Nov 9: A Movie Star Inventor Is Born and a New Element Is Made

Host 1 Welcome to This Day in Science and Discovery for Kids on this day November 9th. Um we are looking at invisible forces.

Host 2 Yeah so imagine you are trying to steer a torpedo through the ocean. But the enemy is blasting this loud messy radio noise.

Host 1 Right so your missile goes totally blind.

Host 2 Exactly. How do you fix that? Well in 1914 a Hollywood movie star was born who actually had the answer.

Host 1 Wait a movie star?

Host 2 Yeah. Her name was Hedy Lamarr. She was born in Vienna, Austria and became famous for her acting, but her mind was really always focused on inventing.

Host 1 That is so cool.

Host 2 It is. So during World War II, the military had that exact torpedo problem. They used radio signals to guide them,

Host 1 but the enemy would just jam the signal, right? Like by flooding that specific radio channel with noise?

Host 2 Yep, exactly.

Host 1 So if you stay on one channel, you are basically a sitting duck

Host 2 right but Lamar realized that instead of blasting the signal on one channel you could hop rapidly from one to another

Host 1 oh I see

Host 2 yeah if anyone tries to listen in or block you they're just guessing where you'll go next

Host 1 so it is kind of like a game of musical chairs you know but a game with 88 chairs

Host 2 that is a perfect way to visualize it

Host 1 and if you and I have the exact same sheet of instructions telling us which chair to jump to next we can communicate perfectly

Host 2 Right. Well, anyone trying to jam us is just jumping around blindly. But there was a huge mechanical catch.

Host 1 Uh-oh. What was it?

Host 2 Well, the sender on the ship and the receiver on the torpedo, they have to switch to the exact same channels at the exact same fraction of a second.

Host 1 Wow. Wow. Wait, how would they even build that back then?

Host 2 She actually worked with a composer named George Antheil.

Host 1 A music guy? How does a music guy help a torpedo talk to a ship?

Host 2 By using the technology behind player pianos.

Host 1 Oh wow really?

Host 2 Yeah. Antheil knew how to use paper rolls you know with holes punched in them to make multiple pianos play music completely by themselves in perfect sync.

Host 1 That is brilliant.

Host 2 Right. They took that same physical mechanism and applied it to radio frequencies. In 1942 the government awarded them a patent.

Host 1 Which is an official paper proving the invention is theirs.

Host 2 Exactly. And while it took decades for the military to fully adopt it, the core concept didn't go away.

Host 1 It led to stuff we use today, didn't it?

Host 2 Absolutely. If you have ever paired a Bluetooth speaker or used Wi-Fi, well, you are using technology built right on Lamar's idea. She was even added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Host 1 So Hedy Lamarr manipulated invisible radio waves in the air, but decades later, another team of scientists manipulated something equally invisible but infinitely smaller.

Host 2 Ah, we are talking about atoms.

Host 1 Right. So in 1994 scientists at the GSI lab in Darmstadt Germany they wanted to create element number 110

Host 2 Now elements like gold oxygen iron they are the basic building blocks of nature all organized on a big chart called the periodic table

Host 1 Yep but element 110 had never existed before

Host 2 right

Host 1 to make it they used a giant machine called an accelerator they basically fired atoms of nickel at a target made of lead for days on end

Host 2 Which is incredibly hard to do.

Yeah.

Host 1 Yeah. I picture this like trying to crash two speeding race cars into each other so perfectly that instead of shattering they fuse together into one brand new heavier vehicle.

Host 2 The precision required for that is just staggering. Most of the time those atoms just bounce off or break apart.

Host 1 But they eventually got it right?

Host 2 They did. At exactly 4 39 in the afternoon their detectors registered a success. A nickel atom and a lead atom actually fused.

Host 1 Wow.

Host 2 Yeah. They created just one single atom of this new element.

Host 1 Just one?

Host 2 Yeah.

Host 1 And it didn't even stick around very long, did it?

Host 2 No, not at all. It fell apart in less than a thousandth of a second.

Host 1 Oh man.

Host 2 But that tiny blip was enough to prove it existed. When scientists Sigurd Hoffman got to the lab his teammates simply looked at him and said we've got it.

Host 1 That is amazing. they officially added a brand new square to the periodic table.

Host 2 Yep naming it Darmstadtium after their city.

Host 1 It is amazing how a fraction of a second can change science forever.

Host 2 For sure.

Host 1 And just like how a single point of failure can change life for millions of people I mean also on this day in 1965 a tiny safety switch called a relay was set the wrong way near Niagara Falls.

Host 2 Oh and that one little switch tripping caused a massive chain reaction.

Host 1 A total disaster.

Host 2 Yeah because electricity can't just stop flowing so when that switch failed all that immense power detoured to other power lines.

Host 1 Which couldn't handle the extra weight.

Host 2 Right. So their switches tripped pushing even more power to the next lines in a giant domino effect.

Host 1 The ultimate cascading failure.

Host 2 Yeah.

Host 1 About 30 million people in Canada and the Northeast US lost their power.

Host 2 And some for up to 13 hours. Quite a day for physics really.

Host 1 Oh definitely. Much like this day in 1922 when Albert Einstein was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.

Host 2 Ah yes won it for the photoelectric effect which is the rule explaining what happens when light shines on metal and knocks electrons loose

Host 1 right but did you know that when his massive Nobel Prize was announced Einstein was completely unreachable

Host 2 Wait really why

Host 1 He was on a trip to Japan and was busy sightseeing in Hong Kong

Host 2 you are kidding

Host 1 Nope he didn't even find out he won until three days later when he finally got a telegram in Shanghai

Host 2 Wow so it took three whole days to deliver the biggest news in science

Host 1 Yep

Host 2 it really makes you wonder you know if a Hollywood star's piano roll trick paved the way for modern Wi-Fi and a telegram took three days to reach Einstein what everyday mundane object sitting in your room right now might inspire the next great leap in human discovery

Host 1 thanks for tuning in see you back here tomorrow