Maybe I should change the way I titled my articles, because some readers may think the answer is in it. Like with the Laws of Robotics, there’s a history behind the Bechdel Test. But first, if you don’t know what we are talking about today:
What is the Bechdel Test?
According to Merriam-Webster, the Bechdel Test is a set of criteria used as a test to evaluate a work of fiction (such as a film) on the basis of its inclusion and representation of female characters:
The movie has to have at least two women in it,
who talk to each other,
about something other than a man.
Who Created the Bechdel Test?
Even if the name may let you think that American cartoonist Alison Bechdel invented the Bechdel Test, it’s not the case. Her work, however, popularized it, and that’s why it was named after her.
The test first appeared in Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” (which ran from 1983 to 2008 in Funny Times, and in syndication). The strip was about the lives of a diverse group of characters (most of them lesbians connected to the city’s feminist bookstore) living in a medium-sized city in the United States. It offered political and topical commentaries as well as soap opera storylines.
“The Rule” published in “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
The strip behind the test was originally published in 1985. It was called “The Rule” and was about two friends talking, one of them explaining her rules about the way she chose the movies she watched. As her friend put it, it’s “pretty strict, but a good idea.” It seems that a lot of people thought like her because it’s today considered a standard.
Alison Bechdel never claimed to be the originator of the test. In fact, she never gave it a name. She credited her friend Liz Wallace for the idea, but also the work of author Virginia Woolf—more specifically of her writing in her 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own” in which she observed that:
“All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple… And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends… They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that…”
For creating the comic strip explaining the test, Alison Bechdel got the credit for the concept. She definitely had her part in it, but let’s not forget Liz Wallace’s contribution.
There’s not a complete collection of “Dykes to Watch Out For” easily available, but if you’re interested in the comic strip, you can find a great compilation in “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.”
I’m writing about the origins of classic horror monsters like vampires, werewolves, and zombies, but for me, they are mostly creatures of fiction. Strangely, when it comes to witches, it’s not the same.
Some people really believe in witchcraft and a lot of women were killed after being accused of practicing it. With that in mind, it’s harder to put the witches next to the other frightening supernatural beings. So, let’s take a look at the history of witches to discover…
During its first years, American Television was live from New York—or at least from a studio located on the East Coast. The first famous golden age was about live drama anthologies, but they disappeared quickly when Hollywood took over and everything was put on film.
There were exceptions, of course, I Love Lucy and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, for example, comedies with laughs to make you laugh. The shows were filmed before a Live Studio audience or filmed and projected to a laughing audience that was then recorded.
For a long time, I never really thought about the Illuminati as something other than a conspiracy theorist’s obsession. Then, the Marvel Universe got its Illuminati, and It felt weird. I was looking into some of those comics the other day and I thought that I maybe should look into it. Maybe I could learn something? (spoiler: I did)
Who’s Behind the Invention of the Illuminati?
Through history, we can find multiple references to movements built around the idea of enlightenment like with the Alumbrados in Spain during the 15th century or les Illuminés in France during the 17th century. But the Order of the Illuminati we are talking about was created in Bavaria.
I’m working on my new kitchen lately, trying to decide what to put in it, and where to cut to save money. This led me to look into dishwashers. Living alone, I’m not sure I need one, but it may be useful one day. So, I quickly learned that the technology behind the dishwasher didn’t really change since its invention. But…
Who Created the Dishwasher?
Of course, when I’m talking about “dishwasher,” I’m not referencing the worker employed to wash dishes. As the dictionary puts it, a dishwasher is a machine for washing dishes—not sure that there was someone in particular who invented the idea of having someone do the dishes.
The youngest son in an 11-child family, Howard Carter was born on May 9, 1874, in Brompton, Kensington, London. The Hamond family, the lords of the manor of Swaffham, employed his father, Samuel Carter, and his grandfather, Samuel Carter Senior, as gamekeepers on their estate. Howard developed an interest in sketching and painting because of his father and brother, William Carter, who were both artists.
As the weather in London didn’t suit him, Howard was transferred to live in Swaffham, a market town in Norfolk. Due to his ill health, he only had a meager formal education and was tutored at home privately. His father gave him drawing and painting lessons when he visited Swaffham frequently, laying the groundwork for his future careers as an artist and an archaeologist.
It seems that more people ask “who invented electricity?” than “who discovered electricity?” There’s a difference between inventing and discovering, but there’s also a difference between discovering the existence of electricity and the invention of technic to produce it.
What is electricity?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines electricity this way:
a fundamental form of energy observable in positive and negative forms that occurs naturally (as in lightning) or is produced (as in a generator) and that is expressed in terms of the movement and interaction of electrons.
a science that deals with the phenomena and laws of electricity
Who discovered electricity?
The best way is to begin with the natural occurrence of electricity. In that domain, the Greeks seem to take the first place (not Benjamin Franklin, he’ll come way later in history). In fact, the word “electricity” comes from the Greek elektron which means “amber,” because they rubbed amber with fur and observed the attraction of feathers and other objects. That was the discovery of static electricity—this phenomenon was not perceived as connected to the electric current until the 19th century.
It was in about 600 BC. With time, researchers and archeologists discovered what they believe may have been ancient batteries meant to produce light at ancient Roman sites, but also in archeological digs leading to Persians artefacts.
Who invented electricity?
The famous Ben Franklin’s kite experiment—with a kite, a key, and a storm—occurred in 1752. It proved that lightning and electric sparks were connected. But it didn’t lead to the use of the word “electricity.’ That came even before. English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word ‘electricus’ in the year 1600 to describe the product of that first Greek experiment. And a few years later, another English scientist, Thomas Browne, used the word ‘electricity’ in a paper in which he talked about his research based on William Gilbert’s work. That said, Franklin’s work inspired a lot of Europeans.
Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (1816)
English scientists were really dedicated to exploring the possibilities of electricity. In the early 1700s, Francis Hauksbee invented the first electrostatic generator based on German scientist Otto von Guericke’s invention—it was a primitive form of the frictional electrical machine. But it’s another discussion, one about lamps.
Francis Hauksbee was a member of The Royal Society—formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge—as was William Nicholson who, with surgeon Anthony Carlisle, discovered electrolysis in May 1800, the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen by voltaic current. This led Italian physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta to the discovery of the voltaic pile, a battery. That’s why batteries are rated in volts.
Englishman Michael Faraday is also famous for the construction of a voltaic pile, one with seven British halfpenny coins stacked together with seven disks of sheet zinc, and six pieces of paper moistened with salt water—as it was learned in 1812. A few years later, in 1821, after the Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetism, Faraday built devices to produce what he called ‘electromagnetic rotation’—one of these is known as the homopolar motor, and helped build the foundation of modern electromagnetic technology. These discoveries can’t all be credited to Faraday though. He based his work on the failed experiments of William Hyde Wollaston and Humphry Davy, fellow members of the Royal Society.
Michael Faraday English Scientist is a drawing by Mary Evans
But Faraday didn’t stop there. He explored the electromagnetic properties of materials, worked with light and magnets, and more. In 1831, he discovered electromagnetic induction—the production of an electromotive force across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field. What he established was then modeled mathematically by James Clerk Maxwell as Faraday’s law. This discovery leads Faraday to construct the electric dynamo, the ancestor of modern power generators and the electric motor. Finally, Faraday established that only a single ‘electricity’ exists—at that time, it was thought that there was more than one.
Faraday was not the only one influenced by Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery. Another one was André-Marie Ampère, a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as ‘electrodynamics.’ For him, it really started when his friend François Arago showed the members of the French Academy of Sciences the discovery made by Ørsted. After that, Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism. He showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite directions, respectively. This is what laid the foundation of electrodynamics and, of course, Ampère’s law, which states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and the intensities of their currents. The base unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI) was subsequently named after him—the ‘ampere’ or ‘amp.’
In 1826, German physicist Georg Ohm defined the relationship between power, voltage, current, and resistance in what is now known as ‘Ohm’s Law.’ That’s why the ohm became the basic unit for resistance.
Really, the late 19th century saw the greatest progress in electrical engineering. As you may have noticed, I avoided talking about lights, and more precisely the light bulb, because it will be the subject of another article. For now, let’s go back to electricity.
James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish scientist who specialized in the field of mathematical physics. In 1865, he published ‘A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,’ a paper on electromagnetism in which he derived an electromagnetic wave equation with a velocity for light in close agreement with measurements made by experiment, and deduced that light is an electromagnetic wave. Basically, he demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves move at the speed of light. His work made him a founder of the modern field of electrical engineering.
It certainly influenced German physicist Heinrich Hertz who, in 1886, was the first to conclusively prove the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. Hertz’s proof of the existence of airborne electromagnetic waves led to an explosion of experimentation with this new form of electromagnetic radiation, which was called ‘Hertzian waves.’ That was until the 1910s when the term ‘radio waves’ became current.
Other discoveries were made after that. A lot. We will explore those subjects in subsequent articles.
The Commercial Electricity
Discoveries, theories, and experiments had to lead somewhere. We needed practical uses of electricity. Michael Faraday’s power generator set the stage for an electrical revolution—this is where the history of the light bulb became important. Having light bulbs was useless unless you had a practical source of energy to power them. Thomas Edison wanted to provide that. In order to make electricity practical and inexpensive. In 1882, he built the first electric power plant that was able to produce electricity, the Pearl Street generating station’s electrical power distribution system, which provided 110 volts of direct current (DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.
Nikola Tesla
By working in Paris with the Continental Edison Company, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla gained a lot of practical experience in electrical engineering. Soon, he started to design and build updated versions of generating dynamos and motors. In 1884, he moved to the United States with the help of his manager, Charles Batchelor. He ended up working on street lighting but quit after six months with the company. That didn’t stop his work and his new systems didn’t go unnoticed. Nevertheless, investors were not interested in his ideas for new types of alternating current (AC) motors and electrical transmission equipment.
Thomas Edison’s direct current had limitations that were overcome by the AC. In fact, in Europe, the AC power system was developed and adopted rapidly after 1886. In the US, Edison tried to discredit alternating currents as too dangerous in a public campaign called the ‘war of the currents.’ But progress can’t be stopped and, in 1888, alternating current systems gained further viability with the introduction of a functional AC motor—Nikola Tesla’s design for an induction motor was one of them. With Thomas Edison leaving the electric power business, direct current lost the war, and, by October 1890, Edison Machine Works began developing AC-based equipment. Mergers, patents, and other financial deals pushed AC power to the front. Well into the 20th century, some cities still used DC, but most adopted AC quickly.
A lot of people contributed to the ‘invention’ of electricity as we think of it today. Now, the difficulty is to produce more and more of it. That leads to new inventions!
