Who Did It First?

IN 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper was the first to demonstrate a handheld cellular telephone. It had a battery, a radio, and a microprocessor (a minicomputer). New Yorkers gaped in amazement when they saw Cooper making a phone call on the street. But the invention was possible only because back in 1800, Alessandro Volta had invented a reliable battery. In addition, the telephone had been developed by 1876, the radio by 1895, and the computer by 1946. Finally, the invention of the microprocessor in 1971 made cell phones possible. Nevertheless, we might ask, Was communication with sophisticated devices really new?

A communication device often taken for granted is the human voice. Over half the billions of neurons in the motor cortex of your brain are involved in controlling your speech organs, and about 100 muscles operate the complex mechanisms of your tongue, lips, jaw, throat, and chest.

Your ear too is part of the same communication system. It converts sound into electrical impulses that your brain can process. Your brain analyzes sounds, so you can recognize people by the timbre of their voice. Your brain also measures how many millionths of a second one ear hears before the other and thus calculates precisely where a sound comes from. These are just two of the features that enable you to listen to one person at a time, even though several others may be speaking.

So, sophisticated wireless communication (with caller recognition) is not new. We find it first in the world of living things​—nature.

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1800

Reliable battery

1876

Telephone

1971

Microprocessor

1973

Dr. Martin Cooper develops the mobile telephone

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Dr. Cooper and mobile phone: © Mark Berry

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Right side of page 2, front to back, reenacted photos: Guglielmo Marconi with his radio equipment; Thomas Edison and the lightbulb; Granville T. Woods, a communications inventor; the Wright Brothers and the 1903 Wright Flyer

Powered Flight

FOR centuries, men dreamed of flying. But a man does not have muscles powerful enough to lift his own weight into the air. In 1781, James Watt invented a steam engine that produced rotary power, and in 1876, Nikolaus Otto furthered the idea and built an internal-combustion engine. Now man had an engine that could power a flying machine. But who could build one?

The brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright had wanted to fly ever since they learned to fly kites as boys. Later, they learned engineering skills by building bicycles. They realized that the key challenge of flight was to design a craft that could be controlled. A plane that cannot be balanced in the air is as useless as a bicycle that cannot be steered. Wilbur watched pigeons in flight and noticed that they bank into a turn, as a cyclist does. He concluded that birds turn and keep balance by twisting their wing tips. He hit upon the idea of building a wing that would twist.

In 1900, Wilbur and Orville built an aircraft with twistable wings. They flew it first as a kite and then as a piloted glider. They discovered that it needed three basic controls to adjust pitch, roll, and side-to-side movement. However, they were disappointed that the wings did not produce enough lift, so they built a wind tunnel and experimented with hundreds of wing shapes until they found the ideal shape, size, and angle. In 1902, with a new aircraft, they mastered the art of balancing the craft on the wind. Could they mount an engine on it now?

First, they had to build their own engine. With knowledge gained from the wind tunnel, they solved the complex problem of designing a propeller. Finally, on December 17, 1903, they started the engine, the propellers whirred, and the craft lifted off into an icy wind. “We had accomplished the ambition that stirred us as boys,” said Orville. “We had learned to fly.” The brothers became international celebrities. But how did they manage to power themselves into the air? Yes, nature played a part.

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The Wright “Flyer,” North Carolina, U.S.A., 1903 (reenacted photo)

Nature Had It First

“Ask, please, . . . the winged creatures of the heavens, and they will tell you. . . . The hand of Jehovah itself has done this.”​—Job 12:7-9.

EVERYTHING about birds appears to be designed for flight. For example, the shafts of wing feathers must support a bird’s entire weight during flight. How can the wings be so light yet so strong? If you cut through the shaft of a feather, you may see why. It resembles what engineers call a foam-sandwich beam. It has a pithy interior and a rough exterior. Engineers have studied feather shafts, and foam-sandwich beams are used in aircraft.

The bones of birds are also amazingly designed. Most are hollow, and some may be strengthened by internal struts in a form engineers call the Warren girder. Interestingly, a similar design was used in the wings of the space shuttle.

Pilots balance modern aircraft by adjusting a few flaps on the wings and tail. But a bird uses some 48 muscles in its wing and shoulder to change the configuration and motion of its wings and individual feathers, doing so several times a second. No wonder that avian aerobatic ability is the envy of aircraft designers!

Flight, especially takeoff, consumes a lot of energy. So birds need a powerful, fast-burning “engine.” A bird’s heart beats faster than that of a similar-size mammal and is usually larger and more powerful. Also, a bird’s lungs have a different, one-way-flow design that is more efficient than a mammal’s.

Many birds are designed to carry enough fuel for amazingly long flights. A migrating thrush uses up half of its body weight for a ten-hour flight. When a bar-tailed godwit takes off from Alaska heading for New Zealand, over half of its body weight is fat. Astonishingly, this allows it to fly for about 190 hours (eight days) nonstop. No commercial aircraft can do that.

Television

SOON after men learned to broadcast sound, inventors wondered if they could also transmit live pictures. To appreciate the challenge, consider how television works today.

First, a TV camera focuses a scene onto a target device that “reads” the picture, similar to the way you read print. However, instead of scanning lines of letters on the page, it scans lines of spots (or pixels) in the picture. It converts what it sees into an electronic video signal that can be transmitted to another place. A receiver then converts the signal back into a live picture.

A Scotsman named John Logie Baird has been credited with being the first to demonstrate a television. When poor health caused him to give up his job as an electrical engineer, he turned to a subject that had interested him since he was a teenager​—how to build a machine that could transmit live images.

Baird’s television camera used a disk (a hatbox, at first) perforated by about 30 holes arranged in a spiral. As the disk spun, the holes scanned successive lines of the picture and allowed light to fall on a photoelectric cell. The cell produced a video signal that was transmitted to a receiver. In the receiver the signal was amplified to illuminate a variable light behind a similar spinning disk to reproduce the picture. The challenge was to synchronize the disks. As Baird toiled on the project, he supported himself by shining shoes.

Baird transmitted the first television pictures from one end of his attic to the other on October 2, 1925. The first person ever to appear on TV was a frightened office boy from downstairs, who was pressed into service for half a crown. In 1928, Baird broadcast the first television pictures across the Atlantic. When John Baird arrived in person in New York, the timid Scotsman was acutely embarrassed when he was greeted by a pipe band. He was famous. But was he the first to transmit live pictures?

Nature Had It First

“The hearing ear and the seeing eye​—Jehovah himself has made even both of them.”​—Proverbs 20:12.

YOUR eyes are like tiny television cameras. They convert images into electrical signals and transmit these signals along the optic nerve to the back of your brain, where the actual seeing takes place.

The eye is a marvel in miniature. Just an inch [24 mm] in diameter and one fourth of an ounce [7.5 g] in weight, it is ingeniously engineered. For example, it has separate systems for dim and bright lighting, so that 30 minutes after entering a dark room, your eyes may become 10,000 times more sensitive to light.

In normal lighting, what gives you a clear picture? Your eye has over 100 times more light-sensitive cells (pixels) than most video cameras. Also, a large portion of those cells are packed into a small spot at the center of the retina called the fovea, which provides the sharpest vision. Since you shift your gaze several times a second, you get the impression that your whole field of vision is sharp. Remarkably, your eye’s fovea is about the size of the dot at the end of this sentence.

Electrical signals from the light-sensitive cells pass from one nerve cell to another toward the optic nerve. But the nerve cells do more than just pass the signals on. They preprocess them, enhancing vital information and suppressing unneeded detail.

The visual cortex of your brain is like a sophisticated video receiver. It sharpens images by enhancing edges and compares the signals from cells sensitive to primary colors, so you can distinguish millions of colors. Your brain also compares the tiny dissimilarities between what your two eyes see, so you can perceive distance.

Consider how your eyes scan faces in a distant crowd and send electronic impulses to your brain, which then transforms the signals into clear images. Consider, too, how subtle details of those faces are compared with ones in your memory, so that you instantly recognize your friend. Is that process not awe-inspiring?

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The way the eye processes information attests to its ingenious engineering

Automatic Navigation

YOU probably know how difficult it can be to find your way across an unfamiliar town. So how can a navigator find his way across featureless oceans? Merely having a compass does not help unless a navigator knows what his position is in relation to his destination. Not until the invention of the sextant and the marine chronometer in the 1730’s could navigators determine their exact location and plot their course on a map​—with each fix requiring hours of calculation.

Today motorists in many countries navigate using relatively inexpensive devices linked to the Global Positioning System (GPS). You just key in your destination address. The device can show your exact position on its screen. Then it guides you to where you want to go. How does it work?

Satellite navigation devices depend on about 30 satellites that each broadcast signals indicating the satellite’s position and the time to an accuracy of a few billionths of a second. Once your device has established contact with a few satellites, it accurately measures how long a signal takes to travel from the satellite to your receiver. With this information, it can determine your position. Can you imagine the complexity of the mathematics? In a few seconds, it computes the distances to three satellites, all thousands of miles away traveling in different directions at speeds of many miles per second.

Professors Bradford Parkinson and Ivan Getting invented the GPS back in the early 1960’s. Although it was originally developed for military use, it was later made available to the public, becoming fully operational in 1996. A GPS receiver is a marvel of computer technology, but was it the first automatic navigation device?

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Globe: Based on NASA photo

Nature Had It First

“Even the stork in the heavens​—it well knows its appointed times.”​—Jeremiah 8:7.

JEREMIAH wrote about the migrating stork over 2,500 years ago. Today, people still marvel at creatures that migrate, such as salmon, which can swim thousands of miles in the ocean and return to the stream where they were born, and leatherback sea turtles, which also make incredible journeys. One that nested in Indonesia was tracked as it migrated 13,000 miles [20,000 km] to the coast of Oregon in the United States. Leatherbacks often return to the same area of Indonesia to nest again.

Some creatures can home, a skill even more remarkable than the navigation of migrators. For example, investigators took 18 albatross by plane from a small island in the center of the Pacific Ocean to several locations thousands of miles away and released them​—some near the western rim of the ocean and others near the eastern rim. Within a few weeks, most of the birds had returned home.

Pigeons have been transported more than 100 miles [150 km] to unfamiliar places while under deep anesthesia or in rotating drums, yet after circling a few times, they have calculated their position and turned accurately toward home. Since the pigeons can find their way home even when wearing frosted eyeglasses, researchers believe that they calculate their position in relation to home by detecting the directions from which they receive important navigational information.

Monarch butterflies from vast areas of North America migrate more than a thousand miles to a small area of Mexico. Even though they have never been to Mexico before, they find their way, often to the same trees where their great-grandparents roosted the previous year. Just how they do it still baffles researchers.

Whereas our automatic navigation devices may depend totally on satellites, many animals seem to be able to use various navigation methods​—from observing landmarks and the sun to detecting magnetic fields, distinctive smells, and even sounds. Professor of biology James L. Gould writes: “Animals whose lives depend on accurate navigation are uniformly overengineered. . . . They usually come equipped with alternative strategies​—a series of backups between which they switch depending on which is providing the most reliable information.” The sophistication of animal navigation continues to confound investigators.

What We Learn From Nature

“How many your works are, O Jehovah! All of them in wisdom you have made.”​—Psalm 104:24.

MANY use the word “nature” to refer to the source of the design of living things. For example, in its issue of March 2003, the journal Scientific American stated: “Of all the body coverings nature has designed, feathers are the most various and the most mysterious.” Although that writer may think of nature as a mere force, he says that nature “designed” feathers. Can a force design things?

To “design” means to “plan (something) with a specific purpose or intention in mind.” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English) Only a person can design and invent. Just as inventors have names, the Creator has a name. Jehovah is the Author of nature. He alone is “the Most High over all the earth,” who “created all things.”​—Psalm 83:18; Revelation 4:11.

What do we learn from creation? Its greatest lessons tell us about Jehovah and his wonderful qualities, including his wisdom. “His invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship.” (Romans 1:20) From nature we learn that God’s wisdom is superior to ours. If he can design things better than inventors can, does it not stand to reason that he can advise us better than human counselors can?

God’s advice is not principally to be found in the “book of nature,” but, rather, in his written Word, the Bible. In it you can find an abundance of practical wisdom. The Bible says: “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial.”​—2 Timothy 3:16.

If you find that learning about inventors is interesting, you will find that learning about the Creator can be even more so. For example, you likely want to know answers to such questions as: Why do we experience suffering and then die? Is this really God’s purpose for man? If not, why does God allow suffering?

Whether they acknowledge it or not, scientists have learned design from Jehovah. You too can learn much from our Creator. For instance, you can learn how to enjoy a stable marriage, how to raise children successfully, what God’s purpose is for earth, and much more that can make your life meaningful. The book What Does the Bible Really Teach? published by Jehovah’s Witnesses, can help you to benefit greatly from God’s Word.