1. FINGERPRINTING
William Herschel (pic to the left of Uranus) discovered Uranus. His grandson (another William Herschel) initiated fingerprinting for practical purposes while working for the Indian Civil Service. The man in the pic to the right of Uranus is Alphonse Bertillon, the creator of anthropometry - an identification system based on physical measurements. Bertillon's method would later be supplanted by fingerprinting. The pic to the right of Bertillon features the frontispiece of Bertillon's Identification anthropométrique (1893) illustrating the idea. The man below William Herschel is Francis Galton (eugenics). After having studied the fingerprints during ten years, Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints. He had calculated that the chance of a "false positive" (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion. The pic to the right of Galton shows the structure of the skin with the Eccrine glands, which are responsible for fingerprints.
2. JOHN MCCARTHY
xkcd strip about Lisp (the words blacked out) which was invented by John McCarthy. He coined the term Artificial Intelligence. The TIME mag cover shows Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame. In 1999 he formed a company called LoudCloud, whose logo is seen to the left of the cover. This was the first company for commercial exploitation of the Cloud Computing concept (now formally called Saas - Software as a Service, seen in the rough sketch). This concept was first anticipated by John McCarthy. The buildings with the unique architecture are part of MIT's famous CSAIL whose present structure and function owe their existence to John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky (on the pic to the left of CSAIL).
xkcd strip about Lisp (the words blacked out) which was invented by John McCarthy. He coined the term Artificial Intelligence. The TIME mag cover shows Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame. In 1999 he formed a company called LoudCloud, whose logo is seen to the left of the cover. This was the first company for commercial exploitation of the Cloud Computing concept (now formally called Saas - Software as a Service, seen in the rough sketch). This concept was first anticipated by John McCarthy. The buildings with the unique architecture are part of MIT's famous CSAIL whose present structure and function owe their existence to John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky (on the pic to the left of CSAIL).
3. BUTTERFLY EFFECT
It is essentially a fancy name for 'Sensitive dependence on initial conditions' in chaos theory, namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. The graph of this is shown. The man in the pic to the right of the graph is Henri Poincaré, the French polymath who laid the foundations for Chaos Theory. The man to the left of Poincare is Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist who discovered that linear statistical models for weather patterns may not be accurate. Small variations led to drastic differences in the endpoint. He was unable to come up with a title for his talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972. Someone chipped in with "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" as a title. This is shown in row 2 of the collage. The pics in row 3 show plots of the Lorenz attractor.
4. WAR OF CURRENTS / AC vs DC / EDISON vs TESLA
Thomas Edison (the only person in the collage) favoured direct current while Tesla was a proponent of alternating current. Edison opposed capital punishment, but his desire to disparage the system of alternating current led to the invention of the electric chair. Harold Brown, who was at this time being secretly paid by Edison, constructed the first electric chair for the state of New York in order to promote the idea that alternating current was deadlier than DC. Experts announced proposals to harness Niagara Falls (pic to the right of Edison) for generating electricity, even briefly considering compressed air as a power transmission medium. Against GE and Edison's proposal, George Westinghouse, using Tesla's AC system, won the international Niagara Falls Commission contract. Westinghouse started Westinghouse Electric Corporation and was a lifelong champion of Tesla's AC. His company later became Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) - whose eye logo is shown. The final stage where the battle was settled was the World's Fair of 1893 whose iconic image is that of the Ferris Wheel (shown below the electric chair). Tesla won the contract and demonstrated the efficiency of AC. The stamp commemorates the first use of transmission lines (using AC) at Frankfurt railway station.
An ironic corollary to this rivalry is that Westinghouse was awarded the Edison medal by the IEEE.
5. HYBRID CAR
The man (with a moustache) is Ferdinand Porsche (of Volkswagen fame). He was also the first to invent an electric car in 1900. While Rewa is claimed to have the first assembly line dedicated for the manufacture of an electric car, the Woods Motor Vehicle Company was a manufacturer of electric automobiles between 1899 and 1916. In 1915 they produced the Dual Power with both electric and internal combustion engines and this continued until 1918. The man in the TIME cover is the writer Hermann Wouk whose brother Victor Wouk whose PhD thesis titled "Static electricity generated during the distribution of gasolene" led to his successful conversion of a Buick Skylark vehicle with a 20-kilowatt direct-current electric motor and an RX-2 Mazda rotary engine. The electric equipment for this car was provided by Eureka Vacuum Cleaner Company. Henney Kilowatt was an electric car made in 1959. The person below Porsche is Dr Andrew Frank, who is considered the father of modern plug-in hybrids.
6. DDT
The man is Paul Hermann Muller won the 1948 Nobel for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of DDT as an effective poison against several arthropods. The woman is Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring triggered the anti-DDT revolution and led to the eventual banning of DDT at the Stockholm convention of the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) whose logo is shown. DDT is particularly toxic to birds as it causes eggshell thinning and has been directly linked to the endangered status of birds such as the Bald Eagle and the Osprey.
Zed
