February 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 7550, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
INNOVATION AND DISCOVERY AS CHRONICLED IN Scientific AmericAn
Compiled by Mark FischettiSCIENTIfIC AmERICAN ONLINE
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES
IN THE Scientific AmericAn ARCHIVE S AT
scientificamerican.com/magazine/saFEbRuARYshall use the energy in the atoms
to drive our machines, cook our
food and heat our rooms.”1872
Mastodons
in New York
“A farmer in the town of Mount
Hope, Orange County, N.Y.,
digging recently in a swamp on his
premises, exhumed from the muck,
about eight feet below the surface,
a number of bones which, from
their size and formation, are sup-
posed to be those of a mastodon.
There are two ribs nearly five feet
long, and two sections of vertebrae
six inches wide. Several discover-
ies of mastodon remains have
been made in this county during
the past thirty or forty years.”The Channel Tunnel
“The successful completion and
operation of the Mont Cenis rail-
way tunnel through the Alps has
given new impetus to establishing
railway communication be tween
England and France, by means
of a tunnel under the British
Channel. The distance is 22 miles.
The Channel Tunnel Company has
been formed in London to solve
the problem. The tunnel is to
extend from Dover, England, to
Calais, France. The tunnel will be
made through the lower or gray
chalk, chiefly, if not entirely, and
by the adoption of machinery. Any
[cost] estimate must at present be
purely conjectural, but it is reck-
oned that the work, if practicable
at all, could be completed within
five years and for $25,000,000.”
no channel tunnel was built until
eurotunnel opened the “chunnel”
in 1994, between folkestone, england,
and coquelles, france. Price tag:
about £9 billion.1972
Tectonic
Dump
“A speculative but intriguing
scheme for disposing of man-
made solid wastes has been
put forward by two investiga-
tors at the University of Wash-
ington. The plan would take
advantage of regions called
subduction sinks, where sedi-
mentary material is being
drawn downward into the
earth’s mantle as a consequence
of seafloor spreading. A hypo-
thetical disposal system would
consist of three stages: collec-
tion, compaction of waste into
blocks and its sea transporta-
tion to tectonic sinks. The one-
way system would take care
of quantities larger than we
can produce.”Fiber-Optic Television
“The use of a laser beam as
a high-capacity channel for car-
rying voice, video, digital and
other signals has seemed an
attractive possibility. A single
coherent beam of laser light can
in principle carry the equivalent
of several thousand television
channels. Until recently it
seemed that if a laser beam was
to be useful in communications,
it would have to travel in a care-
fully designed pipe complete
with lenses and other features
enabling the light to bend
around corners. A much more
attractive possibility is to use
thin glass fibers to carry the
laser beam. At the Bell Tele-
phone Laboratories, experimen-
tal fibers have been made that
exhibit an absorption loss of
about 60 decibels per kilometer,
and fibers with a loss as low as
18 decibels per kilometer have
been made by the Corning Glass
Works. With repeaters spaced
every mile or two, glass-fiber
systems could be a strong con-
tender for future long-haul
transmission applications.”1922
Nuclear Power
from Coal?
“Atoms, those smallest bricks of
nature, are the seat of unbound ed
energy. Scientists are today of the
opinion that radio activity is not
only a property of radium, ura-
nium or thorium atoms, but that
it is common to all atoms, only
that in other atoms this power is
latent. If it were possible to start
the decomposition of the atoms,
the radioactivity must appear.
The quantity that could be won
by such means is infinitely greater
than that attained by chemical
reaction or combustion. We have
produced energy from coal
[through combustion]. If it were
possible to break up the atoms
and cause them to spend their
latent energy, an ocean liner of
50,000 horsepower could travel
across the oceans uninterrupt-
edly for ten years using only a
single kilogram of coal. Perhaps
there will come a time when we1972: “Near saturation in microwave
communication is indicated by the
colored beams on this map of the
New York metropolitan area. The
routes are radio channels that carry
a variety of traffic.”187219721922Scientific American,
Vol. 226, No. 2; February 1972