Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

That also reminds me of a thing I ponder at times when walking, how many radio signals are "in the air" today.  It doesn't really bother me, but it's rather amazing how they can be kept separate.  I actually don't know this for a fact, but I assume a cell phone is really a small radio.  I remember some early ones that had an antenna one had to extend.

How the heck does all this work anyway?

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

The Wright Brothers Make Their Famous Flight (1903)
Both excellent mechanics, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright built and repaired bicycles before turning their attention to flying machines. They spent years designing and testing gliders and also built a powerful four-cylinder engine and an efficient propeller. In 1903, after several failed attempts, the brothers succeeded in making the first controlled, sustained flights in a power-driven airplane.

The First Opium War

Often seen as the beginning of European imperial hegemony over China, the First Opium War was fought between the British East India Company and the Qing Dynasty from 1839 to 1842. Widespread opium addiction had led to a Chinese ban on imports of the drug in 1729, and the British aimed to reverse this policy. Easily overpowered, China agreed to the Treaty of Nanjing, which fixed tariffs on British goods, opened several Chinese ports to British merchants

Absolutely untrue. In fact, they did in fact land a robotic mission on the moon a few years after Apollo and even returned samples. They also remain the only people to successfully land and transmit from Venus, albeit for only a short time.
Their mega rocket, N1, had dozens of engines ( Sat V had 4 large F1 engines). It proved difficult to control. All three flights ended in failure.

Correction. Saturn V had 5 F1 engines, not 4. 

THIS DAY IN HISTORY: 

A Christmas Carol Is Published (1843)
English novelist Charles Dickens wrote many books and stories about Christmas. His first, the beloved A Christmas Carol, was written in just weeks, reputedly to meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy. An instant success, it has since been adapted countless times for theater and film. The last name of the story's protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, has even entered the English lexicon as a word meaning a mean-spirited, miserly person.

On This Day in 1951, Four Illuminated Lightbulbs in Idaho Were Evidence of the First Time a Nuclear Power Plant Generated Electricity
Although it was just a byproduct of developing a new type of reactor, the generation of electricity from nuclear energy signaled a bright future ahead

December 20, 2024

Deep in the sagebrush steppe of southeast Idaho on December 20, 1951, a team of nuclear physicists gathered around four 200-watt lightbulbs dangling from a slack wire. Then, Harold Lichtenberger, the project manager, flipped a switch. The bulbs lit up. 

Most of the time, flipping a light switch doesn’t need an audience. The team of scientists was reportedly nonchalant, too. “This is it,” one scientist said when the bulbs illuminated, according to Rick Michal in Nuclear News.



But this was no mere flick of the finger: For the first time in history, a nuclear reaction had generated a significant amount of electricity. 

For the time being, it only powered four bulbs. But the future looked bright from the small brick building outside of Arco, Idaho. 

Development of the Experimental Breeder Reactor-I, as the reactor that powered the lightbulbs was known, began in the late 1940s, as the United States government sought to develop a nuclear reaction process that would extend its finite supply of uranium. 

Uranium-238 is uranium’s most relatively abundant isotope, making up 99 percent of the naturally occurring form of the element. However, unlike the scarce and radioactive uranium-235 isotope, uranium-238 is stable and nonfissionable without high-energy neutrons. 

A breeder reactor, like the one scientists in Idaho were trying to build, converts uranium-238’s “nonfissionable material into fissionable material more rapidly than the nuclear fuel is consumed,” Popular Mechanics explained in 1952, “a process that would contribute to expansion of our atomic program.” 

As scientists initiate the process of artificial nuclear decay, uranium-238 atoms absorb neutrons in the reactor core, becoming relatively more fissionable plutonium-239 atoms. When a plutonium nucleus in a breeder reactor is hit with a high-energy neutron, it splits, releasing heat and more neutrons. The process becomes a self-sustaining source of energy, in the form of heat, as the reaction continues.

A secret 1949 government feasibility report written by Lichtenberger, Walter Zinn and Aaron Novick—all veterans of the United States’ top-secret Manhattan Project that furthered nuclear research and created the world’s first nuclear weapons—concluded that “from the nuclear point of view … there is much attraction toward a fast neutron reactor for breeding.”

Experiments with EBR-I began in early 1951. In the compact brick building, a complex process of nuclear reactions took place leading up to the moment when Lichtenberger flipped that switch. 

First, a liquid metal coolant consisting of an alloy of sodium and potassium flowed through the reactor core, where it absorbed heat from the artificial decay process. As it returned back to its supply tank, it transferred its heat to a secondary liquid metal coolant, which was pumped to a boiler, transferring heat to water and generating enough steam to turn a turbine. 

At 1:50 p.m. on December 20, as Lichtenberger flipped the switch, the first electricity generated from nuclear energy flowed from the turbines into the four lightbulbs. 

“When I turned the switch,” Lichtenberger later told The Idaho Statesman, “I guess I was more interested in how the circuit breakers would function than I was in the significance of the test.” 

In fact, power production, Atomic Energy Commission officials told the Statesman, was merely “incidental” to the experiment’s main goals: measuring the efficacy of the breeder process and  converting nonfissionable material into fissionable material. The generation of electricity was simply a side project. 

The next day, the EBR-I’s output reached 100 kilowatts, powering all the electronics in the building, another promising indication of the development of nuclear power. 

Interest in breeder reactors waned after the 1960s as the available global uranium supply increased and scientists developed more efficient enrichment methods. But the little brick building near Arco still proudly calls itself the “World’s First Nuclear Power Plant.”