Changes between Version 18 and Version 19 of Outreach/HandyFacts

Timestamp:

04/25/12 12:39:34 (14 years ago)

Author:

jps@…

Comment:

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Outreach/HandyFacts

@@ -12 +12 @@
  * In the 1970s, the "Columbia CO Survey" built a 1.2 meter radio telescope that operated out of the Little Dome and was the first to map the sky in this important radio band. See a picture of this at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/mmw/mini_NY_210.jpg
  * Rutherfurd Observatory has been in continuous operation since Pupin was constructed, but in 2009 a new "Northwest Corner Building" was erected next to it, six floors higher than the roof of Pupin and blocking a significant portion of its field of view, and putting out a considerable amount of light, interfering with observations in the remaining sky.
- * Below the Rutherfurd Observatory on the 14th floor was the site of Professer Wallace Eckert's Astronomical Laboratory, in which he constructed the first device to perform general scientific calculations automatically in 1933-34. 
+ * Below the Rutherfurd Observatory on the 14th floor was the site of Professor Wallace Eckert's Astronomical Laboratory, in which he constructed the first device to perform general scientific calculations automatically in 1933-34 by connecting IBM punch card tabulating machines together, arguably inventing punch card programming. Eckert's expertise in this computational device was the reason he was appointed as director of the United States Naval Observatory at the beginning of World War II. His Columbia Astronomy Department replacement was refugee from Europe, Martin Schwarzschild (son of Karl Schwarzschild and later chair of the Princeton Astrophysics Department), who himself enlisted in the US Army and was eventually promoted to be an officer in the Army Intelligence Corps. After the war, Eckert returned to Columbia to head the newly-named Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory that worked in close cooperation with IBM. In 1957, Eckert's laboratory finally left Pupin Hall to the new campus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, still the headquarters for the IBM research division.
  * Pupin Hall is also where Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, and other physicists began work on developing a self-sustaining neutron chain reaction in 1939, in the basement. When Fermi's work moved to the University of Chicago after Pearl Harbor so it would be safer from attack from the sea, it was called the Manhattan Project because of where it had begun, and it kept its name when it moved later to Los Alamos, New Mexico.  Here is an article from the NYT describing the Manhattan roots of the Manhattan project: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?pagewanted=1.