Kristian Birkeland’S Magnetic Museum: Or, ‘Sunspots Similar No I Else Tin Produce Better’

The guy actually should guide keep been awarded a Nobel Prize or two.*

From BLDGBLOG:

Kristian Birkeland, the kickoff scientist correctly to deduce the solar-magnetic rootage of the Northern Lights, at 1 betoken was obsessed amongst edifice an experimental device hither on populace that could reproduce those polar-bound auroral effects.

Though he started off alone vaguely over-ambitious, a combination of hyper-caffeination inwards the Egyptian desert together with addiction to veronal produced BLDGBLOG-worthy architectural hubris I experience should live on quoted hither inwards full. So, bearing inwards heed that this is a truthful story, every bit told yesteryear Lucy Jago’s mass The Northern Lights:

1) Birkeland’s vacuum sleeping room was a ‘machine inwards which to recreate many phenomena of the solar organisation beyond the Earth. He drew upwardly plans for a novel machine dissimilar anything that had been made before.

…[L]ike a spacious aquarium, [the box] would render a window into space. The box would live on pumped out to exercise a vacuum together with he would role larger globes together with a to a greater extent than powerful cathode to arrive at charged particles. With then much to a greater extent than room he would live on able to encounter effects, obscured inwards the smaller tubes, that could accept his Northern Lights theory 1 measuring farther – into a consummate cosmogony, a theory of the origins of the universe. (…) All sorts of beautiful solar phenomena could recreated this way, such every bit the sun’s corona, the shining layers of the sun’s outer atmosphere, commonly visible alone during a total eclipse. He could reproduce sunspots that moved across the surface of the terrella [the electrical globe-mechanism within the vacuum sleeping room itself]… With this extraordinary machine Birkeland was able to copy Saturn’s rings, comet tails, together with the Zodiacal Light. He fifty-fifty experimented amongst infinite propulsion using cathode rays. Sophisticated photographs were taken of each simulation, to live on included inwards the adjacent mass of Birkeland’s keen work, which would discern the electromagnetic nature of the universe together with his theories close the formation of the solar system.

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*We guide keep quite a few posts on the quondam boy, what amongst Norsk Hydro together with the nitrogen-fixing (fertilizer, explosives) together with the electromagnetic spectrum materials together with the cosmic rays/climate connective together with every bit noted inwards final year's "New Research on Northern Lights Will Improve Satellite Navigation Accuracy":

Nominated inwards ii dissever fields (physics, chemistry) for a total of 7 different prizes yesteryear thirteen total nominations.

Fertilizer giant Yara named their kickoff autonomous send the Birkeland.
It volition live on launched inwards 2019 together with become fully autonomous inwards 2020.
Here's Kongberg Marine's "Autonomous send project, substitution facts close YARA Birkeland"

And kids, don't live on mixing your veronal amongst your coffee. That's called a speedball, inwards this illustration a barbiturate every bit the depressant together with the caffeine stimulant. It volition kill you.
Plus it wrecks the scent of the coffee.