couldn`t go on. His arm had seized and his whole frame was shaking as though palsied. At first I thought he had received another shock, but he maintained fatigue and virtually demanded a rest!
Sensing a shirker as well as you can Faraday, I took over turning the machine and with some merriment demanded he take observations of the expanded spark. The dolt actually had the audacity to assume a proprietorial stance next to the plates, Faraday! When the prime started sparking over, Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year. Hodges staggered back from the plates, covering his right eye and uttering blasphemities which would have themselves led to his dismissal, even had he not been blinded. But what had happened Faraday?"
nothing exceptional about that, hot air balloons have been around since the early 1800's.
They were even used in the civil war.
The Wright brothers invented heavier than air/powered flight.
is how he slips in a advertisement for the book he sells on his main page within the articles...
:-)
Man... this is bad science at its absolute worst. (I hope enough people notice the "it's funny... laugh" and don't think it's the "science" section one.) Considering that the only site google has that refers to this particular Glitch <laugh> is this site. Science ain't changing anytime soon.
Oh, but if you do think this is for real, I have a beautiful bridge I am selling...
~ kjrose
Did the guy discover Object Oriented Programming, too?
7 errors, 1 warning fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'yousuck.h': No such file or directory
fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'properitrylibarby.h': No such file or directory
error C2239: unexpected token '{' following declaration of 'main'
error C2065: 'htmlprintf' : undeclared identifier
error C2001: newline in constant
error C2143: syntax error : missing ')' before '}'
error C2143: syntax error : missing ';' before '}'
warning C4508: 'main' : function should return a value; 'void' return type assumed
And I thought we only recently started seeing Glitchy technologies!
"It's Funny, Laugh" icon. But when I got to the part about poor ole Hodges "emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year", a suspected that this page was out about truth but about entertainment. And it is!
I still don't see that icon at http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/VicN2/vicN2.html. Where is it?
With the other fakers, the one that was looking like a Nobel candidate until it was discovered he had been faking the results (and therefore conclusions) of his experiments for the past few years.
I'm also reminded of the apparently bogus papers that have been making their way into peer-reviewed journals of theoretical physics.
The abuse of the ass-istant in these articles, especially the part about getting his scrotum burned off, are too much. I just don't think I buy this stuff.
The do a sthick like this in "Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead", a fantastic movie with Gary Oldman based on the Top Stoppard favorite.
One of them keeps discovering advanced concepts of physics (the movie is set in the time of Hamlet) playing with potted plants and bowling balls and feathers, but is never able to fully expand on them as he is repeatedly distracted by plot advancement.
Its pretty funny, and this kinda reminded me of that.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Kroto wasn't the first to see crystals of C60, Huffman was. Kroto only saw C60 as a peak in a mass spectrometer.
Notice how he never mentioned that everyone will have a flying car by the year 2000? Puts the 50's science writers to shame..
Trolling is a art,
the ernestglitch machine which was rediscovered by one Mr. Turing.
Poor Glitch also forgot to patent a device in later incarnation called paladin or palladium something.
How is that possible? Did the guy also develop the quantum concepts necessary to explain what a laser is?
This all sounds like a lot of moonshine.
History is written by those who have hanged heroes. (Sorry, couldn't resist)
Who invented the telephone again?
Mike
Ok ok, I'll be good. Gimme back my karma.
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
i think someone wise and learned needs to start moderating the posted news a little closer.
Notice that this article was posted with topic It's funny. Laugh. (icon: bare, bald foot) rather than topic Science (icon: Einstein's head).
On the home page:
Experimenting with Weapons-Grade Fissile Material in the Home.
A Method of Electro-Plating Lizards
Atomic Hydrogen Blowtorch.
Any they just keep geting better
http://www.lateralscience.co.uk/
Can't wait for the Victorian Cyclotron
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
you sun of a bitch i clicked it. my eyes are bleeding ffs.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
the secret journals of Phineas J. Magnetron
-
I received these unusual documents from my uncle who -- perhaps inadvertently -- willed them to me along with an attic full of junk and dusty memorabilia. There were twenty-four books in all, every one of them labeled with a year on the spine and front cover. What captured my attention -- besides the mysterious code -- was that the years began with 1877.
nicely done.Magnetron's books appeared to be a journal of some kind, as each entry was preceded by a date written in a bold block lettering. Below each date were as many as 4,408 small numbers and letters, packed 64 characters per square inch with no spaces or identifiable punctuation. The only characters used were the numerals 0 through 9 and the letters A through F, leading the cryptographers to deduce that the code utilized a hexadecimal, or base 16 numbering system.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
He writes:
Indian hemp? Become a scientist NOW! :-)
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Slashdot.org: Al Gore accused as[*] patent infringement
[*] sic
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
It is in memorium of him that we have the phrase "a glitch in the system". ;-)
-psy
Ernest Glitch ??? how about Genuine Hoax....
Medievil electricty ummm...yeah right...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
"ungloved testicles" ... um ..
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Reading these articles, I couldn't help but think that poor Hodges must be a distant relative of Jim, Marlon Perkins hapless assistant from Wild Kingdom. "So now we watch from the safety of the boat as Jim attempts to subdue the deadly anaconda!"
Poor Hodges is now famous as the first person to receive laser eye surgery.
The abuse that the poor guy received was astounding. Dig this:
Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year.
Table-ized A.I.
"But he uses these slight infirmities to shirk from a full sixteen hour day. I remind him that lead mining is equally dangerous, although he maintains that scrotal de-glovement by halogen gases is rare in the mines."
does that mean his poor assistant got his nutsack burned off?!? geez
Remarkable! I see clear parallels between this pioneering Victorian scientist and the much later experiments chronicled in the televised documentaries of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his faithful assistant Beaker.
From this page on his website-
My own experience with fluorine has been solely with its compounds. In particular, natural calcium fluoride crystals (fluorite or fluorspar). Also hydrofluoric acid, during a highly ill-advised "experiment" conducted in the clean room of a semiconductor manufacturer unwise enough to employ me.... The glass and quartz-ware used in diffusion furnaces must be kept scrupulously clean to avoid contamination of the silicon wafers being processed. Consequently it is periodically bathed in a mixture of hydrofluoric and nitric acids. Full protection clothing was donned over normal clean room eyes-only-exposed garb, and a large silicon wafer (complete with defective 4Mb DRAMs) was "carefully" thrown into the acid bath. Nothing happened for about twenty seconds, as the HF attacked the silicon, heating up the wafer until a runaway reaction started. The acid bath then erupted into a frightening boiling maelstrom, with the violent evolution of copious amounts of red and brown fumes of nitrogen oxides. The complete destruction of high technology by the tiger of chemistry.
Splendid.
Now we know why they're shunning away geeks
- mritunjai
I'm not up on chemistry and electrical engineering to know if this stuff actually makes sense. Would the stuff presented in the stories actually work?
If so, it is nice to see funny, clever hard-scifi -- it might make a nice book or short story.
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
This is one of the great hoaxes put on the American people, and it's gained a life of its own. Gore correctly took credit - in a casual comment in an interview - for taking the initiative in Congress in creating what we consider to be the Internet (increasing funding and taking it from a military to a commercial and academic network). Some weeks later, Republicans started using the false "invented" claim.
I was telling someone about that book today - I read it about ten years ago - but couldn't remember the title. A fortunate coincidence.
The apparent owner of the site posted links to this stuff over on scienceforums.net, and it was quickly refuted with some simple facts:w thread.php?s= &postid=4477#post4477
"A C60 fullerene has 20 hexagons; but also 12 pentagons, and the observation doesn't mention these; but the biggest problem I see is it's diameter; we simply couldn't see things 7 angstroms in diameter 1856. If we could, and above 260 kelvin, the spin would make it appear spherical."
-http://scienceforums.net/forums/sho
I've gotten so tired of the Rush Limbaugh drones and their guffaws whenever this distortion is repeated. The Internet, and the technology sector in general, would be in a lot better shape today if we had Al Gore in office rather than the guy that was appointed President.
I never would have wanted to be THIS guy's assistant! First he makes him sick from inhaling quicksilver (Mercury) vapor (very poisonous), then he fries (electrocutes) his hand so bad that he can't use his arm for a month, then the poor guy loses his sight in one eye thanks to the discovery of the laser. How does this guy reward his assistant for giving (literally) so much of himself? He CANS him! And we thought that our employers were assholes! Jeesh!
so the russians were ahead of the game all this time.
.. both US and USSR being white for the most part.
And I just attributed it all to inspired by good but crap for brains implemented policyies of the last 100 years.
One thing of note, the cold war taught us to hate the russians as our enemy, possibly the first non-racially based enemy created.
I nearly fell out of my seat when I read this... ouch! This letter could have come right out of the pages of The Onion, from perhaps Zwiebel's (sp?) cheif scientist.
Hum, if this book did actually exist, someone ought to contribute it to Project Gutenburg. This guy is claiming copyright to something that was supposedly written in 1854 and selling it for $25.
Now, if he actually wrote it all, the price is reasonable, given the amount of creativity involved in putting it together, but he ought to have said so rather than lying about it being something historic.
Slashdot could have warned us before we hit the second paragraph that this was a good story.. but nothing more than a good *story*.
Slashdot could hae posted it to a humor section instead of *Science*!
"...Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year"
Hodges would make a great strait-man, in a cartoon that is...I missed the 'funny' icon but I couldn't help laughing as soon as I read the exploits of poor Hodges. Whomever wrote this should turn it into a weekly cartoon. Some of us that have been zapped, blown up, suffered chemical burns, etc in our path of discovery can't help but feel for this guy. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...made in the 1970's and re-runs played on PBS stations here in the states afterwards. Leonard Rossiter could've played the perfect Glitch.
There they go again. Trying to take credit for someone else's work.
Anyone else see something funny about this?
Master Glitch, there's a glitch in this here electric valve. It has been glowing funnily since I dropped my pickle sandwich in there (and so was discovered the light emitting diode)
From the article
"Sensing a shirker as well as you can Faraday, I took over turning the machine and with some merriment demanded he take observations of the expanded spark...Hodges would see nothing of value looking along the axis. How wrong Faraday! When the prime started sparking over, Hodges emitted a scream the like of which I hadn`t heard since his scrotum was burned off during my experiment with fluorine gas last year."
Now THAT'S funny!
...it was *Mrs. Glitch* who should really get the credit.
I forgot to mention that what they believe is a mechanical calculator was an ancient greek artifact. That was really the whole point. Jesus, I don't even have the "coffee" excuse.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I've even seen fufula and foofera, but I'm pretty sure froofrah is the correct spelling.
I'm not sure which is more indicative of Slashdot's editorial decline -- this story, or the rash of duplicates.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
The internet invents AL GORE!
These letters are a classic. Probably should be ran thru Victoriantalk though. The parent site has some of the coolest stuff I've seen in a while. I hope somebody mirrors it before the ARM shuts it down.
Here is a modern description. You can put one together for a few dollars. It delivers nanosecond pulses of UV laser light that you can use to excite dye lasers and do other neat stuff with.
make wonderful earrings...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Hodges sounds like a character out of one of the Lemony Snicket novels. And if you haven't read any of those, you're missing something nasty and good. Actually, I wonder if 'Ernest Glitch' IS the same guy who writes the Snicket books. The styles are similar.
it looked like the title read:
"The Heterophobe Unpublished Letters of Ernest Glitch"
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Of course it's a hoax, the whole thing reads like a comedy of errors where the poor servant Hodges is subjected to various nasty injuries as a result of Glitch's experiments.
How is the parent a "troll"? How can providing providing factual information regarding an interview be considered trolling?
"Troll" does not mean something that you don't want to hear.
But Franklin and Faraday got all the credit.
He's back!