by: Steve Gink
Louis Essen was born in 1908 in a small town in England called Nottingham. His childhood was typical of the time and he pursued his education with enjoyment and dedication. At the age of 20 Louis graduated from the University of Nottingham, where he had been studying. It was at this time that his career began to take off, while I was invited to join the NPL, or National Physics Laboratory.
Was for Louis? s time at the NPL he began working to develop a quartz crystal oscillator as he believed they were able to measure time as accurately as a pendulum based clock. Ten years after joining the NPL Louis had invented the Essen ring. This was an eponymous invention which took its name from the shape of the quartz which Louis had used in his latest clock and that was three times more accurate than previous versions.
Louis soon moved on to newer areas of research and began studying ways to measure the speed of light. During World War II he began working in high frequency radar and used his technical ability to develop the wavemeter cavity resonance. In 1946 it was this wavemeter which he used, along with a colleague by the name of Albert Gordon-Smith, make his lightspeed measurements. Have you recently recognized Louis? s measures were largely more accurate to have been recorded up until that time.
"During the early part of the 1950? s Louis began to take an interest in the research being conducted at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in the United States of America. He learned that the work was done to invent a clock that was more accurate than any other. "American scientists used the idea of \u200b\u200bkeeping a watch? s accuracy using the radiation emitted or absorbed by atoms. At that time the Americans used a molecule of ammonia but Louis felt that this was not working and if they used various atoms, such as hydrogen or cesium, and so he began working on its own clock using these materials instead.
"1953 saw Louis and a colleague, Jack Parry, receiving permission to develop an atomic clock at NPL based on Louis? s existing knowledge of quartz crystal oscillators and other relevant techniques he had learned from the wavemeter cavity resonance he had previously designed. Only two years later the first atomic clock operated Louis, cesium I, designed by UK scientists. Development in the United States had all but stopped due to political difficulties.
Louis continued working on his atomic clock and by 1964 he had managed to increase the accuracy of the atomic clock from a second in 300 years to one second every 2000 years! "The continued success of Louis? s work led to the definition of a second it was changed from 1 / 864000 of a mean solar day to be calculated as the time taken for 9,192,631,770 cycles of radiation in an atomic clock.
"Louis Essen in 1997 and died before his death had been honored with, among others, an OBE and the Tompion Gold Medal of the Clockmakers? Company.
|
uses atomic clocks, you can find her articles about them in atomic clocks or www.atomic-clocks.org visit the site contains information about atomic clocks and some images.
|
0 comments:
Post a Comment