August 19, 2025
3 min read
September 2025: Science History from 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago
Huge fish; spiritualist rebuke
1975, Sun Loops: “Loops on the sun are shown in a false-color picture made with the Harvard College Observatory ultraviolet spectroheliograph aboard the Skylab crewed orbiting satellite. The loops, which are part of the inner corona, extend some 150,000 kilometers from the sun’s western edge. Black and blue areas represent the least intense radiation, yellow and magenta the more intense, and red the most intense.”
Scientific American, Vol. 233, No 3; September 1975
1975
Earth Fires Seeds into Space
“Imagine that the earth has been watched over the aeons by an extremely patient extraterrestrial observer. Nothing, save a little hydrogen and helium, leaves the planet. And then, less than 20 years ago, the planet suddenly begins, like a dandelion gone to seed, to fire tiny capsules throughout the inner solar system. First they go into orbit around the earth. Six capsules set down on the moon and from each two small organisms emerge. Five little spacecraft enter the hellhole of Venus’s atmosphere. More than a dozen are dispatched to Mars. Two spacecraft successfully traverse the asteroid belt, fly close to Jupiter and are ejected by its gravity into interstellar space.
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It is clear, the observer might report, that something interesting is happening. We have entered, almost without noticing it, an age of exploration unparalleled since the Renaissance, when in just 30 years European people moved across the Western ocean to bring the entire globe within their ken. Our new ocean is the shallow disk of space occupied by the solar system. Centuries hence, our age may be remembered chiefly as the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. —Carl Sagan”
1925
Television via Radio
“C. Francis Jenkins, radio photographic experimenter of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated apparatus by which moving objects, including a Dutch windmill and motion picture film, were sent by radio for five miles and reproduced on a miniature screen, 10 by eight inches. The transmitter was set up at station NOF, near Anacostia, D.C., and the receiver in Jenkins’s laboratory. He predicts that the process will be perfected so that scenes at baseball games and prize fights can be broadcast over long distances.”
Clearly Written Books
“Below are some of the recent books that can be recommended for clearness of treatment, obtainable from the Scientific American Book Department.
Red-Lead and How to Use it in Paint, by Sabin
White-Lead. Its Use in Paint, by Sabin
The Science of Knitting, by Tompkins
Carbureting and Combustion in Alcohol Engines, by Sorel, Woodward, Preston
Evolution and Animal Intelligence, by Holmes
I Believe in God and in Evolution, by Keen
God or Gorilla, by McCann”
1875
Cincinnati is Center of U.S.
“The center of our population has traveled westward, keeping curiously near the 39th parallel of latitude, never getting more than 20 miles north or two miles south of it. In 80 years it has traveled only 400 miles, and it is now found nearly 50 miles eastward of Cincinnati, Ohio.”
Spiritualist Rebuke
“Most of the organs of the spiritualists in this country are filled with insipid ghost matter, very tiresome and useless to all whose brains have not been softened by the spirit craze. The Spiritual Scientist, a weekly periodical, is an exception. Its editorial columns exhibit talent, while its conductors, with boldness, condemn as unworthy of true believers the printing of the unauthenticated trashy stuff delivered by common mediums. To its contemporary, the Banner of Light, it administers a severe rebuke for its agency in this matter, and alleges that for the past 10 or 12 years that journal has poured out a weekly stream of pretended spirit communications, of which not more than two in a hundred had contained anything beyond childish nonsense.”
Huge Ganoids Ruled the Seas
“Professor J. S. Newberry gave descriptions of some newly discovered ancient fishes found in the rocks of Ohio. Among these was the entire bony structure of Dinichthys terrelli, the hugest of the old armor-plated ganoids. The dorsal shield weighed 30 pounds. Professor Newberry explained that the dipnoans of Africa and South America were descended from these ancient plated ganoids, and were the last remnants of a group of fishes which in the Devonian age not only ruled the seas, but were the most powerful and highly organized of living beings.”
