Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: Cosmology



Bernard Cleyet wrote:
I've heard the Nobel committee awarded E. for the PE effect because of
its commercial use.

I don't think the photoelectric effect had very much commercial use at
the time Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921. My father, Lloyd
Logan, who died in 1938, had the original patents on the control of
industrial processes by light sensitive means. He got the idea of using
photoelectric cells to detect arsenic impurites in the manufacture of
sulphuric acid that "poisoned" the platinum catalyst, shutting down the
process to prevent further damage to the catalyst. He generalized the
idea to the control of any process where the photoelectrically detected
output could be used to control the process -- several years before
negative feedback was used in electronics (1929). Although my father had
no academic degree at the time, he already had considerable practical
ezxperience in industry including chemical manufacture. He got the idea
for the application of photocells while at the Royal Technical College
(now part of Strathclyde University), Glasgow while still in the
Canadian Army in 1919. He was taking general science courses in physics,
chemistry, and geology intended mainly for pre-med students, because
that was all that was available at the time. The chemistry teacher was
the famous G. G. Henderson. After returning to the United States, my
father tested his idea at home in Arlington, MA with some help from his
sister, Hazel Logan, and he later enrolled as a special student at
M.I.T. around 1923 to do further experimental work on his inventions and
to study geometrical and physical optics, his subfield. At that time,
vacuum phototubes were not widely used outside physics laboratories.
Selenium cells were available, but the sensitivity was low. There were
some newer cells. My father tried to develop an integrated vacuum
photocell with amplification, but abandoned the idea when he heard
similar work was being done at Westinghouse. I still have his sketches
for such a device. My father wrote an article about the potential
commercial application of photoelectricity in 1920, but it was not
published until 1923 in somewhat condensed form (1). I still have the
original draft which contains a much longer inventory of possible
applications including the possibility of using photoelectric means to
read dictaphone messages recorded on paper so that they could easily be
sent through the mail. According to Hazel Logan, a company offered to
buy my father's patents with the intention of applying them to a very
narrow use. My father, seeing the potential widespread use, preferred to
let them go into the public domain. I think he made only about $100 for
all his work on photoelectric applications. It wasn't until around 1940
that one started to see photoelectric cells used to open doors, etc. --
at least where I lived (Baltimore). In a letter dated Feb. 21, 1941,
Hazel Logan refers to a then recent Readers' Digest article, "Jack of
All Trades, - The Electric Eye," in which it was stated "that 'brewers,
makers of soft drinks, and oil refineries put the beam through a pipe
where liquid is continuously flowing,'" saying that it was "_identical_
with the original application of the idea in the purification of SO2
[sulfur dioxide]." My mother wrote to Hazel Logan on March 12, 1941, "I
was interested in a transcribed radio program to-day. It was 'Orphan
Annie' sponsored by the Quaker Oats Co. Before the story
started the announcer stated that he wished all the boys and girls
listening in could visit the plant and see all the machinery and and the
_Electric_ _Eye_ working to produce the 'Vitamin Rain' now found in
Quaker Puffed Wheat and Rice." I recall that they advertised that the
cereal was "shot from guns." My father used photocells for color control
and counting among many other applications. My father was a stickler for
literature searches. One journal article, probably based on
his doctoral thesis on the manufacture of coal gas, listed about 600
references. He wrote a bibliography on the photoelectric effect that I
found in the online card catalog at the Johns Hopkins University library
a few years ago. I still have his notes for that bibliography. I recall
that one of the articles referred to was by Hermann August Pfund,
explaining photoelectricity in solid materials. I had the impression
that Pfund didn't take into account the quantum nature of the effect at
that time -- something like what Jack referred to. According to my
father's article, in regard to selenium cells, "The increase in
conductivity is explained by Pfund as being due to the emission of
additional electrons by resonance set up within the atom, these
electrons having properties of free electrons during the absorption of
light. ..." This, based on an article by Pfund in Phys. Rev., [1] 28
(1909), 324, sounds like a classical description to me. Of course, in
1909 the Bohr theory was yet to come. My father
eventually went to Johns Hopkins as a Research Associate in Gas
Engineering in 1926. Without any academic degree, he took off a year in
1928 to get his Doctor of Science in Engineering there in 1929. He had
already studied quantum theory of atomic structure with Harold Urey just
before the latter left Hopkins. My father was then appointed Associate
Professor of Gas Engineering at Hopkins. His office in Maryland Hall was
next to the Physics Dept. He got to know most of the physicists well
including Pfund, Herzfeld, John C. Hubbard (who taught J. A. Wheeler
general physics), Maria Goeppert-Mayer and her husband Joseph Mayer,
James Franck, and probably others. [I recall being invited to a faculty
childrens' party by the Mayers at the age of four or five.] I don't
think my father did much research on photoelectricity after he went to
Hopkins. He was involved as a collaborator on research producing
liquid fuels from gaseous fuels -- secret since it was under contract
with a group of gas companies. I have never seen the patents. Prior to
WWI, my father had a few patents, one an ammeter based on the Faraday
effect and a fluid level control for industrial use. He also applied the
photoelectric effect to this purpose in a later patent where the liquid
of high refractive index entering a hollow prism connected to a tank by
a vertical U-tube causes the light to be totally internally reflected so
that it reaches the photocell when the liquid in the tank reaches such a
level as to fill the prism. (A Saturday technology student at my college
working for a medical technology firm needed such an application. He had
been able to get it to work by trial and error, but I was able to help
him with my father's explicit method based on elementary optics.)
According to Hazel Logan, my father invented a means of preventing water
from entering submarines when torpedoes wwere released on his own time
while working for a boat company. His employer appropriated the patent.
I always wondered why my father kept such a patent in his papers with
another's name on it. According to Hazel, my father did not contest the
appropriation of his invention, knowing that his colleagues would lose
their jobs if they testified against the company as they offered to do.

Regarding the applications of photoelectricity, my father wrote in the
1923 article (presented as a lecture at an ACS meeting in April 1922,
"Applied photo-electricity must still be considered a comparatively
neglected subject . While scientific applications of light-sensitive
cells to stellar photometry, and -- among other applications -- the
photophone of Bell, the automatic lighting of buoys, the electrical
transmission of photographs, the control of torpedoes, and the ingeneous
optophone of Fournier d'Albe for enabling the blind to read, have
reached varying degrees of practicality, only few industrial
applications have been proposed. While also a few attempts to effect
control in certain directions are evidenced by proposed applications to
the regulation of the luminosity of vacuum tube lamps, the regulation of
voltage, and the control of ultraviolet lamps in the sterilization of
water, the field of application to the control of manufacturing
processes, especially in chemical industry, appears to have been
practically neglected." (I just read that the optophone, originally
invented in 1912, may still be
alive.)
<http://oldweb.northampton.ac.uk/aps/eng/research/optophone/optophone.html>
Anyway, it doesn't seem like the commercial use of the photoelectric
effect had made much headway by 1921.

I think the real reason for the delay in Einstein's being awarded the
Nobel Prize was opposition from Nobel Committee members. There was some
general concern as to whether relativity had been sufficiently
validated. By 1919, Eddington's experiment had brought considerable fame
to Einstein and general relativity. Years ago, I read that Allvar
Gullstrand, a Swedish opthamalogist, specialist in physiological optics,
inventor of the familiar slit lamp biomicroscope
<http://eyelearn.med.utoronto.ca/AntSegmentImages/SlitLampIntro.htm>,
and recipient of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology
<http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1911/gullstrand-bio.html>,
opposed Einstein receiving the Nobel prize. A web search gives the
details. Gullstrand, who was largely self-educated in optics, apparently
very well so, but not as well in other branches of physics, tried to
show by calculation that Einstein's relativity was wrong.
<http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentaries/commentary_text.php4?id=727&m=series>.Fortunately,
A mathematical physicist named Carl Wilhelm Oseen, though not on the
Nobel Committee until 1922, pointed out Gullstrand's error, but the
prize was given for the explanation of the photoelectric effect,
apparently in part to avoid conflict with Gullstrand's objection to
Einstein's relativity. An account by a historian of science emphasizing
the drama in Gullstrand's opposition may be found at
<http://www.nbi.dk/NBA/files/sem/copfried.html>, and a detailed account
of the considerations involved in awarding the Nobel Prize in the area
of quantum physics may be found at
<http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/8/7>, particularly the influence
of Oseen on later awards - not always immediately favorable to the
quantum physicists.

Hugh Logan

(1) "Control of Industrial Processes by Light-Sensitive Means," Lloyd
Logan, Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Vol. 15, No. 1,
page 40, January, 1923.