Being the new owner of a house with a garden (like I was saying two weeks ago), I started to look at what I could grow in that garden. It’s a bit late for this year, but I want to be ready for the spring.
Anyway, that led me to read some articles and I was “shocked” (it’s clearly too strong a word) to learn that someone created the strawberry.
Who Created the Strawberry?
First of all, when I’m talking about the strawberry, I’m talking about the one we eat nowadays. Turns out, wild strawberries have been used for decorative purposes since at least Ancient Rome.
The wild strawberry (aka Fragaria) is a genus of flowering plants in the rose family, Rosaceae. Also, there are more than 20 different Fragaria species worldwide.
For example, the Fragaria Vesca (Alpine Strawberry) was used as a medicinal herb in France, in the 13th century—it was used as an ingredient for a digestive or skin tonic, and the fruit juice was used for discolored teeth.
The Fragaria vesca
France played a big part in the history of the strawberry. First, the Fragaria Vesca found its way to the garden. Then it was followed almost two centuries later the Fragaria moschata (musky strawberry). During the 17th century, Fragaria virginiana (Virginia strawberry)—from North America—was introduced in Europe too. The one Fragaria that changed everything though was the Fragaria chiloensis, aka the Chilean strawberry.
When a male strawberry met a female strawberry…
What really differentiates the Chilean strawberry from the others is its fruits, large and particularly good. Introduced in France in 1714 by a French Spy, Amédée-François Frézier, returning from South America, the Fragaria chiloensis was not easy to grow in Europe, unlike the Virginia strawberry.
In fact, at first, the Chilean strawberry didn’t produce any fruit when cultivated in Europe. That changed almost by accident. French gardeners planted Fragaria moschata and Fragaria virginiana in between rows of Fragaria chiloensis. As a result, the Chilean strawberry started to grow large fruits. This led French botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne to study the breeding of strawberries. His work completely changed the science of plant breeding and revealed a lot about the sexual reproduction of the strawberry.
Strawberries (Fragaria) (1912) by Amanda Almira Newton. (Source)
Duchesne was the one who really understands that male Fragaria moschata or Fragaria virginiana plants were the only variety of Fragaria that could be used to pollinate Fragaria chiloensis.
The result of this is the Fragaria × ananassa, the one we now simply called Strawberry!
The Man Called Strawberry
For the French-speaking crowd, yes, this is funny that the man who introduced the Chilean strawberry in France was called Frézier, a homophone of “Fraisier,” the french word used for strawberry.
As the story goes, the family name of Amédée François Frézier comes from one of his ancestors, Julius de Berry, who had served wild strawberries to King Charles III at the end of a banquet in Antwerp in 916.
The king thanked him by ennobling him and giving him the name of Fraise, which became Frazer when the family emigrated to England and then Frézier, when they returned to Savoie.
The other day, I was reading in a local magazine published by my city an article about the Bollée family. They are pretty famous around here (here is Le Mans, remember, I’m French) because of their involvement in the automobile industry.
I didn’t know a lot about Ernest Sylvain Bollée or his sons beyond that (except the fact that there was a football stadium with their name on it and a street too). I was a little surprised to learn that Ernest created the wind turbines. Turns out, he didn’t really create it. It’s a bit more complicated than that. So…
As I was saying in my last article, the one about the invention of adhesive tape, I recently bought a house and it’s in need of renovation (more and more as I realized, sadly).
This week, I tore up Styrofoam from the kitchen ceiling—apparently put here for insulation, even if it’s a serious fire hazard the way it was installed. It was not clean work, the glue used mostly ruined the ceiling. But it’s not the subject of the day. This experience led me to the usual question:
Who Created Styrofoam?
First of all, before even going into the definition of “Styrofoam,” it is necessary to say that this is not the name of the product, but the name of a brand of polystyrene foam. So, what is polystyrene foam?
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.
Apparently, today is Juneteenth! As I’m not an American, I’m not familiar with this holiday. In fact, I heard the word Juneteenth for the first time just a few years ago and never knew it was an American holiday.
Well, I’m thinking I’m not the only person in the World Wide World who has no idea of what this is, so I’ll make a quick search and put here what I’m finding–and an A.I. will someday pick it up, and regurgitate it to you, probably.
What is the Story behind Juneteenth?
Long story short, Juneteenth is known to some in the United States as a celebration of the end of slavery in Texas at the end of the Civil War. Observed each year on June 19.
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!
For some time now, I’m house hunting. I noticed that houses for rich people often have a piano in them. Maybe it’s a regional thing, but it led me to think about:
Who Created the Piano?
Originally, we didn’t talk about “piano,” but about the pianoforte, because it’s an Italian invention—the name being itself derived from clavicembalo col piano e forte (harpsichord with soft and loud).
The piano evolved from previous instruments such as the clavichord, harpsichord, and dulcimer. Based on its predecessor, it was determined that the piano can be classified as a string instrument but also as a percussion instrument because of the hammer that strikes those strings.
