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Thomas Edison
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"Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent
perspiration."
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Born
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Died
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Occupation
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Inventor, scientist, businessman
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Religion
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Spouse
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Mary Stilwell (m. 1871–1884)
Mina Miller (m. 1886–1931) |
Children
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Marion Estelle Edison (1873–1965)
Thomas Alva Edison Jr. (1876–1935) William Leslie Edison (1878–1937) Madeleine Edison (1888–1979) Charles Edison (1890–1969) Theodore Miller Edison (1898–1992) |
Parents
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Samuel Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–1896)
Nancy Matthews Elliott (1810–1871) |
Relatives
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Lewis Miller (father-in-law)
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Edison as a boy
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Historical marker of Edison's
birthplace
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor
and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around
the world, including the phonograph,
the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb.
In addition, he created the world’s first industrial research laboratory. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors
to apply the principles of mass production
and large teamwork to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited
with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.[1]
Edison is the fourth most prolific
inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and
Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker,
a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power,
recorded music and motion pictures. His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his
early career as a telegraph operator. Edison originated the concept and implementation
of electric-power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and
factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first
power station was on Manhattan Island,
New York.
Early
life
Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio,
and grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. He was the seventh and last child of Samuel
Ogden Edison, Jr. (1804–96, born in Marshalltown,
Nova Scotia, Canada) and Nancy Matthews Elliott
(1810–1871, born in Chenango
County, New York).[2][citation
needed] His father had to escape from Canada because he took part
in the unsuccessful Mackenzie Rebellion of 1837.[citation
needed] Edison considered himself to be of Dutch ancestry.[3]
In school, the young Edison's mind
often wandered, and his teacher, the Reverend Engle, was overheard calling him
"addled".
This ended Edison's three months of official schooling. Edison recalled later,
"My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I
felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint." His
mother homeschooled him.[4]
Much of his education came from reading R.G. Parker's School
of Natural Philosophy and The Cooper Union.
Edison developed hearing problems at
an early age. The cause of his deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet fever
during childhood and recurring untreated middle-ear infections. Around the
middle of his career Edison attributed the hearing impairment to being struck
on the ears by a train conductor when his chemical laboratory in a boxcar
caught fire and he was thrown off the train in Smiths Creek, Michigan, along with his apparatus and chemicals. In his later years
he modified the story to say the injury occurred when the conductor, in helping
him onto a moving train, lifted him by the ears.[5][6]
Edison's family was forced to move
to Port Huron,
Michigan, when the railroad bypassed Milan in 1854,[7] but
his life there was bittersweet. He sold candy and newspapers on trains running
from Port Huron to Detroit, and he sold vegetables to supplement his income. He
also studied qualitative analysis, and conducted chemical experiments on the
train until an accident caused the prohibition of further work of the kind. He
obtained the exclusive right of selling newspapers on the road, and, with the
aid of four assistants, he set in type and printed the Grand Trunk Herald,
which he sold with his other papers.[8]
This began Edison's long streak of entrepreneurial ventures as he discovered
his talents as a businessman. These talents eventually led him to found 14
companies, including General Electric,
which is still in existence as one of the largest publicly traded companies
in the world.[9][10]
Telegrapher
Edison became a telegraph operator
after he saved three-year-old Jimmie MacKenzie from being struck by a runaway
train. Jimmie's father, station agent
J.U. MacKenzie of Mount Clemens, Michigan, was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph
operator. Edison's first telegraphy job away from Port Huron was at Stratford
Junction, Ontario, on the Grand Trunk Railway.[11]
In 1866, at the age of 19, Thomas Edison moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where, as an employee of Western Union,
he worked the Associated Press bureau news wire.
Edison requested the night shift, which allowed him plenty of time to spend at
his two favorite pastimes—reading and experimenting. Eventually, the latter
pre-occupation cost him his job. One night in 1867, he was working with a lead–acid battery when he spilled sulfuric acid
onto the floor. It ran between the floorboards and onto his boss's desk below.
The next morning Edison was fired.[12]
One of his mentors during those
early years was a fellow telegrapher and inventor named Franklin Leonard Pope, who allowed the impoverished youth to live and work in the
basement of his Elizabeth, New Jersey home. Some of Edison's earliest inventions were related to
telegraphy, including a stock ticker. His first patent was for the electric
vote recorder, (U.S. Patent 90,646),[13]
which was granted on June 1, 1869.[14]
Marriages
and children
Mina Edison in 1906
On December 25, 1871,
Edison married 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, whom he had met two months earlier as
she was an employee at one of his shops. They had three children:
·
William Leslie Edison
(1878–1937) Inventor, graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale,
1900.[17]
Mary Edison died on
August 9, 1884, of unknown causes: possibly from a brain tumor,[18] possibly from a morphine overdose.[19]
On February 24, 1886,
at the age of thirty nine, Edison married 20-year-old Mina Miller in Akron, Ohio.[20] She was the daughter of inventor Lewis
Miller, co-founder of the Chautauqua Institution and a benefactor of Methodist charities. They also had three children:
·
Charles Edison
(1890–1969), who took over the company upon his father's death and who later
was elected Governor of New Jersey.[23]
He also took charge of his father's experimental laboratories in West Orange.
Beginning
his career
Thomas Edison began his career as an
inventor in Newark, New Jersey, with the automatic repeater and his other improved
telegraphic devices, but the invention which first gained him notice was the phonograph
in 1877. This accomplishment was so unexpected by the public at large as to
appear almost magical. Edison became known as "The Wizard of Menlo
Park," New Jersey. His first phonograph recorded on tinfoil around a
grooved cylinder, but had poor sound quality
and the recordings could only be played a few times. In the 1880s, a redesigned
model using wax-coated cardboard cylinders was produced by Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell,
and Charles Tainter. This was one reason that Thomas Edison continued work on
his own "Perfected Phonograph."
Menlo
Park (1876–1881)
Edison's major innovation was the
first industrial research lab, which was built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was built with the funds from the sale of Edison's quadruplex telegraph. After his demonstration of the telegraph, Edison was not
sure that his original plan to sell it for $4,000 to $5,000 was right, so he
asked Western Union to make a bid. He was surprised to hear them offer $10,000,[citation
needed] ($202,000 USD 2010) which he gratefully accepted. The
quadruplex telegraph was Edison's first big financial success, and Menlo Park
became the first institution set up with the specific purpose of producing
constant technological innovation and improvement. Edison was legally
attributed with most of the inventions produced there, though many employees
carried out research and development under his direction. His staff was
generally told to carry out his directions in conducting research, and he drove
them hard to produce results.
Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory,
removed to Greenfield Village at Henry Ford Museum
in Dearborn, Michigan. (Note the organ against the back wall)
William Joseph Hammer, a consulting electrical engineer, began his duties as a
laboratory assistant to Edison in December 1879. He assisted in experiments on
the telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore
separator, electric lighting, and other developing inventions. However, Hammer worked
primarily on the incandescent electric lamp and was put in charge of tests and
records on that device. In 1880, he was appointed chief engineer of the Edison
Lamp Works. In his first year, the plant under General Manager Francis Robbins Upton turned out 50,000 lamps. According to Edison, Hammer was
"a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting".
Thomas Edison's first successful
light bulb model, used in public demonstration at Menlo Park, December 1879
Nearly all of Edison's patents were
utility patents, which were protected for a 17-year period and included
inventions or processes that are electrical, mechanical, or chemical in nature.
About a dozen were design patents, which protect an ornamental design for up to a 14-year
period. As in most patents, the inventions he described were improvements over prior art.
The phonograph patent, in contrast, was unprecedented as describing the first
device to record and reproduce sounds.[26]
Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb, but instead invented the
first commercially practical incandescent light.[citation
needed] Many earlier inventors had previously devised incandescent
lamps including Henry
Woodward, and Mathew Evans.
Others who developed early and not commercially practical incandescent electric
lamps included Humphry Davy, James Bowman Lindsay, Moses G. Farmer,[27]
William E. Sawyer, Joseph Swan and Heinrich Göbel.
Some of these early bulbs had such flaws as an extremely short life, high
expense to produce, and high electric current
drawn, making them difficult to apply on a large scale commercially. In 1878,
Edison applied the term filament to the element of glowing wire carrying the current, although the English
inventor Joseph Swan had used the term prior to this. Swan developed an
incandescent light with a long lasting filament at about the same time as
Edison, as Swan's earlier bulbs lacked the high resistance needed to be an
effective part of an electrical utility. Edison and his co-workers set about
the task of creating longer-lasting bulbs. In Britain, Joseph Swan had been
able to obtain a patent on the incandescent lamp because although he had been
making successful lamps some time before Edison was tardy in applying for
patents so application was submitted by Edison but failed due to an oversight
in the drafting of Edison's patent application.[28]
Unable to raise the required capital in Britain because of this, Edison was
forced to enter into a joint venture with Swan (known as Ediswan). Swan
acknowledged that Edison had anticipated him, saying "Edison is entitled
to more than I ... he has seen further into this subject, vastly than I, and
foreseen and provided for details that I did not comprehend until I saw his
system".[29]
By 1879, Edison had produced a new concept: a high resistance lamp in a very
high vacuum, which would burn for hundreds of hours. While the earlier
inventors had produced electric lighting in laboratory conditions, dating back
to a demonstration of a glowing wire by Alessandro Volta
in 1800, Edison concentrated on commercial application, and was able to sell
the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting
light bulbs and creating a complete system for the generation and distribution
of electricity.
In just over a decade Edison's Menlo
Park laboratory had expanded to occupy two city blocks. Edison said he wanted
the lab to have "a stock of almost every conceivable material". A
newspaper article printed in 1887 reveals the seriousness of his claim, stating
the lab contained "eight thousand kinds of chemicals, every kind of screw
made, every size of needle, every kind of cord or wire, hair of humans, horses,
hogs, cows, rabbits, goats, minx, camels ... silk in every texture,
cocoons, various kinds of hoofs, shark's teeth, deer horns, tortoise
shell ... cork, resin, varnish and oil, ostrich feathers, a peacock's
tail, jet, amber, rubber, all ores ..." and the list goes on.[30]
Over his desk, Edison displayed a
placard with Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous quotation: "There is no expedient to which a
man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."[31]
This slogan was reputedly posted at several other locations throughout the
facility.
With Menlo Park, Edison had created
the first industrial laboratory concerned with creating knowledge and then
controlling its application.
Carbon
telephone transmitter
In 1877–78, Edison invented and
developed the carbon microphone used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until
the 1980s. After protracted patent litigation, in 1892 a federal court ruled
that Edison—and not Emile Berliner—was the inventor of the carbon microphone. The carbon
microphone was also used in radio broadcasting and public address work through
the 1920s.
Electric
light
Edison in 1878
Building on the contributions of
other developers over the previous three quarters of a century, Edison made
significant improvements to the idea of incandescent light, and wound up in the public consciousness as "the
inventor" of the lightbulb, and a prime mover in developing the necessary
infrastructure for electric power.
After many experiments with platinum and other
metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22,
1879;[32]
it lasted 40 hours. Edison continued to improve this design and by November 4,
1879, filed for U.S. patent 223,898 (granted on January 27, 1880) for an
electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected to
platina contact wires".[33]
Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament
including "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various
ways",[33]
it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and
his team discovered a carbonized
bamboo filament
that could last over 1,200 hours. The idea of using this particular raw
material originated from Edison's recalling his examination of a few threads
from a bamboo fishing pole while relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake in the
present-day state of Wyoming, where he and other members of a scientific team had
traveled so that they could clearly observe a total eclipse of the sun on July
29, 1878, from the Continental Divide.[34]
U.S. Patent#223898: Electric-Lamp.
Issued January 27, 1880.
In 1878, Edison formed the Edison
Electric Light Company in New
York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan
and the members of the Vanderbilt family.
Edison made the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on
December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park. It was during this time that he said:
"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn
candles."[35]
Lewis Latimer joined the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884. Latimer
had received a patent in January 1881 for the "Process of Manufacturing
Carbons", an improved method for the production of carbon filaments for
lightbulbs. Latimer worked as an engineer, a draftsman and an expert witness in
patent litigation on electric lights.[36]
George Westinghouse's company bought Philip Diehl's competing induction lamp patent rights (1882) for $25,000, forcing the holders of
the Edison patent to charge a more reasonable rate for the use of the Edison
patent rights and lowering the price of the electric lamp.[37]
On October 8, 1883, the US
patent office ruled that Edison's patent was
based on the work of William Sawyer and was therefore invalid. Litigation
continued for nearly six years, until October 6, 1889, when a judge ruled that
Edison's electric light improvement claim for "a filament of carbon of
high resistance" was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan,
whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison's, he and Swan
formed a joint company called Ediswan to
manufacture and market the invention in Britain.
Mahen Theatre in Brno (in what is now the Czech Republic) was the first public
building in the world to use Edison's electric lamps, with the installation
supervised by Edison's assistant in the invention of the lamp, Francis Jehl.[38]
In September 2010, a sculpture of three giant light bulbs was erected in Brno,
in front of the theatre.[39]
Electric
power distribution
Edison patented a system for electricity
distribution in 1880, which was essential to
capitalize on the invention of the electric lamp. On December 17, 1880, Edison
founded the Edison
Illuminating Company. The company established the first
investor-owned electric utility in 1882 on Pearl Street Station, New York City. It was on September 4, 1882, that Edison
switched on his Pearl
Street generating station's electrical
power distribution system, which provided 110 volts direct current
(DC) to 59 customers in lower Manhattan.[40]
Earlier in the year, in January 1882
he had switched on the first steam generating power station at Holborn Viaduct
in London. The DC supply system provided electricity supplies to street lamps
and several private dwellings within a short distance of the station. On
January 19, 1883, the first standardized incandescent electric lighting system
employing overhead wires began service in Roselle, New Jersey.
War
of currents
Extravagant displays of electric
lights quickly became a feature of public events, as in this picture from the
1897 Tennessee
Centennial Exposition.
Edison's true success, like that of
his friend Henry Ford, was in his ability to maximize profits through
establishment of mass-production systems and intellectual property rights. George Westinghouse and Edison became adversaries because of Edison's promotion
of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution instead of the more
easily transmitted alternating current (AC) system invented by Nikola Tesla
and promoted by Westinghouse. Unlike DC, AC could be stepped up to very high
voltages with transformers, sent over thinner and cheaper wires, and stepped down
again at the destination for distribution to users.
In 1887 there were 121 Edison
power stations in the United States delivering DC electricity to customers.
When the limitations of DC were discussed by the public, Edison launched a
propaganda campaign to convince people that AC was far too dangerous to use.
The problem with DC was that the power plants could economically deliver DC
electricity only to customers within about one and a half miles (about
2.4 km) from the generating station, so that it was suitable only for
central business districts. When George Westinghouse suggested using high-voltage
AC instead, as it could carry electricity hundreds of miles with marginal loss
of power, Edison waged a "War of Currents"
to prevent AC from being adopted.
The war against AC led him to become
involved in the development and promotion of the electric chair
(using AC) as an attempt to portray AC to have greater lethal potential than
DC. Edison went on to carry out a brief but intense campaign to ban the use of
AC or to limit the allowable voltage for safety purposes. As part of this
campaign, Edison's employees publicly electrocuted
animals to demonstrate the dangers of AC;[41][42]
alternating electric currents are slightly more dangerous in that frequencies
near 60 Hz have a markedly greater potential for inducing fatal
"cardiac fibrillation" than do direct currents.[43]
On one of the more notable occasions, in 1903, Edison's workers electrocuted Topsy the elephant
at Luna Park, near Coney Island, after she had killed several men and her owners wanted her
put to death.[44]
His company filmed the electrocution.
AC replaced DC in most instances of
generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving
the efficiency of power distribution. Though widespread use of DC ultimately
lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage
direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. Low
voltage DC distribution continued to be used in high-density downtown areas for
many years but was eventually replaced by AC low-voltage network distribution
in many of them. DC had the advantage that large battery banks could maintain continuous power through brief
interruptions of the electric supply from generators and the transmission system. Utilities such as Commonwealth Edison in Chicago had rotary converters
or motor-generator sets, which could change DC to AC and AC to various frequencies
in the early to mid-20th century. Utilities supplied rectifiers to convert the
low voltage AC to DC for such DC loads as elevators, fans and pumps. There were
still 1,600 DC customers in downtown New York City as of 2005, and service
was finally discontinued only on November 14, 2007.[45]
Most subway systems are still powered by direct current.
Fluoroscopy
Edison is credited with designing
and producing the first commercially available fluoroscope,
a machine that uses X-rays to take radiographs.
Until Edison discovered that calcium tungstate
fluoroscopy screens produced brighter images than the barium platinocyanide
screens originally used by Wilhelm Röntgen,
the technology was capable of producing only very faint images. The fundamental
design of Edison's fluoroscope is still in use today, despite the fact that
Edison himself abandoned the project after nearly losing his own eyesight and
seriously injuring his assistant, Clarence Dally. Dally had made himself an enthusiastic human guinea pig
for the fluoroscopy project and in the process been exposed to a poisonous dose
of radiation. He later died of injuries related to the exposure. In 1903, a
shaken Edison said "Don't talk to me about X-rays, I am afraid of
them."[46]
Work
relations
Photograph of Thomas Edison by
Victor Daireaux, Paris, circa 1880s
Frank J. Sprague, a competent mathematician and former naval officer, was recruited by Edward H. Johnson
and joined the Edison organization in 1883. One of Sprague's significant
contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park was to expand Edison's
mathematical methods. Despite the common belief that Edison did not use
mathematics, analysis of his notebooks reveal that he was an astute user of
mathematical analysis conducted by his assistants such as Francis Robbins Upton, for example, determining the critical parameters of his
electric lighting system including lamp resistance by a sophisticated analysis
of Ohm's Law,
Joule's Law
and economics.[47]
Another of Edison's assistants was Nikola Tesla.
Tesla claimed that Edison promised him $50,000 if he succeeded in making
improvements to his DC generation plants. Several months later, when Tesla had
finished the work and asked to be paid, he said that Edison replied, "When
you become a full-fledged American you will appreciate an American joke."[48]
Tesla immediately resigned. With Tesla's salary of $18 per week, the payment
would have amounted to over 53 years' pay and the amount was equal to the
initial capital of the company. Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to
$25 per week.[49]
Although Tesla accepted an Edison Medal
later in life, this and other negative series of events concerning Edison
remained with Tesla. The day after Edison died, the New York Times
contained extensive coverage of Edison's life, with the only negative opinion
coming from Tesla who was quoted as saying:
He had no hobby, cared for no sort
of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary
rules of hygiene. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an
immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance
intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing
that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the
labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical
knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical
American sense.[50]
—Nikola Tesla
One of Edison's famous quotations
regarding his attempts to make the light globe suggest that perhaps Tesla was
right about Edison's methods of working: "If I find 10,000 ways something
won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt
discarded is another step forward."[51]
When Edison was a very old man and
close to death, he said, in looking back, that the biggest mistake he had made
was that he never respected Tesla or his work.[52]
Media
inventions
The key to Edison's fortunes was
telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph
operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This allowed him to make his
early fortune with the stock ticker, the first electricity-based broadcast system. Edison
patented the sound recording and reproducing phonograph in 1878. Edison was
also granted a patent for the motion picture camera or "Kinetograph".
He did the electromechanical design, while his employee W.K.L. Dickson,
a photographer, worked on the photographic and optical development. Much of the
credit for the invention belongs to Dickson.[32]
In 1891, Thomas Edison built a Kinetoscope,
or peep-hole viewer. This device was installed in penny arcades, where people
could watch short, simple films. The kinetograph and kinetoscope were both
first publicly exhibited May 20, 1891.[53]
On August 9, 1892, Edison received a
patent for a two-way telegraph. In April 1896, Thomas Armat's
Vitascope,
manufactured by the Edison factory and marketed in Edison's name, was used to
project motion pictures in public screenings in New York City. Later he
exhibited motion pictures with voice soundtrack on cylinder recordings,
mechanically synchronized with the film.
The June 1894 Leonard–Cushing bout.
Each of the six one-minute rounds recorded by the Kinetoscope was made
available to exhibitors for $22.50.[54]
Customers who watched the final round saw Leonard score a knockdown.
Officially the kinetoscope entered
Europe when the rich American Businessman Irving T. Bush
(1869–1948) bought from the Continental Commerce Company of Franck Z. Maguire
and Joseph D. Bachus a dozen machines. Bush placed from October 17, 1894, the
first kinetoscopes in London. At the same time the French company Kinétoscope
Edison Michel et Alexis Werner bought these machines for the market in France.
In the last three months of 1894 The Continental Commerce Company sold hundreds
of kinetoscopes in Europe (i.e. the Netherlands and Italy). In Germany and in Austria-Hungary
the kinetoscope was introduced by the Deutsche-österreichische-Edison-Kinetoscop
Gesellschaft, founded by the Ludwig Stollwerck[55]
of the Schokoladen-Süsswarenfabrik Stollwerck & Co of Cologne. The first
kinetoscopes arrived in Belgium at the Fairs in early 1895. The Edison's Kinétoscope Français, a Belgian
company, was founded in Brussels on January 15, 1895, with the rights to sell
the kinetoscopes in Monaco, France and the French colonies. The main investors
in this company were Belgian industrialists. On May 14, 1895, the Edison's
Kinétoscope Belge was founded in Brussels. The businessman Ladislas-Victor
Lewitzki, living in London but active in Belgium and France, took the initiative
in starting this business. He had contacts with Leon Gaumont
and the American
Mutoscope and Biograph Co. In
1898 he also became a shareholder of the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for
France.[56]
In 1901, he visited the Sudbury area in
Ontario, Canada, as a mining prospector, and is credited with the original
discovery of the Falconbridge ore body. His attempts to actually mine the ore body were
not successful, however, and he abandoned his mining claim in 1903.[57]
A street in Falconbridge, as well as the Edison
Building, which served as the head office of
Falconbridge Mines, are named for him.
In 1902, agents of Thomas Edison
bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New
York City. Méliès received no compensation. He was counting on taking the film
to the US and recapture its huge cost by showing it throughout the country when
he realized it had already been shown there by Edison. This effectively
bankrupted Méliès.[58]
Other exhibitors similarly routinely copied and exhibited each others films.[59]
To better protect the copyrights on his films, Edison deposited prints of them
on long strips of photographic paper with the U.S. copyright office. Many of these paper prints survived longer and in better
condition than the actual films of that era.[60]
Edison's favorite movie was The Birth
of a Nation. He thought that talkies had
"spoiled everything" for him. "There isn't any good acting on
the screen. They concentrate on the voice now and have forgotten how to act. I
can sense it more than you because I am deaf."[61]
His favorite stars were Mary Pickford
and Clara Bow.[62]
In 1908, Edison started the Motion
Picture Patents Company, which
was a conglomerate of nine major film studios (commonly known as the Edison
Trust). Thomas Edison was the first honorary fellow of the Acoustical
Society of America, which was founded in 1929.
West
Orange and Fort Myers (1886–1931)
Thomas A. Edison Industries Exhibit,
Primary Battery section, 1915
Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, respectively. Ft. Myers, Florida, February 11, 1929
Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, later lived a few hundred feet
away from Edison at his winter retreat in Fort Myers, Florida. Edison even
contributed technology to the automobile. They were friends until Edison's
death.
In 1928, Edison joined the Fort
Myers Civitan Club. He believed strongly in the organization, writing that
"The Civitan Club is doing things —big things— for the community, state,
and nation, and I certainly consider it an honor to be numbered in its
ranks."[63]
He was an active member in the club until his death, sometimes bringing Henry
Ford to the club's meetings.
The
final years
Edison was active in business right
up to the end. Just months before his death in 1931, the Lackawanna
Railroad implemented electric trains in
suburban service from Hoboken to Gladstone, Montclair and Dover in New
Jersey. Transmission was by means of an overhead catenary system, with the
entire project under Edison's guidance. To the surprise of many, he was at the
throttle of the very first MU (Multiple-Unit) train to depart Lackawanna
Terminal in Hoboken, driving the train all the way to Dover. As another tribute
to his lasting legacy, the same fleet of cars Edison deployed on the Lackawanna
in 1931 served commuters until their retirement in 1984, when some of them were
purchased by the Berkshire
Scenic Railway Museum in Lenox, Massachusetts. A special plaque commemorating the joint achievement of
both the railway and Edison can be seen today in the waiting room of Lackawanna
Terminal in Hoboken, presently operated by New Jersey Transit.[64]
Edison was said to have been
influenced by a popular fad diet in his
last few years; "the only liquid he consumed was a pint of milk every
three hours".[32]
He is reported to have believed this diet would restore his health. However,
this tale is doubtful. In 1930, the year before Edison died, Mina said in an
interview about him that "Correct eating is one of his greatest
hobbies." She also said that during one of his periodic "great
scientific adventures", Edison would be up at 7:00, have breakfast at
8:00, and be rarely home for lunch or dinner, implying that he continued to
have all three.[61]
Edison became the owner of his Milan, Ohio,
birthplace in 1906. On his last visit, in 1923, he was shocked to find his old
home still lit by lamps and candles.
Thomas Edison died of complications
of diabetes on October 18, 1931, in his home, "Glenmont" in Llewellyn Park
in West Orange, New Jersey, which he had purchased in 1886 as a wedding gift for Mina.
He is buried behind the home.[65][66]
Edison's last breath is reportedly
contained in a test tube at the Henry Ford
Museum. Ford reportedly convinced Charles Edison to seal a test tube of air in
the inventor's room shortly after his death, as a memento. A plaster death mask
was also made.[67]
Mina died in 1947.
Views
on politics, religion and metaphysics
Historian Paul Israel has
characterized Edison as a "freethinker".[32]
Edison was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's
The Age of Reason.[32]
Edison defended Paine's "scientific deism", saying, "He has been called an atheist, but
atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing
the idea which other men often express by the name of deity."[32]
In an October 2, 1910, interview in the New York
Times Magazine,
Edison stated:
Nature is what we know. We do not
know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If
God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke:
mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where
do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made
us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions.[68]
Edison was called an atheist for
those remarks, and although he did not allow himself to be drawn into the
controversy publicly, he clarified himself in a private letter: "You have
misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it
denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call
Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is
that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one
may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it
came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made."[32]
Nonviolence was key to Edison's
moral views, and when asked to serve as a naval consultant for World War I, he
specified he would work only on defensive weapons and later noted, "I am
proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill." Edison's
philosophy of nonviolence extended to animals as well, about which he stated:
"Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all
evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still
savages."[69]
However, he is also notorious for having electrocuted a number of dogs in 1888,
both by direct and alternating current, in an attempt to argue that the former
(which he had a vested business interest in promoting) was safer than the
latter (favored by his rival George Westinghouse).[70]
Edison's success in promoting direct current as less lethal also led to
alternating current being used in the electric chair adopted
by New York in 1889 as a supposedly humane
execution method; because Westinghouse was angered by the decision, he funded Eighth Amendment-based
appeals for inmates set to die in the electric chair, ultimately resulting in
Edison providing the generators which powered early electrocutions and
testifying successfully on behalf of the state that electrocution was a
painless method of execution.[71]
Tributes
Places
and people named for Edison
Several places have been named after
Edison, most notably the town of Edison, New Jersey. Thomas
Edison State College, a nationally known college for
adult learners, is in Trenton, New Jersey. Two community colleges are named for him: Edison State College in Fort Myers, Florida, and Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio.[72]
There are numerous high schools named after Edison; see Edison High School.
The City Hotel, in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, was the first building to be lit with Edison's three-wire
system. The hotel was re-named The Hotel Edison, and retains that name today.
The Russian composer Edison Denisov,
whose father was a radio-physicist, was named after the inventor.
Museums
and memorials
In West Orange, New Jersey, the
13.5 acre (5.5 ha) Glenmont estate is maintained and operated by the National Park Service as the Edison
National Historic Site.[73]
The Thomas
Alva Edison Memorial Tower and Museum
is in the town of Edison, New Jersey.[74]
In Beaumont, Texas, there is an Edison Museum, though Edison never visited
there.[citation
needed] The Port Huron Museum,
in Port Huron, Michigan, restored the original depot that Thomas Edison worked out
of as a young newsbutcher. The depot has been named the Thomas Edison
Depot Museum.[75]
The town has many Edison historical landmarks, including the graves of Edison's
parents, and a monument along the St. Clair River.
Edison's influence can be seen throughout this city of 32,000. In Detroit, the
Edison Memorial Fountain in Grand
Circus Park was created to honor his
achievements. The limestone fountain was dedicated October 21, 1929, the
fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the lightbulb.[76]
On the same night, The Edison Institute was dedicated in nearby Dearborn.
In early 2010, Edison was proposed
by the Ohio Historical Society as a finalist in a statewide vote for inclusion in Statuary Hall
at the United States Capitol.
Awards
named in honor of Edison
The Edison Medal
was created on February 11, 1904, by a group of Edison's friends and
associates. Four years later the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers
(AIEE), later IEEE, entered
into an agreement with the group to present the medal as its highest award. The
first medal was presented in 1909 to Elihu Thomson
and, in a twist of fate, was awarded to Nikola Tesla
in 1917. It is the oldest award in the area of electrical and electronics
engineering, and is presented annually
"for a career of meritorious achievement in electrical science, electrical
engineering or the electrical arts."
The American
Society of Mechanical Engineers
concedes the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award to individual patents since 2000.[77]
Honors
and awards given to Edison
The President of the Third French Republic, Jules Grévy,
on the recommendation of his Minister
of Foreign Affairs Jules
Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire and with
the presentations of the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Louis Cochery, designated Edison with the distinction of an 'Officer of the Legion of Honour' (Légion d'honneur) by decree on November 10, 1881;[78]
In 1983, the United States Congress, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 140 (Public Law
97—198), designated February 11, Edison's birthday, as National Inventor's Day.
In 1887, Edison won the Matteucci Medal.
In 1890, he was elected a member of the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Edison was awarded Franklin Medal
of The Franklin Institute in 1915 for discoveries contributing to the foundation of
industries and the well-being of the human race.
Edison was ranked thirty-fifth on Michael H. Hart's
1978 book The 100,
a list of the most influential figures in history. Life magazine
(USA), in a special double issue in 1997, placed Edison first in the list of
the "100 Most Important People in the Last 1000 Years", noting that
the light bulb
he promoted "lit up the world". In the 2005 television series The
Greatest American, he was voted by viewers as the
fifteenth-greatest.
On November 6, 1915 The New York
Times announced that both Edison and Tesla were to jointly receive the 1915
Nobel Prize but it did not occur. [80]
The details of what happened are not known but Tesla who had once worked for
Edison quit when he was promised a large bonus for solving a problem and then
after being successful was told the promise was a joke. [81]
Telsa once said that if Edison had to find a needle in a haystack he would take
apart the haystack one straw at a time. [82]
The Prize was awarded to Sir William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg
"for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of
X-rays" .
Other
items named after Edison
The United States Navy named the USS Edison (DD-439), a Gleaves class destroyer, in his honor in 1940. The ship was decommissioned a few
months after the end of World War II. In 1962, the Navy commissioned USS
Thomas A. Edison (SSBN-610),
a fleet ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine. Decommissioned on December
1, 1983, Thomas A. Edison was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on April 30, 1986. She went through the Navy's Nuclear Powered Ship and Submarine Recycling Program at Bremerton, Washington, beginning on October 1, 1996. When she finished the
program on December 1, 1997, she ceased to exist as a complete ship and was
listed as scrapped.
In
popular culture
Thomas Edison has appeared in popular culture
as a character in novels, films, comics and video games. His prolific inventing
helped make him an icon and he has made appearances in popular culture during
his lifetime down to the present day. His history with Nikola Tesla
has also provided dramatic tension and is a theme returned to numerous times.
On February 11, 2011, on Thomas
Edison's 164th birthday, Google's homepage featured an animated Google Doodle
commemorating his many inventions. When the cursor was hovered over the doodle,
a series of mechanisms seemed to move, causing a lightbulb to glow.
Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo
ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564[4] –
8 January 1642),[1][5]
was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope
and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy",[6]
the "father of modern physics",[7]
the "father of science",[7]
and "the Father of Modern Science".[8]
Galileo's
championing of heliocentrism
was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or
the Tychonic system.[9] He
met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the
absence of an observed stellar parallax.[9]
The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in
1615, and they concluded that it could only be supported as a possibility, not
as an established fact.[9][10]
Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII
and thus alienated him and the Jesuits,
who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[9] He
was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy",
forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.[11][12] It
was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works,
Two New Sciences. Here he summarized the work he had done some
forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materialsEarly life
Galileo was born in Pisa
(then part of the Duchy of Florence), Italy, the first of six
children of Vincenzo Galilei, a famous lutenist,
composer, and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati. Four of their
six children survived infancy, and the youngest Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo) also became a noted lutenist and
composer.
Galileo was named after an ancestor, Galileo Bonaiuti, a physician, university teacher and politician who lived in Florence from 1370 to 1450; at that time in the late 14th century, the family's surname shifted from Bonaiuti (or Buonaiuti) to Galilei. Galileo Bonaiuti was buried in the same church, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where about 200 years later his more famous descendant Galileo Galilei was buried too. When Galileo Galilei was 8, his family moved to Florence, but he was left with Jacopo Borghini for two years.[1] He then was educated in the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa, 35 km southeast of Florence.[1]
Galileo's beloved elder daughter, Virginia (Sister Maria
Celeste), was particularly devoted to her father. She is buried with him in
his tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.
Although a genuinely pious Roman Catholic,[15]
Galileo fathered three children out of wedlock with Marina
Gamba. They had two daughters, Virginia in 1600 and Livia in 1601, and one
son, Vincenzo, in 1606. Because of their illegitimate birth, their father
considered the girls unmarriageable. Their only worthy alternative was the
religious life. Both girls were sent to the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri and
remained there for the rest of their lives.[16]
Virginia took the name Maria Celeste upon entering the convent. She died on
2 April 1634, and is buried with Galileo at the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.
Livia took the name Sister Arcangela and was ill for most of her life. Vincenzo
was later legitimized and married Sestilia Bocchineri.[17]
In 1589, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa. In 1591 his father died and he was entrusted with the care of his younger brother Michelagnolo. In 1592, he moved to the University of Padua, teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610.[21] During this period Galileo made significant discoveries in both pure fundamental science (for example, kinematics of motion and astronomy) as well as practical applied science (for example, strength of materials and improvement of the telescope). His multiple interests included the study of astrology, which at the time was a discipline tied to the studies of mathematics and astronomy.[22]
For Galileo, the tides were caused by the sloshing back and forth of water in the seas as a point on the Earth's surface speeded up and slowed down because of the Earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the Sun. Galileo circulated his first account of the tides in 1616, addressed to Cardinal Orsini.[25] His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure.
If this theory were correct, there would be only one high tide per day. Galileo and his contemporaries were aware of this inadequacy because there are two daily high tides at Venice instead of one, about twelve hours apart. Galileo dismissed this anomaly as the result of several secondary causes, including the shape of the sea, its depth, and other factors.[26] Against the assertion that Galileo was deceptive in making these arguments, Albert Einstein expressed the opinion that Galileo developed his "fascinating arguments" and accepted them uncritically out of a desire for physical proof of the motion of the Earth.[27] Galileo dismissed as a "useless fiction" the idea, held by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the moon caused the tides.[28] Galileo also refused to accept Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets,[29] considering the circle the "perfect" shape for planetary orbits.
Grassi's arguments and conclusions were criticized in a subsequent article, Discourse on the Comets,[33] published under the name of one of Galileo's disciples, a Florentine lawyer named Mario Guiducci, although it had been largely written by Galileo himself.[34] Galileo and Guiducci offered no definitive theory of their own on the nature of comets,[35] although they did present some tentative conjectures that are now known to be mistaken. In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner,[36] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[37] The Jesuits were offended,[38] and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance,[39] under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano,[40] purporting to be one of his own pupils.
The Assayer was Galileo's devastating reply to the Astronomical Balance.[41] It has been widely regarded as a masterpiece of polemical literature,[42] in which "Sarsi's" arguments are subjected to withering scorn.[43] It was greeted with wide acclaim, and particularly pleased the new pope, Urban VIII, to whom it had been dedicated.[44] Galileo's dispute with Grassi permanently alienated many of the Jesuits who had previously been sympathetic to his ideas,[45] and Galileo and his friends were convinced that these Jesuits were responsible for bringing about his later condemnation.[46] The evidence for this is at best equivocal, however.[47]
Biblical references Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include text stating that "the
world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." In the same manner, Psalm
104:5 says, "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never
be moved." Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "And the sun rises and
sets and returns to its place" etc.[48]
Galileo defended heliocentrism, and claimed it was not contrary to those Scripture passages. He took Augustine's position on Scripture: not to take every passage literally, particularly when the scripture in question is a book of poetry and songs, not a book of instructions or history. He believed that the writers of the Scripture merely wrote from the perspective of the terrestrial world, from that vantage point that the sun does rise and set. Another way to put this is that the writers would have been writing from a phenomenological point of view, or style. So Galileo claimed that science did not contradict Scripture, as Scripture was discussing a different kind of "movement" of the earth, and not rotations.[49]
By 1616 the attacks on the ideas of Copernicus had reached a head, and Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade the Catholic Church authorities not to ban Copernicus' ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and the church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.[citation needed]
Dava Sobel[50] explains that during this time, Urban had begun to fall more and more under the influence of court intrigue and problems of state. His friendship with Galileo began to take second place to his feelings of persecution and fear for his own life. At this low point in Urban's life, the problem of Galileo was presented to the pope by court insiders and enemies of Galileo. Coming on top of the recent claim by the then Spanish cardinal that Urban was soft on defending the church, he reacted out of anger and fear. This situation did not bode well for Galileo's defense of his book.
Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also has the connotation of "simpleton".[51] This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[52] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.
With the loss of many of his defenders in Rome because of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. The sentence of the Inquisition was in three essential parts:
After a period with the friendly Ascanio Piccolomini (the Archbishop of Siena), Galileo was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence in 1634, where he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Galileo was ordered to read the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. However his daughter Maria Celeste relieved him of the burden after securing ecclesiastical permission to take it upon herself.[57] It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he dedicated his time to one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarized work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials. This book has received high praise from Albert Einstein.[58] As a result of this work, Galileo is often called the "father of modern physics". He went completely blind in 1638 and was suffering from a painful hernia and insomnia, so he was permitted to travel to Florence for medical advice.[13][14]
Galileo was one of the first modern thinkers to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical. In The Assayer he wrote "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe ... It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures;...."[69] His mathematical analyses are a further development of a tradition employed by late scholastic natural philosophers, which Galileo learned when he studied philosophy.[70] He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of science from both philosophy and religion; a major development in human thought. He was often willing to change his views in accordance with observation. In order to perform his experiments, Galileo had to set up standards of length and time, so that measurements made on different days and in different laboratories could be compared in a reproducible fashion. This provided a reliable foundation on which to confirm mathematical laws using inductive reasoning.
Galileo showed a remarkably modern appreciation for the proper relationship between mathematics, theoretical physics, and experimental physics. He understood the parabola, both in terms of conic sections and in terms of the ordinate (y) varying as the square of the abscissa (x). Galilei further asserted that the parabola was the theoretically ideal trajectory of a uniformly accelerated projectile in the absence of friction and other disturbances. He conceded that there are limits to the validity of this theory, noting on theoretical grounds that a projectile trajectory of a size comparable to that of the Earth could not possibly be a parabola,[71] but he nevertheless maintained that for distances up to the range of the artillery of his day, the deviation of a projectile's trajectory from a parabola would only be very slight.[72]
His observations of the satellites of Jupiter created a revolution in astronomy that reverberates to this day: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian Cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth,[79] and many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that Galileo could have discovered such a thing.[80] His observations were confirmed by the observatory of Christopher Clavius and he received a hero's welcome when he visited Rome in 1611.[81] Galileo continued to observe the satellites over the next eighteen months, and by mid 1611 he had obtained remarkably accurate estimates for their periods—a feat which Kepler had believed impossible.[82]
Galileo observed the planet Saturn, and at first mistook its rings for planets, thinking it was a three-bodied system. When he observed the planet later, Saturn's rings were directly oriented at Earth, causing him to think that two of the bodies had disappeared. The rings reappeared when he observed the planet in 1616, further confusing him.[85]
Galileo also observed the planet Neptune in 1612. It appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars. He did not realize that it was a planet, but he did note its motion relative to the stars before losing track of it.[86]
In the Starry Messenger Galileo reported that stars appeared as mere blazes of light, essentially unaltered in appearance by the telescope, and contrasted them to planets, which the telescope revealed to be discs. But shortly thereafter, in his letters on sunspots, he reported that the telescope revealed the shapes of both stars and planets to be "quite round". From that point forward he continued to report that telescopes showed the roundness of stars, and that stars seen through the telescope measured a few seconds of arc in diameter.[91] He also devised a method for measuring the apparent size of a star without a telescope. As described in his Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems, his method was to hang a thin rope in his line of sight to the star and measure the maximum distance from which it would wholly obscure the star. From his measurements of this distance and of the width of the rope he could calculate the angle subtended by the star at his viewing point.[92] In his Dialogue he reported that he had found the apparent diameter of a star of first magnitude to be no more than 5 arcseconds, and that of one of sixth magnitude to be about 5/6 arcseconds. Like most astronomers of his day, Galileo did not recognize that the apparent sizes of stars that he measured were spurious, caused by diffraction and atmospheric distortion (see seeing disk or Airy disk), and did not represent the true sizes of stars. However, Galileo's values were much smaller than previous estimates of the apparent sizes of the brightest stars, such as those made by Tycho Brahe (see Magnitude) and enabled Galileo to counter anti-Copernican arguments such as those made by Tycho that these stars would have to be absurdly large for their annual parallaxes to be undetectable.[93] Other astronomers such as Simon Marius, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, and Martinus Hortensius made similar measurements of stars, and Marius and Riccioli concluded the smaller sizes were not small enough to answer Tycho's argument.[94]
In about 1593, Galileo constructed a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.
In 1609, Galileo was, along with Englishman Thomas
Harriot and others, among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to
observe stars, planets or moons. The name "telescope" was coined for
Galileo's instrument by a Greek mathematician, Giovanni Demisiani,[96]
at a banquet held in 1611 by Prince Federico
Cesi to make Galileo a member of his Accademia dei Lincei.[97]
The name was derived from the Greek tele = 'far' and skopein =
'to look or see'. In 1610, he used a telescope at close range to magnify the
parts of insects.[98]
By 1624 Galileo had perfected[99]
a compound microscope.
He gave one of these instruments to Cardinal Zollern in May of that year for
presentation to the Duke of Bavaria,[100]
and in September he sent another to Prince Cesi.[101]
The Linceans played a role again in naming the
"microscope" a year later when fellow academy member Giovanni
Faber coined the word for Galileo's invention from the Greek words μικρόν
(micron) meaning "small", and σκοπεῖν (skopein)
meaning "to look at". The word was meant to be analogous with
"telescope".[102][103]
Illustrations of insects made using one of Galileo's microscopes, and published
in 1625, appear to have been the first clear documentation of the
use of a compound microscope.[104]
In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for large land surveys; this method, for example, was used by Lewis and Clark. For sea navigation, where delicate telescopic observations were more difficult, the longitude problem eventually required development of a practical portable marine chronometer, such as that of John Harrison.[105] In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock (called Galileo's escapement), a vectorial model of which may be seen here. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.
Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with, being one of the first to understand sound frequency. By scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of the sound produced to the spacing of the chisel's skips, a measure of frequency. In 1638 Galileo described an experimental method to measure the speed of light by arranging that two observers, each having lanterns equipped with shutters, observe each other's lanterns at some distance. The first observer opens the shutter of his lamp, and, the second, upon seeing the light, immediately opens the shutter of his own lantern. The time between the first observer's opening his shutter and seeing the light from the second observer's lamp indicates the time it takes light to travel back and forth between the two observers. Galileo reported that when he tried this at a distance of less than a mile, he was unable to determine whether or not the light appeared instantaneously.[107] Sometime between Galileo's death and 1667, the members of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento repeated the experiment over a distance of about a mile and obtained a similarly inconclusive result.[108] Galileo put forward the basic principle of relativity, that the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, regardless of its particular speed or direction. Hence, there is no absolute motion or absolute rest. This principle provided the basic framework for Newton's laws of motion and is central to Einstein's special theory of relativity.
In his 1638 Discorsi Galileo's character Salviati, widely regarded as Galileo's spokesman, held that all unequal weights would fall with the same finite speed in a vacuum. But this had previously been proposed by Lucretius[112] and Simon Stevin.[113] Cristiano Banti's Salviati also held it could be experimentally demonstrated by the comparison of pendulum motions in air with bobs of lead and of cork which had different weight but which were otherwise similar.
Galileo proposed that a
falling body would fall with a uniform acceleration, as long as the resistance
of the medium through which it was falling remained negligible, or in the
limiting case of its falling through a vacuum.[114]
He also derived the correct kinematical law for the distance travelled during a
uniformceleration starting from rest—namely, that it is proportional to the
square of the elapsed time ( d ∝ t 2).[115]However,in neither case were these discoveries entirely original. The
time-squared law for uniformly accelerated change was already known to Nicole
Oresme in the 14th century,[116]
and Domingo de Soto, in the 16th, had suggested that
bodies falling through a homogeneous medium would be uniformly accelerated.[117]
Galileo expressed the time-squared law using geometrical constructions and
mathematically precise words, adhering to the standards of the day. (It
remained for others to re-express the law in algebraic terms). He also
concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force—often friction—acts
upon them, refuting the generally accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects
"naturally" slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them
(philosophical ideas relating to inertia had been proposed by John
Philoponus centuries earlier, as had Jean
Buridan, and according to Joseph
Needham, Mo
Tzu had proposed it centuries before either of them, but this was the first
time that it had been mathematically expressed, verified experimentally, and
introduced the idea of frictional force, the key breakthrough in validating
inertia). Galileo's Principle of Inertia stated: "A body moving on a level
surface will continue in the same direction at constant speed unless
disturbed." This principle was incorporated into Newton's laws of motion (first law).
Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo's paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares.
Statue outside the Uffizi, Florence
Galileo's early works describing scientific instruments include the 1586 tract
entitled The Little Balance (La Billancetta) describing an
accurate balance to weigh objects in air or water[118]
and the 1606 printed manual Le Operazioni del Compasso Geometrico et
Militare on the operation of a geometrical and military compass.[119]
His early works in dynamics, the science of motion and mechanics were his 1590 Pisan De Motu (On Motion) and his circa 1600 Paduan Le Meccaniche (Mechanics). The former was based on Aristotelian–Archimedean fluid dynamics and held that the speed of gravitational fall in a fluid medium was proportional to the excess of a body's specific weight over that of the medium, whereby in a vacuum bodies would fall with speeds in proportion to their specific weights. It also subscribed to the Hipparchan-Philoponan impetus dynamics in which impetus is self-dissipating and free-fall in a vacuum would have an essential terminal speed according to specific weight after an initial period of acceleration.
Galileo's 1610 The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) was the first scientific treatise to be published based on observations made through a telescope. It reported his discoveries of:
In 1623, Galileo published The Assayer—Il Saggiatore, which attacked theories based on Aristotle's authority and promoted experimentation and the mathematical formulation of scientific ideas. The book was highly successful and even found support among the higher echelons of the Christian church.[124] Following the success of The Assayer, Galileo published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) in 1632. Despite taking care to adhere to the Inquisition's 1616 instructions, the claims in the book favouring Copernican theory and a non Geocentric model of the solar system led to Galileo being tried and banned on publication. Despite the publication ban, Galileo published his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze) in 1638 in Holland, outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
Copernicus's De Revolutionibus remained.[129] All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index.[130]
In 1939 Pope Pius XII, in his first speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, within a few months of his election to the papacy, described Galileo as being among the "most audacious heroes of research... not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments".[131] His close advisor of 40 years, Professor Robert Leiber wrote: "Pius XII was very careful not to close any doors (to science) prematurely. He was energetic on this point and regretted that in the case of Galileo."[132]
On 15 February 1990, in a speech delivered at the Sapienza University of Rome,[133] Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) cited some current views on the Galileo affair as forming what he called "a symptomatic case that permits us to see how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science and technology goes today".[134] Some of the views he cited were those of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, whom he quoted as saying "The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune."[134] The Cardinal did not clearly indicate whether he agreed or disagreed with Feyerabend's assertions. He did, however, say "It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views."[134]
On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and issued a declaration acknowledging the errors committed by the Catholic Church tribunal that judged the scientific positions of Galileo Galilei, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.[135][136] In March 2008 the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Nicola Cabibbo, announced a plan to honour Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.[137] In December of the same year, during events to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo's earliest telescopic observations, Pope Benedict XVI praised his contributions to astronomy.[138] A month later, however, the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Gianfranco Ravasi, revealed that the plan to erect a statue of Galileo in the grounds of the Vatican had been suspended.[139]
Galileo's astronomical discoveries and investigations into the Copernican theory have led to a lasting legacy which includes the categorisation of the four large moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) as the Galilean moons. Other scientific endeavours and principles are named after Galileo including the Galileo spacecraft,[143] the first spacecraft to enter orbit around Jupiter, the proposed Galileo global satellite navigation system, the transformation between inertial systems in classical mechanics denoted Galilean transformation and the Gal (unit), sometimes known as the Galileo which is a non-SI unit of acceleration.
Partly because 2009 was the fourth centenary of Galileo's first recorded
astronomical observations with the telescope, the United Nations scheduled it
to be the International Year of Astronomy.[144]
A global scheme was laid out by the International Astronomical Union
(IAU), also endorsed by UNESCO—the UN
body responsible for Educational, Scientific and Cultural matters. The International Year of Astronomy
2009 was intended to be a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions
to society and culture, stimulating worldwide interest not only in astronomy
but science in general, with a particular slant towards young people.
Asteroid 697 Galilea is named in his honour.
Twentieth-century plays have been written on Galileo's life, including Life of Galileo (1943) by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, with a film adaptation (1975) of it, and Lamp At Midnight (1947) by Barrie Stavis,[146] as well as the 2008 play "Galileo Galilei".[147]
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a science fiction novel entitled Galileo's Dream (2009), in which Galileo is brought into the future to help resolve a crisis of scientific philosophy; the story moves back and forth between Galileo's own time and a hypothetical distant future.[148]
Galileo Galilei was recently selected as a main motif for a high value collectors' coin: the €25 International Year of Astronomy commemorative coin, minted in 2009. This coin also commemorates the 400th anniversary of the invention of Galileo's telescope. The obverse shows a portion of his portrait and his telescope. The background shows one of his first drawings of the surface of the moon. In the silver ring other telescopes are depicted: the Isaac Newton Telescope, the observatory in Kremsmünster Abbey, a modern telescope, a radio telescope and a space telescope. In 2009, the Galileoscope was also released. This is a mass-produced, low-cost educational 2-inch (51 mm) telescope with relatively high quality.
Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo
ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564[4] –
8 January 1642),[1][5]
was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher
who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope
and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy",[6]
the "father of modern physics",[7]
the "father of science",[7]
and "the Father of Modern Science".[8]
His contributions to observational
astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus,
the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named
the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo
also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.
Galileo's
championing of heliocentrism
was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or
the Tychonic system.[9] He
met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the
absence of an observed stellar parallax.[9]
The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in
1615, and they concluded that it could only be supported as a possibility, not
as an established fact.[9][10]
Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII
and thus alienated him and the Jesuits,
who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[9] He
was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy",
forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.[11][12] It
was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works,
Two New Sciences. Here he summarized the work he had done some
forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materialsEarly life
Galileo was born in Pisa
(then part of the Duchy of Florence), Italy, the first of six
children of Vincenzo Galilei, a famous lutenist,
composer, and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati. Four of their
six children survived infancy, and the youngest Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo) also became a noted lutenist and
composer.Galileo was named after an ancestor, Galileo Bonaiuti, a physician, university teacher and politician who lived in Florence from 1370 to 1450; at that time in the late 14th century, the family's surname shifted from Bonaiuti (or Buonaiuti) to Galilei. Galileo Bonaiuti was buried in the same church, the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where about 200 years later his more famous descendant Galileo Galilei was buried too. When Galileo Galilei was 8, his family moved to Florence, but he was left with Jacopo Borghini for two years.[1] He then was educated in the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa, 35 km southeast of Florence.[1]
Galileo's beloved elder daughter, Virginia (Sister Maria
Celeste), was particularly devoted to her father. She is buried with him in
his tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.Career as a scientist
Although he seriously considered the priesthood as a young man, at his father's urging he instead enrolled at the University of Pisa for a medical degree. He did not complete this degree, but instead studied mathematics.[18] Galileo was also studious of disegno, a term encompassing fine art, and in 1588 attained an instructor position in the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, teaching perspective and chiaroscuro. Being inspired by the artistic tradition of the city and the works of the Renaissance artists, Galileo acquired an aesthetic mentality. While a young teacher at the Accademia, he began a lifelong friendship with the Florentine painter Cigoli, who included Galileo's lunar observations in one of his paintings.[19][20]In 1589, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics in Pisa. In 1591 his father died and he was entrusted with the care of his younger brother Michelagnolo. In 1592, he moved to the University of Padua, teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610.[21] During this period Galileo made significant discoveries in both pure fundamental science (for example, kinematics of motion and astronomy) as well as practical applied science (for example, strength of materials and improvement of the telescope). His multiple interests included the study of astrology, which at the time was a discipline tied to the studies of mathematics and astronomy.[22]
Galileo,
Kepler and theories of tides
Galileo Galilei. Portrait by Leoni
Cardinal Bellarmine had written in 1615 that the Copernican system could not
be defended without "a true physical
demonstration that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the
sun".[23]
Galileo considered his theory of the tides to provide the required physical
proof of the motion of the earth. This theory was so important to Galileo that
he originally intended to entitle his Dialogue on the Two Chief World
Systems the Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea.[24]
The reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.For Galileo, the tides were caused by the sloshing back and forth of water in the seas as a point on the Earth's surface speeded up and slowed down because of the Earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the Sun. Galileo circulated his first account of the tides in 1616, addressed to Cardinal Orsini.[25] His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure.
If this theory were correct, there would be only one high tide per day. Galileo and his contemporaries were aware of this inadequacy because there are two daily high tides at Venice instead of one, about twelve hours apart. Galileo dismissed this anomaly as the result of several secondary causes, including the shape of the sea, its depth, and other factors.[26] Against the assertion that Galileo was deceptive in making these arguments, Albert Einstein expressed the opinion that Galileo developed his "fascinating arguments" and accepted them uncritically out of a desire for physical proof of the motion of the Earth.[27] Galileo dismissed as a "useless fiction" the idea, held by his contemporary Johannes Kepler, that the moon caused the tides.[28] Galileo also refused to accept Kepler's elliptical orbits of the planets,[29] considering the circle the "perfect" shape for planetary orbits.
Controversy over comets and The Assayer
Main article: The
Assayer
In 1619, Galileo became embroiled in a controversy with Father Orazio
Grassi, professor of mathematics at the Jesuit Collegio
Romano. It began as a dispute over the nature of comets, but by the time
Galileo had published The Assayer (Il Saggiatore) in 1623, his
last salvo in the dispute, it had become a much wider argument over the very
nature of science itself. Because The Assayer contains such a wealth of
Galileo's ideas on how science should be practised, it has been referred to as
his scientific manifesto.[30]
Early in 1619, Father Grassi had anonymously published a pamphlet, An
Astronomical Disputation on the Three Comets of the Year 1618, [31]
which discussed the nature of a comet that had appeared late in November of the
previous year. Grassi concluded that the comet was a fiery body which had moved
along a segment of a great circle at a constant distance from the earth,[32]
and since it moved in the sky more slowly than the moon, it must be farther
away than the moon.Grassi's arguments and conclusions were criticized in a subsequent article, Discourse on the Comets,[33] published under the name of one of Galileo's disciples, a Florentine lawyer named Mario Guiducci, although it had been largely written by Galileo himself.[34] Galileo and Guiducci offered no definitive theory of their own on the nature of comets,[35] although they did present some tentative conjectures that are now known to be mistaken. In its opening passage, Galileo and Guiducci's Discourse gratuitously insulted the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner,[36] and various uncomplimentary remarks about the professors of the Collegio Romano were scattered throughout the work.[37] The Jesuits were offended,[38] and Grassi soon replied with a polemical tract of his own, The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance,[39] under the pseudonym Lothario Sarsio Sigensano,[40] purporting to be one of his own pupils.
The Assayer was Galileo's devastating reply to the Astronomical Balance.[41] It has been widely regarded as a masterpiece of polemical literature,[42] in which "Sarsi's" arguments are subjected to withering scorn.[43] It was greeted with wide acclaim, and particularly pleased the new pope, Urban VIII, to whom it had been dedicated.[44] Galileo's dispute with Grassi permanently alienated many of the Jesuits who had previously been sympathetic to his ideas,[45] and Galileo and his friends were convinced that these Jesuits were responsible for bringing about his later condemnation.[46] The evidence for this is at best equivocal, however.[47]
Controversy over heliocentrism
Main article: Galileo
affair
Cristiano
Banti's 1857 painting Galileo facing the Roman
Inquisition
Galileo defended heliocentrism, and claimed it was not contrary to those Scripture passages. He took Augustine's position on Scripture: not to take every passage literally, particularly when the scripture in question is a book of poetry and songs, not a book of instructions or history. He believed that the writers of the Scripture merely wrote from the perspective of the terrestrial world, from that vantage point that the sun does rise and set. Another way to put this is that the writers would have been writing from a phenomenological point of view, or style. So Galileo claimed that science did not contradict Scripture, as Scripture was discussing a different kind of "movement" of the earth, and not rotations.[49]
By 1616 the attacks on the ideas of Copernicus had reached a head, and Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade the Catholic Church authorities not to ban Copernicus' ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and the church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.[citation needed]
Dava Sobel[50] explains that during this time, Urban had begun to fall more and more under the influence of court intrigue and problems of state. His friendship with Galileo began to take second place to his feelings of persecution and fear for his own life. At this low point in Urban's life, the problem of Galileo was presented to the pope by court insiders and enemies of Galileo. Coming on top of the recent claim by the then Spanish cardinal that Urban was soft on defending the church, he reacted out of anger and fear. This situation did not bode well for Galileo's defense of his book.
Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also has the connotation of "simpleton".[51] This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[52] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.
With the loss of many of his defenders in Rome because of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo was ordered to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633. The sentence of the Inquisition was in three essential parts:
·
Galileo was found "vehemently suspect of
heresy", namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless
at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves,
and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been
declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to "abjure,
curse and detest" those opinions.[53]
·
He was sentenced to formal imprisonment at the
pleasure of the Inquisition.[54]
On the following day this was commuted to house arrest, which he remained under
for the rest of his life.
·
His offending Dialogue was banned; and in
an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was
forbidden, including any he might write in the future.[55]
Tomb of Galileo Galilei, Santa Croce
According to popular legend, after recanting his theory that the Earth moved
around the Sun, Galileo allegedly muttered the rebellious phrase And
yet it moves, but there is no evidence that he actually said this or
anything similar. The first account of the legend dates to a century after his
death.[56]After a period with the friendly Ascanio Piccolomini (the Archbishop of Siena), Galileo was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence in 1634, where he spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. Galileo was ordered to read the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. However his daughter Maria Celeste relieved him of the burden after securing ecclesiastical permission to take it upon herself.[57] It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he dedicated his time to one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarized work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials. This book has received high praise from Albert Einstein.[58] As a result of this work, Galileo is often called the "father of modern physics". He went completely blind in 1638 and was suffering from a painful hernia and insomnia, so he was permitted to travel to Florence for medical advice.[13][14]
Death
Galileo continued to receive visitors until 1642, when, after suffering fever and heart palpitations, he died on 8 January 1642, aged 77.[13] The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando II, wished to bury him in the main body of the Basilica of Santa Croce, next to the tombs of his father and other ancestors, and to erect a marble mausoleum in his honour.[59] These plans were scrapped, however, after Pope Urban VIII and his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, protested,[60] because Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for "vehement suspicion of heresy".[61] He was instead buried in a small room next to the novices' chapel at the end of a corridor from the southern transept of the basilica to the sacristy.[62] He was reburied in the main body of the basilica in 1737 after a monument had been erected there in his honour;[63] during this move, three fingers and a tooth were removed from his remains.[64] One of these fingers, the middle finger from Galileo's right hand, is currently on exhibition at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy.[65]Scientific methods
Galileo made original contributions to the science of motion through an innovative combination of experiment and mathematics.[66] More typical of science at the time were the qualitative studies of William Gilbert, on magnetism and electricity. Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had performed experiments establishing perhaps the oldest known non-linear relation in physics: for a stretched string, the pitch varies as the square root of the tension.[67] These observations lay within the framework of the Pythagorean tradition of music, well-known to instrument makers, which included the fact that subdividing a string by a whole number produces a harmonious scale. Thus, a limited amount of mathematics had long related music and physical science, and young Galileo could see his own father's observations expand on that tradition.[68]Galileo was one of the first modern thinkers to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical. In The Assayer he wrote "Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe ... It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures;...."[69] His mathematical analyses are a further development of a tradition employed by late scholastic natural philosophers, which Galileo learned when he studied philosophy.[70] He displayed a peculiar ability to ignore established authorities, most notably Aristotelianism. In broader terms, his work marked another step towards the eventual separation of science from both philosophy and religion; a major development in human thought. He was often willing to change his views in accordance with observation. In order to perform his experiments, Galileo had to set up standards of length and time, so that measurements made on different days and in different laboratories could be compared in a reproducible fashion. This provided a reliable foundation on which to confirm mathematical laws using inductive reasoning.
Galileo showed a remarkably modern appreciation for the proper relationship between mathematics, theoretical physics, and experimental physics. He understood the parabola, both in terms of conic sections and in terms of the ordinate (y) varying as the square of the abscissa (x). Galilei further asserted that the parabola was the theoretically ideal trajectory of a uniformly accelerated projectile in the absence of friction and other disturbances. He conceded that there are limits to the validity of this theory, noting on theoretical grounds that a projectile trajectory of a size comparable to that of the Earth could not possibly be a parabola,[71] but he nevertheless maintained that for distances up to the range of the artillery of his day, the deviation of a projectile's trajectory from a parabola would only be very slight.[72]
Astronomy
Fresco by Giuseppe
Bertini depicting Galileo
showing the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope
It was on this page that Galileo first noted an observation
of the moons of Jupiter. This
observation upset the notion that all celestial bodies must revolve around the
Earth. Galileo published a full description in Sidereus Nuncius in March
1610
The phases of Venus, observed by Galileo in 1610
Based only on uncertain descriptions of the first practical telescope,
invented by Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands in 1608,
Galileo, in the following year, made a telescope with about 3x magnification.
He later made improved versions with up to about 30x magnification.[73]
With a Galilean telescope the observer could see
magnified, upright images on the earth—it was what is commonly known as a
terrestrial telescope or a spyglass. He could also use it to observe the sky;
for a time he was one of those who could construct telescopes good enough for
that purpose. On 25 August 1609, he demonstrated one of his early telescopes,
with a magnification of about 8 or 9, to Venetian lawmakers.
His telescopes were also a profitable sideline for Galileo selling them to
merchants who found them useful both at sea and as items of trade. He published
his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a brief
treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger).[74]Jupiter
On 7 January 1610 Galileo observed with his telescope what he described at the time as "three fixed stars, totally invisible[75] by their smallness", all close to Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it.[76] Observations on subsequent nights showed that the positions of these "stars" relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars. On 10 January Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter:[77] He had discovered three of Jupiter's four largest satellites (moons). He discovered the fourth on 13 January. These satellites are now called Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Galileo named the group of four the Medicean stars, in honour of his future patron, Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Cosimo's three brothers.[78] Later astronomers, however, renamed them Galilean satellites in honour of their discoverer.His observations of the satellites of Jupiter created a revolution in astronomy that reverberates to this day: a planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian Cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth,[79] and many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that Galileo could have discovered such a thing.[80] His observations were confirmed by the observatory of Christopher Clavius and he received a hero's welcome when he visited Rome in 1611.[81] Galileo continued to observe the satellites over the next eighteen months, and by mid 1611 he had obtained remarkably accurate estimates for their periods—a feat which Kepler had believed impossible.[82]
Venus, Saturn, and Neptune
From September 1610, Galileo observed that Venus exhibited a full set of phases similar to that of the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Nicolaus Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun. On the other hand, in Ptolemy's geocentric model it was impossible for any of the planets' orbits to intersect the spherical shell carrying the Sun. Traditionally the orbit of Venus was placed entirely on the near side of the Sun, where it could exhibit only crescent and new phases. It was, however, also possible to place it entirely on the far side of the Sun, where it could exhibit only gibbous and full phases. After Galileo's telescopic observations of the crescent, gibbous and full phases of Venus, therefore, this Ptolemaic model became untenable. Thus in the early 17th century as a result of his discovery the great majority of astronomers converted to one of the various geo-heliocentric planetary models,[83] such as the Tychonic, Capellan and Extended Capellan models,[84] each either with or without a daily rotating Earth. These all had the virtue of explaining the phases of Venus without the vice of the 'refutation' of full heliocentrism’s prediction of stellar parallax. Galileo’s discovery of the phases of Venus was thus arguably his most empirically practically influential contribution to the two-stage transition from full geocentrism to full heliocentrism via geo-heliocentrism.Galileo observed the planet Saturn, and at first mistook its rings for planets, thinking it was a three-bodied system. When he observed the planet later, Saturn's rings were directly oriented at Earth, causing him to think that two of the bodies had disappeared. The rings reappeared when he observed the planet in 1616, further confusing him.[85]
Galileo also observed the planet Neptune in 1612. It appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars. He did not realize that it was a planet, but he did note its motion relative to the stars before losing track of it.[86]
Sunspots
Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although Kepler had unwittingly observed one in 1607, but mistook it for a transit of Mercury. He also reinterpreted a sunspot observation from the time of Charlemagne, which formerly had been attributed (impossibly) to a transit of Mercury. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the unchanging perfection of the heavens posited by orthodox Aristotelian celestial physics, but their regular periodic transits also confirmed the dramatic novel prediction of Kepler's Aristotelian celestial dynamics in his 1609 Astronomia Nova that the sun rotates, which was the first successful novel prediction of post-spherist celestial physics.[87] And the annual variations in sunspots' motions, discovered by Francesco Sizzi and others in 1612–1613,[88] provided a powerful argument against both the Ptolemaic system and the geoheliocentric system of Tycho Brahe.[89] A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots, and in their interpretation, led Galileo to a long and bitter feud with the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there is little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes, looking for confirmation of Kepler's prediction of the sun's rotation. Scheiner quickly adopted Kepler's 1615 proposal of the modern telescope design, which gave larger magnification at the cost of inverted images; Galileo apparently never changed to Kepler's design.Moon
Prior to Galileo's construction of his version of a telescope, Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician and explorer, had already used what he dubbed a "perspective tube" to observe the moon. Reporting his observations, Harriot noted only "strange spottednesse" in the waning of the crescent, but was ignorant to the cause. Galileo, due in part to his artistic training[20] and the knowledge of chiaroscuro,[19] had understood the patterns of light and shadow were in fact topological markers. While not being the only one to observe the moon through a telescope, Galileo was the first to deduce the cause of the uneven waning as light occlusion from lunar mountains and craters. In his study he also made topological charts, estimating the heights of the mountains. The moon was not what was long thought to have been a translucent and perfect sphere, as Aristotle claimed, and hardly the first "planet", an "eternal pearl to magnificently ascend into the heavenly empyrian", as put forth by Dante.Milky Way and stars
Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye. He observed the double star Mizar in Ursa Major in 1617.[90]In the Starry Messenger Galileo reported that stars appeared as mere blazes of light, essentially unaltered in appearance by the telescope, and contrasted them to planets, which the telescope revealed to be discs. But shortly thereafter, in his letters on sunspots, he reported that the telescope revealed the shapes of both stars and planets to be "quite round". From that point forward he continued to report that telescopes showed the roundness of stars, and that stars seen through the telescope measured a few seconds of arc in diameter.[91] He also devised a method for measuring the apparent size of a star without a telescope. As described in his Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems, his method was to hang a thin rope in his line of sight to the star and measure the maximum distance from which it would wholly obscure the star. From his measurements of this distance and of the width of the rope he could calculate the angle subtended by the star at his viewing point.[92] In his Dialogue he reported that he had found the apparent diameter of a star of first magnitude to be no more than 5 arcseconds, and that of one of sixth magnitude to be about 5/6 arcseconds. Like most astronomers of his day, Galileo did not recognize that the apparent sizes of stars that he measured were spurious, caused by diffraction and atmospheric distortion (see seeing disk or Airy disk), and did not represent the true sizes of stars. However, Galileo's values were much smaller than previous estimates of the apparent sizes of the brightest stars, such as those made by Tycho Brahe (see Magnitude) and enabled Galileo to counter anti-Copernican arguments such as those made by Tycho that these stars would have to be absurdly large for their annual parallaxes to be undetectable.[93] Other astronomers such as Simon Marius, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, and Martinus Hortensius made similar measurements of stars, and Marius and Riccioli concluded the smaller sizes were not small enough to answer Tycho's argument.[94]
Technology
Galileo's geometrical and military compass, thought to have
been made c. 1604 by his personal instrument-maker Marc'Antonio Mazzoleni
Galileo made a number of contributions to what is now known as technology,
as distinct from pure physics. This is not the same distinction as made by
Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo's physics as techne or
useful knowledge, as opposed to episteme, or philosophical investigation
into the causes of things. Between 1595 and 1598, Galileo devised and improved
a Geometric and Military Compass suitable for use by gunners and surveyors.
This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolò Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered,
in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately,
a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for
cannonballs
of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the
construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular
sector, and a variety of other calculations. Under Galileo's direction,
instrument maker Marc'Antonio Mazzoleni produced more than
100 of these compasses, which Galileo sold (along with an instruction manual he
wrote) for 50 lire and offered a course of instruction in the use of the
compasses for 120 lire.[95]In about 1593, Galileo constructed a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.
*A replica of the earliest surviving telescope attributed to
Galileo Galilei, on display at the Griffith Observatory.
In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter's satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for large land surveys; this method, for example, was used by Lewis and Clark. For sea navigation, where delicate telescopic observations were more difficult, the longitude problem eventually required development of a practical portable marine chronometer, such as that of John Harrison.[105] In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock (called Galileo's escapement), a vectorial model of which may be seen here. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.
Physics
Galileo e Viviani,
1892, Tito Lessi
Galileo's theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along
with the largely independent work of Kepler and René
Descartes, was a precursor of the classical mechanics developed by Sir Isaac
Newton. Galileo conducted several experiments with pendulums. It
is popularly believed (thanks to the biography by Vincenzo
Viviani) that these began by watching the swings of the bronze chandelier
in the cathedral of Pisa, using his pulse as a timer. Later experiments are
described in his Two New Sciences. Galileo claimed that a
simple pendulum is isochronous, i.e. that its swings always take the same
amount of time, independently of the amplitude. In
fact, this is only approximately true,[106]
as was discovered by Christian Huygens. Galileo also found that the
square of the period varies directly with the length of the pendulum. Galileo's
son, Vincenzo, sketched a clock based on his father's theories in 1642. The
clock was never built and, because of the large swings required by its verge
escapement, would have been a poor timekeeper. (See Technology
above.)Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with, being one of the first to understand sound frequency. By scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of the sound produced to the spacing of the chisel's skips, a measure of frequency. In 1638 Galileo described an experimental method to measure the speed of light by arranging that two observers, each having lanterns equipped with shutters, observe each other's lanterns at some distance. The first observer opens the shutter of his lamp, and, the second, upon seeing the light, immediately opens the shutter of his own lantern. The time between the first observer's opening his shutter and seeing the light from the second observer's lamp indicates the time it takes light to travel back and forth between the two observers. Galileo reported that when he tried this at a distance of less than a mile, he was unable to determine whether or not the light appeared instantaneously.[107] Sometime between Galileo's death and 1667, the members of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento repeated the experiment over a distance of about a mile and obtained a similarly inconclusive result.[108] Galileo put forward the basic principle of relativity, that the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, regardless of its particular speed or direction. Hence, there is no absolute motion or absolute rest. This principle provided the basic framework for Newton's laws of motion and is central to Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Falling bodies
A biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani stated that Galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass.[109] This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight.[110] While this story has been retold in popular accounts, there is no account by Galileo himself of such an experiment, and it is generally accepted by historians that it was at most a thought experiment which did not actually take place.[111]In his 1638 Discorsi Galileo's character Salviati, widely regarded as Galileo's spokesman, held that all unequal weights would fall with the same finite speed in a vacuum. But this had previously been proposed by Lucretius[112] and Simon Stevin.[113] Cristiano Banti's Salviati also held it could be experimentally demonstrated by the comparison of pendulum motions in air with bobs of lead and of cork which had different weight but which were otherwise similar.
Dome of the Cathedral
of Pisa with the "lamp of Galileo"
Mathematics
While Galileo's application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analysis and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxian theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo's life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of Descartes.Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo's paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares.
Hiswritings
Statue outside the Uffizi, FlorenceHis early works in dynamics, the science of motion and mechanics were his 1590 Pisan De Motu (On Motion) and his circa 1600 Paduan Le Meccaniche (Mechanics). The former was based on Aristotelian–Archimedean fluid dynamics and held that the speed of gravitational fall in a fluid medium was proportional to the excess of a body's specific weight over that of the medium, whereby in a vacuum bodies would fall with speeds in proportion to their specific weights. It also subscribed to the Hipparchan-Philoponan impetus dynamics in which impetus is self-dissipating and free-fall in a vacuum would have an essential terminal speed according to specific weight after an initial period of acceleration.
Galileo's 1610 The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) was the first scientific treatise to be published based on observations made through a telescope. It reported his discoveries of:
·
the Galilean
moons;
·
the roughness of the Moon's surface;
·
the existence of a large number of stars
invisible to the naked eye, particularly those responsible for the appearance
of the Milky
Way; and
·
differences between the appearances of the
planets and those of the fixed stars—the former appearing as small discs, while
the latter appeared as unmagnified points of light.
Galileo published a description of sunspots in 1613 entitled Letters on
Sunspots[120]
suggesting the Sun and heavens are corruptible. The Letters on Sunspots
also reported his 1610 telescopic observations of the full set of phases of Venus,
and his discovery of the puzzling "appendages" of Saturn and their
even more puzzling subsequent disappearance. In 1615 Galileo prepared a
manuscript known as the Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina which was not published in printed form until 1636. This
letter was a revised version of the Letter to Castelli, which was
denounced by the Inquisition as an incursion upon theology by advocating
Copernicanism both as physically true and as consistent with Scripture.[121]
In 1616, after the order by the inquisition for Galileo not to hold or defend the
Copernican position, Galileo wrote the Discourse on the tides (Discorso
sul flusso e il reflusso del mare) based on the Copernican earth, in the
form of a private letter to Cardinal Orsini.[122]
In 1619, Mario Guiducci, a pupil of Galileo's, published a lecture written
largely by Galileo under the title Discourse on the Comets (Discorso
Delle Comete), arguing against the Jesuit interpretation of comets.[123]In 1623, Galileo published The Assayer—Il Saggiatore, which attacked theories based on Aristotle's authority and promoted experimentation and the mathematical formulation of scientific ideas. The book was highly successful and even found support among the higher echelons of the Christian church.[124] Following the success of The Assayer, Galileo published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo) in 1632. Despite taking care to adhere to the Inquisition's 1616 instructions, the claims in the book favouring Copernican theory and a non Geocentric model of the solar system led to Galileo being tried and banned on publication. Despite the publication ban, Galileo published his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze) in 1638 in Holland, outside the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
·
The Little Balance (1586)
·
On Motion (1590)[125]
·
Mechanics (ca. 1600)
·
The
Starry Messenger (1610; in Latin, Sidereus Nuncius)
·
Discourse on Floating Bodies (1612)
·
Letters on Sunspots (1613)
·
Letter to the Grand Duchess
Christina (1615; published in 1636)
·
Discourse on the Tides (1616; in Italian,
Discorso del flusso e reflusso del mare)
·
Discourse on the Comets (1619; in
Italian, Discorso Delle Comete)
·
The
Assayer (1623; in Italian, Il Saggiatore)
·
Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems (1632; in Italian Dialogo dei due massimi
sistemi del mondo)
·
Discourses
and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences (1638; in
Italian, Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze)
Legacy
Church reassessments of Galileo in later centuries
The Inquisition's ban on reprinting Galileo's works was lifted in 1718 when permission was granted to publish an edition of his works (excluding the condemned Dialogue) in Florence.[126] In 1741 Pope Benedict XIV authorized the publication of an edition of Galileo's complete scientific works[127] which included a mildly censored version of the Dialogue.[128] In 1758 the general prohibition against works advocating heliocentrism was removed from the Index of prohibited books, although the specific ban on uncensored versions of the Dialogue andCopernicus's De Revolutionibus remained.[129] All traces of official opposition to heliocentrism by the church disappeared in 1835 when these works were finally dropped from the Index.[130]
In 1939 Pope Pius XII, in his first speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, within a few months of his election to the papacy, described Galileo as being among the "most audacious heroes of research... not afraid of the stumbling blocks and the risks on the way, nor fearful of the funereal monuments".[131] His close advisor of 40 years, Professor Robert Leiber wrote: "Pius XII was very careful not to close any doors (to science) prematurely. He was energetic on this point and regretted that in the case of Galileo."[132]
On 15 February 1990, in a speech delivered at the Sapienza University of Rome,[133] Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI) cited some current views on the Galileo affair as forming what he called "a symptomatic case that permits us to see how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science and technology goes today".[134] Some of the views he cited were those of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, whom he quoted as saying "The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune."[134] The Cardinal did not clearly indicate whether he agreed or disagreed with Feyerabend's assertions. He did, however, say "It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views."[134]
On 31 October 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and issued a declaration acknowledging the errors committed by the Catholic Church tribunal that judged the scientific positions of Galileo Galilei, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.[135][136] In March 2008 the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Nicola Cabibbo, announced a plan to honour Galileo by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.[137] In December of the same year, during events to mark the 400th anniversary of Galileo's earliest telescopic observations, Pope Benedict XVI praised his contributions to astronomy.[138] A month later, however, the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Gianfranco Ravasi, revealed that the plan to erect a statue of Galileo in the grounds of the Vatican had been suspended.[139]
Impact on modern science
According to Stephen Hawking, Galileo probably bears more of the responsibility for the birth of modern science than anybody else,[140] and Albert Einstein called him the father of modern science.[141][142]Galileo's astronomical discoveries and investigations into the Copernican theory have led to a lasting legacy which includes the categorisation of the four large moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) as the Galilean moons. Other scientific endeavours and principles are named after Galileo including the Galileo spacecraft,[143] the first spacecraft to enter orbit around Jupiter, the proposed Galileo global satellite navigation system, the transformation between inertial systems in classical mechanics denoted Galilean transformation and the Gal (unit), sometimes known as the Galileo which is a non-SI unit of acceleration.
Asteroid 697 Galilea is named in his honour.
In artistic and popular media
Galileo is mentioned several times in the "opera" section of the Queen song, "Bohemian Rhapsody".[145] He features prominently in the song "Galileo" performed by the Indigo Girls.Twentieth-century plays have been written on Galileo's life, including Life of Galileo (1943) by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, with a film adaptation (1975) of it, and Lamp At Midnight (1947) by Barrie Stavis,[146] as well as the 2008 play "Galileo Galilei".[147]
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a science fiction novel entitled Galileo's Dream (2009), in which Galileo is brought into the future to help resolve a crisis of scientific philosophy; the story moves back and forth between Galileo's own time and a hypothetical distant future.[148]
Galileo Galilei was recently selected as a main motif for a high value collectors' coin: the €25 International Year of Astronomy commemorative coin, minted in 2009. This coin also commemorates the 400th anniversary of the invention of Galileo's telescope. The obverse shows a portion of his portrait and his telescope. The background shows one of his first drawings of the surface of the moon. In the silver ring other telescopes are depicted: the Isaac Newton Telescope, the observatory in Kremsmünster Abbey, a modern telescope, a radio telescope and a space telescope. In 2009, the Galileoscope was also released. This is a mass-produced, low-cost educational 2-inch (51 mm) telescope with relatively high quality.
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