The smoothest known object in the solar system, it isn't only famous for its good looks. It's the sixth closest moon to the gas giant Jupiter, and has what is assumed to be a nickel core and an atmosphere that, while fragile, holds oxygen. It is famous for being discovered by Galileo in 1610, but has not - as yet- been explored in any great detail by spacecraft. That, it seems is all about to change as both NASA and the ESA are primed in a race to reach the enigmatic moon.
Europa's tie to the host planet Jupiter is emphasized in her name. While Jupiter is named after the king of the Roman Gods (aka Zeus in Greek mythology), Europa is named after one of his conquests. For anyone familiar with Greek mythology, it's well known that Zeus was a randy deity and his wife Hera was less than impressed with his affairs. When Zeus happened upon Europa and her companions he was transfixed with her beauty and transformed himself into a white bull that was so stunning and gentle in appearance that all the women gathered around to fawn over the creature. He laid down in front of Europa and she climbed onto his back. Suddenly the bull jumped up and charged off a cliff, diving into the water below to swim out to sea with her trapped on his back. Zeus took her to Crete and promised her that she would bear famous sons who could claim that they had a god for a father. The real life moon mirrors its namesake in many ways. It is one that is very closely tied to water: it is believed that the crust is ice but, due to the position and shifting gravity of being so close to Jupiter, that under the surface there is liquid water. And, just as Europa begot famous sons, so too do many scientists believe that of all the places in our solar system, Europa is the one that is the most likely to birth life. Across its smooth surface, in the ice cracks, there are mysterious blooms of crimson - could these be related to the excretions of huge numbers of micro-organisms in the sea below?
The Race to Europa
Unfortunately we're not quite at the stage where any spacecraft can land on the planet due to technological limitations, and even staying in orbit with the planet for too long is dangerous for the machinery due to Europa's intense radiation fields. But nevertheless NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) have both put forward missions and been granted funding that will allow them to launch in the mid-2020s. The ESA is currently pulling forward in the lead with the more solid date of 2022 for launch with their spacecraft 'JUICE', to reach Jupiter in 2030.
Artists impression of JUICE: ESA/AOES
JUICE stands for the 'Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer' which, if we're honest, in the world of acronyms is a bit of a cheat. Nevertheless it's plan is impressive: it is planned to set out to Jupiter to study the gas giant and, upon reaching the neighbouring Ganymede enter into humanity's very first orbit with an icy moon(!). The spacecraft will also make flybys of Callisto and Europa using various camera, spectrometers, a radar, altimeter and plasma sensors to monitor the composition of each moon and planet that it comes across, with radiation shielding to protect it and solar panels to power it on its journey. Jupiter's moons cover a huge range of environments from volcanic to icy to rocky, so it is thought that the data gathered here could give us vital information about how similar planets in our solar system and beyond operate. Most importantly in this mission, it will give vital insights into the composition and behaviour of Jupiter - one of the largest and most alien of planets in our solar system.
Artists Impression of Europa Clipper
NASA's 'Europa Clipper' is perhaps more fully focused on the moon itself than its ESA counterpart. The plan is to place it in orbit of Jupiter and set it on a long looping orbit that would allow it to enact 45 repeated close-quarter flybys of Europa. On board there are plans for a radar to penetrate down into the crust to measure its thickness, an infra-red spectrometer to investigate what the surface is made of and an ion and neutral mass spectrometer to analyse the moon's atmosphere. Clearly we have a whole lot to look forward to...
This week I'm very pleased to host our very first guest post!
Stuart is a twenty-something chap in Nottingham, originally from Essex, who grew up with the likes if Indiana Jones and trashy sci-fi and later found that real history and science is far weirder than whatever hollywood and pulp authors could come up with. His blog, 'The Collect Call of Cthulhu' is a mix of personal musings and occasional enthusiastic nerding. If you'd like to feature in a guest post, feel free to get in contact. Without further a due: Stuart, what exactly is Project Orion?
Project Orion was an odd duck.
It combined the heady
post-Second World War fascination of the atom with the spirit of exploration
and competition that spurred the Space Race, resulting in something that could
have very well changed the course of human history. For example, if you’re a
terrible cynic, it could have ended it. But for the optimists amongst us, it
could have been our ticket to the stars.
Artist rendering of a potential Project Orion craft, care
of Adrian Mann
When people realised that nuclear power could do so much
more than level cities and power nations, they attempted to marry it to
anything and everything. Ford tried to prototype an atomic car with the Ford
Nucleon, which is to say, Ford tried to build a car with an atomic reactor on
board, and oddly enough it never really got beyond the scale-model concepts. There
were plenty of ideas for atomic planes, infamously including the murderously
insane Project Pluto and its nuclear ramjets, but ICBMs made them militarily
obsolete and the civilian demand for flying next to a nuclear reactor was
unsurprisingly low. Even atomic trains were proposed, completing the set. So
why not atomic rocket ships to the stars?
The logic behind Project Orion is simple enough to follow.
A
controlled nuclear explosion produces a huge amount of energy, much like
setting off a controlled chemical explosion. The difference is that to get the
equivalent energy, you need a lot less nuclear material, although there are
drawbacks to launching yourself into space via a series of controlled nuclear
explosions, such as all the nuclear fallout drifting down, and upsetting
various nations who’d rather you didn’t set off all the atomic devices in case
one turns out to be aimed at them. This is the theory behind the nuclear pulse
engine, where a series of controlled, directional nuclear explosions are
applied against a pusher plate, providing the thrust. Apparently, part of the
highly controversial Operation Plumbbob was to put the theory into practice,
using a 300t yield device and a 900 kilogram steel plate. The idea was that
perhaps the explosion would shoot the plate into the air at six times escape
velocity. What actually happened is a mystery, because no one ever found the
plate, or even saw what happened to it. The best guess was the air friction
vaporised it. So yes, Orion could very well have worked, but instead of working
to shave off every possible gram of weight when building a rocket, you’d need
to build skyscraper-sized starships just so the explosions don’t evaporate the thing
or liquefy everyone on board with the force of thrust. They’d be less like
Shuttles, and more like Star Destroyers.
But who was behind this?
The idea of nuclear pulse
propulsion was proposed by Stanislaw Ulam,which is believed to be the same guiding blueprint all modern nuclear weapons
adhere to (and I say believe believed because
the specifics of nuclear weapons are top secret) and developing the Monte Carlo
Method, amongst oh-so many other things. But Project Orion itself was led by
Ted Taylor of General Atomics, and the team included Freeman Dyson, a man who
really does not need an introduction. Freeman Dyson is absolutely nothing to do
with bagless vacuum cleaners, and everything to do with scientific topics that
include theoretical physics, nuclear engineering and astronomy. Ever heard of a
Dyson Sphere? That’d be him, although his concept wasn’t a solid shell but
closer to an asteroid swarm. Some of the finest minds of the atomic age were
attached to Project Orion, so it’s no wonder the results could have changed the
course of history.
Freeman Dyson, what a guy
It was in the late Fifties when Taylor, Dyson and the gang
proposed working prototypes with existing technologies. Let’s go over that
again. They knew how to go about building a working nuclear pulse engine and
worked out how to go about building a ship to bolt onto it, with technology of
the 1950s. If you’re of a certain age, you may have once owned a classic
Nintendo Gameboy, or perhaps a Nokia 3210 mobile telephone. These are orders of
magnitude more advanced than the technology that could have sent us hurtling
through space at a tenth of the speed of light. The most amazing part of all
this is we could have easily built spacecraft that could travel to Mars and
back within a month, with technology
that is now over fifty years old. We
could have visited Saturn’s moons inside a year. Instead, we’ve never really
gone back to the Moon and we’re uhhming and aaahing about finally going to Mars,
in a one-way trip that would take at least six months.
So why do we still use rocket fuel?
Why do we still try to
launch people into space in portacabins mounted on the front of what are, to
the untrained eye, bloody great missiles? Why aren’t we reaching to the stars
in city-sized megaships that travel at 5 to 10% of the speed of light,
harnessing the power of the atom to claim our birthright?
Well, the first is a
pretty obvious flaw, and one that nuclear everything
seems to suffer from. Setting off nuclear bombs is usually a pretty bad idea,
what with the radiation and the fallout. Setting off dozens, one after the
other, high above the world, would have been a very bad thing, expanding the
phenomena of “Downwinders” to potentially the entire world, with a conservative
estimate putting between one and ten deaths directly attributable to each
launch from the Earth into space by a nuclear pulse engine. And that is ignoring
any problem you might have from accidents. Imagine the tragic events of the Space
Shuttle Challenger in 1986, or the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, and add the
danger of nuclear fallout and atomic explosives to the mix, as well as the fact
that these ships would be the size of the Shard or possibly the Empire State
Building, and travelling far faster meaning the debris would be travelling
further and faster as well. When you look at it like that, purely from a
practical point, nuclear pulse engines launching from the Earth are suddenly a lot
less appealing.
Then you have to look at the context of the time.
This was
at the height of the Cold War, with East and West just waiting for an excuse to
lay into each other. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in the minds of
the world when the project was ultimately shelved, and President Kennedy
himself is said to have been appalled by the project when he was introduced to
it. Project Orion proper was set up in 1958 (although the thinking behind it
dates back to 1946, and arguably even further, if you consider the idea of
using controlled chemical explosions as rocket propulsion part of the same
chain of thinking. In which case it goes back to 1881 with that particular idea
coined by Russian explosives expert Nikolai Kibalchich) and the project was
shelved in 1963 with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which forbade
the testing of nuclear weapons underwater, in the atmosphere or in outer space,
which rather pulls the rug out from under Orion. Understandably, the Russians
were concerned with a rocket powered by nuclear bombs capable of moving at, at
a reasonable estimate, 5% the speed of light, and justifiably so when the US
military took interest in it.
They were interested, for example, in how you’d mount naval
weapons on a Project Orion craft, and it turns out firing artillery shells at
targets when you’re moving at even 1% of the speed of light is a bit of a
waste, as the kinetic energy outstrips any sort of chemical explosive by an
order of magnitude. So the thinking went on to all those atomic bomblets you’d
be using to get into space in the first place, and would it be possible to use
a few spares as nuclear artillery? You’d be dropping them faster than anyone
could track, vaporising anything it touched, happily taking “Mutually” out of
“Mutually Assured Destruction”. If you only intended to silence any opposition
to you, you’d only need one and you’d be able to stop anyone ever building
another simply with the threat of hypersonic nuclear artillery strikes turning
the offending nation into a smouldering crater. It could have brought a rather
rapid end to the Cold War, as the Americans could have annihilated Moscow
without so much as a two-minute warning. So understandably, with the Cold War
being the way it was, and Kennedy trying to bring an end to it peacefully rather
than dragging it to the stars, the project was officially shelved.
I don’t want to set the world on fiiire…
Of course, that’s not the end of it, as scientists try to
find ways to at least approach light speed, to say nothing of the mad dream of
faster than light travel, although public opinion of nuclear power has turned
away from seeing it as a panacea to something that is barely understood, barely
tolerated and many would rather never have been discovered. The British Project
Daedalus was to take the concept as an unmanned mission to Barnard’s Star,
using the same technology, albeit launched from space. And the
unfortunately-named Project Icarus (he who flew too close to the sun and
crashed to Earth, for those who didn’t have a happy childhood reading Greek myths)
is picking up where that left off.
As a final thought, the late, great Carl Sagan put it best:
that there’s few better uses for the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons than
fuel for voyages of scientific discovery.
Further Reading
Nuclear Everything! – Dark Roasted Blend’s article offers up a lovely selection of period imagery
of nuclear planes, trains and automobiles, amongst others. Project Pluto, the Flying Crowbar –
Gregg Herken’s article from Air & Space Magazine tells you everything you
need to know about a hypothetical American superweapon that seems to be ripped
straight from Dr. Strangelove. Project Orion – The obligatory Wikipedia page, which goes a little more in-depth into the
nuts and bolts of the project. The story of Project Orion – George Dyson, son of Freeman, gives a brief talk on Project Orion. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion – Further explanation of the concept, including other potential uses of the
method, including the not-at-all-sinister-sounding Medusa. Stanislaw Ulam – Stanislaw Ulam’s
Wikipedia page, with a good summary of his life and work, including links to
more in-depth articles on things like the Monte Carlo Method and the
Teller-Ulam design. Freeman Dyson – Freeman Dyson’s
Wikipedia page, with a summary of his life, work and various interesting
nuggets of information. Nuclear testing and the Downwinders – A brief history of the “Downwinders” of Utah, those unlucky enough to have
been exposed to nuclear fallout from US government testing, in part because
they were downwind of the test sites.
Let me open first by saying "Happy 2015!"
I
hope that you all had wonderful Holiday and New Years celebrations,
and that you have not yet been driven quite insane by the Back to the Future memes that are currently abound on the internet. Yes we are in 2015. Yes this is the 2015 that Marty Mcfly saw as the 'future', with hoverboards and giant 3D sharks abound.
As a kid this was nightmare fuel, let me tell you.
We've been at this point before in 1989 with Orwell, 2001 with a Space Odyssey and more and at each point our future has, seemingly, not lived up to expectations. But could it ever?
That said, I couldn't resist adding to this little pop-culture milestone this 2015 by taking a deeper look into what history envisioned of our future and where we are now at the dawn of 2015.
The Technology of Back to the Future 2and 2015
Hoverboards
Hovercrafts have been around for quite a while, but it looked as if we could never gain enough control to perfect these into the swift and compact hoverboards that got Marty from A to B, but it looks as if we're on the way there with a new piece of kickstarter-funded technology: The Hendo hoverboard. While still somewhat clumsy, it seems a lot of fun and the skating legend Tony Hawk certainly got a smile out of it.
Holograms
Holograms have been a staple of Sci-fi for quite a while as a shorthand for advanced technology. You can see it in Star Wars, Star trek, Back to the Future 2, Minority Report, James Bond, Agents of Shield and Torchwood but to name a few. It seems, that we are on the edge of diving in to this immersive technology. Nowadays you can go to concerts with 'pseudo-holograms' of your favourite deceased musicians, or your favourite incredibly-expensive actors. A 'holographic' Tupac and Michael Jackson have already drawn in crowds, and who could forget the 'holographic' Liam Neeson in the modern stage production of The War of the Worlds? But these images can't quite be called true holograms, but instead a form of live-image compositing also known as 'Pepper's Ghost'. Clever, but not quite the sci-fi ideal. A new design called Bleen seems set to move holograms into a user friendly personal format in a style that we're perhaps more familiar with, as you can see form the publicity video below.
However an over-reliance of computer graphics, the photoshopping of stock photos and a board of directors and scientists that seem to vanish into thin air all set alarm bells ringing, as the website Metabunk argues. Most importantly, the concept of projection onto cool day-lit air simply doesn't mesh with physics as we currently understand it. The closest that can be achieved is through using lasers to superheat small plasma dots in the air in simple shapes, which is dangerous enough that it could never be conducted outside of the labs. I'm certainly more than a little sceptical that true holograms are still firmly in the realm of science fiction today, but I shall let you be the judges. Self tying shoes
The 80s envisioned that light up self tying shoes were the future and Nike - the product placement of the age- has tried to follow suit with their own Nike Mags self tying shoes that will imitate Marty's exactly. This is technically a case of life imitating art, and it's mind-numbingly tricky to actually find a video of the 'moneyshot' of the power laces in action. But we've been assured that they work. Will this signal a real near-future of potentially-ankle-snapping automatic power laces? Probably not.
While the more outlandish futuristic elements of the film are hit and miss at best, there are a lot of elements that did become a reality and entered our daily life so steadily yet quickly, that many of us even forget to take proper notice of them. Tablet Computers
Tablet computers are everywhere nowadays and they seem to have just sprung up all of a sudden. Like the holograms, hand held computers were a feature of any science fiction show that envisioned a future, be it near or far. While we could track the screen depth of TVs and computers getting thinner and more portable, to actually be rid of a hefty processing system and to actually have a touchscreen that was functional was truly revolutionary. Now we have it, we so often take it for granted, when really our first experiences of them were nothing short of magical. In a way it is the natural progression of the laptop, but who could have predicted that it could become a reality so smoothly? Video Conferencing
Another element that was always a staple in science fiction in the past was video conferencing, whether it was between councillors on space ships or employees. It seemed like a predictable and natural progression and so perhaps didn't require much of a stretch of the imagination to envision, but it couldn't have been made reality without some serious technical developments along the way, the chief of which is the sheer usability and speed of our internet connections. Without such a detailed and clever infrastructure in place, it simply wasn't possible, but we have gradually chipped away at this and made it into a reality. Like the tablet computers, and paraphrasing a John Green quote, we seem to experience this amazing technology's development like one falls asleep: slowly and then all at once. Long distance relationships have never been more connected, and it's set to improve even further soon enough.
So, in the end, Back to the Future 2 was hit and miss with its predictions. But what shone through in it's initial envisioning of the future was the media-based, consumer led brightness and imaginative boldness of the 80s. The imagined future, in this respect, was a mirror on the present.
How the past envisioned the future.
Whether or not we reached the goals that the past envisioned for us is never really as important as taking a step back and viewing the spirit behind these imaginations. Science fiction has often been a perfect genre for not only imagining a creative future, but also turning an eye back to view the society that envisioned this future in the first place. Imagination, after all, is always tied to the social influences of the place in history from which it began. So, while back to the future was very 80s, if we look to the victorian period often it was very, well, victorian. The current fashion for steampunk has risen out of the sheer unbridled optimism of Victorian science fiction. Sometimes it was dystopian - just think of the Morlochs in HG Wells' the Time Machine - but when it came to technology the visions of the future showed a capacity to achieve anything. The Victorian age was at the height of blue-sky thinking through the industrial revolution, and this shows in how they envisoned the year 2000. Surprisingly, while it may look different, we actually achieved many of these.
Moving Houses By Train
Victorians had the rather sweet idea that having houses on a railway line would keep everything varied. While this idea in itself seems a little silly, nowadays we have the capacity to move huge items - even houses - regularly if needs be. The Victorians of course couldn't predict the decline of the railway, as it was the height of their technology at the time. Nowadays if you want to move a house you need to call up a truck.
Holidays to the North Pole
The NorthPole was an inhospitable place for the Victorians, but there was hope. Expeditions in 1827, 1871, 1879-1881,1895,1897 and 1900 meant that the North pole was well in the conciousness of the Victorian society. While it was dangerous in the future they hoped to conquer it and make it safe and farmiliar enough to holiday to. Holidays were a new national pasttime and very popular - a true celebration of their progress and civility. And how else better to get to the North pole than by exciting and advanced airships? Making the dangerous and inhospitable welcoming and accessible is a common feature in any time's predictions of the future. For us, we dream of tourism in space and the moon. For the Victorians, their dream was at least partially achieved. Nowadays, if you're tough enough, you can go and holiday in the North pole...though it;s hardly a walk in the park.
Televised Outside Broadcasts
With the development of the telephone a revolution in communication was at hand, and the Victorians envisioned how entertainment could be shared in this medium. Their solution was similar to the 'Peppers ghost' illusion that we now use for pseudo-'holograms', but they couldn't possibly predict how quickly the advancement in communication and entertainment technology could take place. Now we have Tv, computers, mobile phones, skype, 3d images and more. Quite impressive.
Individual Flying Machines
A successful aeroplane would not be invented until the Wright brothers in 1903, but humans have always wanted to fly. The Victorians had a spirit of exploration and a faith that technology would find a way: surely we would have flying machines by the year 2000! Not quite. However individual ways of taking to the air are possible. We have private planes and gyrocopters for true flight. We also have handgliders and wingsuits if 'falling with style' is more your cup of tea.
In the end, envisioning what we want for the future is key to understanding who we are in the present.
Whatever your time period of birth, it's very difficult to pick out how the future will look. Marty McFly's 2015 was a future coloured by the 80s - all bright plasticy consumerist goodness with a little lashing of dystopian anxiety towards the end. The Victorian vision of the year 2000 was one that focused on the freedom of exploration and the joy of invention, yet it coached everything in Victorian ideals and could not predict the social revolution of the future that would, for example, put many women in trousers. So often we use the future to dream, but also to pass social commentary on our own present. This was the aim of even earlier visits to the future, and we often see it in our current science fiction media. By imagining a utopia it shows us what we need to make a change, and by imagining a dystopia it cautions us as to what elements of our current society might cause decay and corruption. To envision the future is to create a mirror, in the end, and it will always be interesting to look back and see how much of that reflection really came true.
History has a habit of erasing itself and sometimes our ancestors really surprise us.
Often the nuances of what really occurred throughout history is lost, often by wilful erasure or through misfortune. Western history, on the whole, has a significant preference for keeping things narrative: we like the idea of marching nobly forwards and into increasing technological and cultural sophistication. We love to think that with every generation we improve ourselves and evolve and, as a result, often we view our ancestors as primitive and - horribly- even stupid. But, of course, they weren't. And history in reality can come in all shapes, not just linear. Sometimes the technology that we view as 'modern' existed much, much earlier and, for some reason or another was lost of future generations.
For example, the popular conception of Japan has always been one of skilled samurais and, following the Tokugawa period in Japan, guns and gaijin influence were banned. Many people, looking to Japan, view gun culture as invasive and unnatural, dragged in by foreign influence. But, in reality, guns had been a part of Japanese weaponry since 1270ad, and it was due to political influences that this technology was wilfully rejected and, eventually, forgotten. Firearm technology stalled, missing out on hundreds of years of potential development.
Finally, even analogue computers are thought to be far, far older than we had ever anticipated. The discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism shook the world, as it showed that even the ancient Greeks had access to complex gear-work mechanisms that wouldn't resurface again for hundreds and hundreds of years and which had somehow been lost to their ancestors. How might life had been if we had kept track of this technology and developed it?
The Antikythera Mechanism
This week I'd like to leave you in the hands of the brilliant Cracked.com, as they tell you about five fantastical ancient devices that prove that our ancestors were way more advanced than they often seem.
The Lycurgus Cup, the Uunartoq disc, the salt drills of ancient China, the iron pillar of the Qutb Complex and Heron's programmable robots all show that our ancestors were very, very smart cookies indeed. 5 Advanced Ancient Technologies that Shouldn't Be Possible
Nowadays we don't really think of short (or long) sightedness as any sort of disability.
It's commonplace to the point of near invisibility. CBS statistics state that approximately 61% of the population needed some form of sight or reading aids in 2012 (as compared to 57% in 2001). The number only increases as the population weighs in with an increasingly towards older generations and as our lives become more affixed to ourscreens and books.
Take away your glasses and contact lenses, however, and it's soon very clear just how vulnerable you are.
Usually I'm reminded of this when I go to the hairdressers. They sit me down, I take my glasses off and instantly I'm plunged back into a world of vague fuzzy shapes. I put blind trust in what the hairdresser is snipping away at. While we make small talk I look straight ahead and try not to squint, and I try to give friendly eye contact when I can't actuallysee her eyes.There's always something unsettling in holding a conversation with a face that, for all intents and purposes, has more in common withSlenderman'sthan something human.
I find it hard not to think how difficult life would be without my glasses when I sit in that chair, and how much they enrich my life.
So how was life like for people before glasses were invented? And who were the people in history who worked to give the precious gift of sight?
There is debate about just how developed ancient eye-correction was.
According to the scholar Edward Rosen, the first known reference to a pair of eyeglasses was in 1305 when Friar Giodarno di Rivolta remarked 'It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making eyeglasses which make for good vision, one of the best and most necessary the world has.' However, the inventive use of lenses and the like to correct faulty vision potentially much older.
Astriophanes (approx 450-385 bc) mentions plan-convex lenses and globes of water that were used to see, and the Roman Seneca is said to have read through a globe of water. However, the use of these aids were not so widespread as to stop a prominent Roman in 100bc from complaining in a letter that he lamented his poor eyesight preventing him from reading. He instead had to rely on his slave reading out any text for him.
While it is not confirmed what its use was, the Nimrud Lens is the oldest known lens found in the world and is dated to somewhere between 4,500-3,500 years old. It's entirely possible that people could have used this to aid them in reading. It is thought that the Romans, Babylonians, Greeks and even Vikings all could create similar lenses of varying quality (thought it is suggested that the vikings instead had these manufactures in the Byzantium empire).
The Nimrud Lens
Eyeglasses as we now know them were likely created in medieval times.
While the gradual wearing of sight is a common ailment of people as they grow older, it is likely that the increase in reading and scholastic learning in the Medieval period drew more attention and inventiveness to the problem of long-sightedness. In 1289 di'Popozo wrote that "I am so debilita-ted-by age that without
the glasses known as spectacles, I would no longer be able to read or
write. These have recently been invented for the benefit of poor old
people whose sight has become weak"
Monastic populations were often the focus for the development of eyeglasses. For example, in the 14th century, it is thought that Friar Alessandro reverse-engineered earlier sight-aids and transformed them into a useful eyeglass, proceeding to share the invention with the population. This was a significent shift away from the norm of invention: in the times before copyrighting craftsmen endeavoured to keep their methods a secret in order to better profit from them, so Alessandro's act of kindness allowed for a great leap forwards in the technology.
Art at the time begins to depict people wearing spectacles and they were gradually associated as a status symbols for learned men, though of course this was dictated to by the shifting fashions of the time.
It wasn't until the 16th century that concave lenses were created for the short-sighted rather than the long-sightedness that is a usual symptom of age. Perhaps the most famous customer for these new short-sighted glassed was Pope Leo the 10th, who used to wear them while he was hunting. Sometime between 1760 and 1780 Benjamin Franklin began experimenting with even fusing the two, creating verifocals.
While the efficiency of glasses were dependant on the sophistication of glass-making technology, perhaps the biggest design challenge was how on earth to keep them on your head!
Many spectacles were designed on a hinge that would perch on the edge of the nose like scissors or could be held up to the face. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was common to have glasses on a stick to hold up opera-style, and ribbons were commonly used to affix glasses more tightly to the face in order to get a better focus from them. In 1781-89 glasses with sliding extension temples were created, but these didn't see widespread use until the 19thc.
Nowadays, the commonest style is through temple bars that hook around the ears but, even so, Opthalmologist Melvin Rueban insisted that these spectacles were 'one of technology's best examples of poor engineering design'.
Modern glasses designs can be adjusted through heating and which curve around the ear, supported by adjustable nose-pads and springs, though any glasses user could quickly tell you that these are still far from perfect.
Nowadays, technology has advanced to the point of potentially erasing the need for frames all together.
Spectacle frames are and, for the foreseeable future, will continue to be the most popular option for vision correction due to their practicality and relative(!) cheapness. However, we are now lucky enough to have the options of contact lenses and laser eye correction to cure short or long sightedness.
Contact lenses were suggested as early as 1845 by Sir John Herschel, but it was F. E Muller who first put them into practice by blowing a glass lens over the eyeball of a man whose lid has been destroyed by cancer. This contact lens was said to have lasted until his death 20 years later. While further experiements and studies commenced, it wasn't until the 1940s that a full variety of contact lenses became available to the public and widely used.
By 1964 some 6 million people in the US wore contact lenses, with 65% of which were female. Given the vulnerability of spectacles to rather severe criticism in fashion, and the close link of traditional female identity with her looks, this is rather unsurprising.
In the 1970s the development of the excimer laser offered a ground breaking alternative to both spectacles and contact lenses - what if short or long sightedness could actually be cured?
Stephen L Trokel used it to experiement on the eyes of cadavers and then living animals, seeing how their corneas could be altered for the better. In 1988 Trokel was lucky enough to have a willing human participant: a 60-year old woman who was due to have her eye removed due to a malignant melanoma asked if they would like to experiment on her. Trokel's colleague, Marguerite MacDonalD performed the first photorefractive Keratectomy on the lady that year. By the early 1990s the procedure was approved in Canada and the US.
In 1999 the development of wavefront technology allowed doctors to map out a patient's prescription on the unique corneas and by 2002 100% bladeless surgery was finally possible.
Sight correction has come a long way in our history and it can only get better
Currently scientists are even on the verge of helping the blind to see.
In 2009, following a work accident, the builder Martin Jones was left blind but, luckily, with one eye still intact. Groundbreaking surgery, carried out by the surgeon Christopher Liu, allowed one of Martin's teeth to act as a replacement lens. While admittedly quite a grisly procedure, it allowed Martin to see his wife after 12 years of blindness. As the tooth is part of Martin's body, there is a far smaller chance of his body rejecting it than if it was made form synthetic materials.
How Martin Jones gained his sight back
Oxford University's smart glasses are designed to help near-blind users by amplifying what little available sight they have.
The device takes 3d objects and alters the images, making them into bright defined silhouettes.
One user, Lyn Oliver, was diagnosed with Retinis Pigmentosa in her early 20s which gradually led to extensive vision loss. She relies on her guide dog Jess to navigate, but using the glasses made this significantly easier.
“If Jess stops, the glasses can tell me if she’s stopped because there’s a
kerb, there’s something on the floor or it’s roadworks, and it’ll give me a
sense of which way she may go around the obstacle.
‘If people are stood outside a shop talking, they often go silent when they
see me and watch me walk past. But they’ve disappeared as far as I am
concerned. Have they moved? Have they gone inside the shop?
“There’s a sudden stress about avoiding them. The glasses help remove this
layer of stress and they do it in a way that is natural to the person using
them. After taking them off I was missing them." Here are the smart glasses in action:
Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done but it's amazing how far we have come in giving preserving the most precious of our senses.
The real life moon mirrors its namesake in many ways. It is one that is very closely tied to water: it is believed that the crust is ice but, due to the position and shifting gravity of being so close to Jupiter, that under the surface there is liquid water. And, just as Europa begot famous sons, so too do many scientists believe that of all the places in our solar system, Europa is the one that is the most likely to birth life. Across its smooth surface, in the ice cracks, there are mysterious blooms of crimson - could these be related to the excretions of huge numbers of micro-organisms in the sea below?
