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06/02/2004
Tupperware, Earthshine and Leonardo
Last week I mentioned the restorations of Michelangelo’s David
and his Creation of Adam. I just realized that May 27 marked
the fourth anniversary of the day my wife and I spent four hours
in line in Milan waiting to see another restoration, that of
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. (My column of 6/20/2000
in the archives describes our unusual experiences in that line.)
Following up on last week’s evolutionary theme, if I had to pick
the most highly evolved human, it would have to be Leonardo,
with Einstein a close second. What person, other than Leonardo,
could you associate with such widely varied subjects as the
Mona Lisa, Tupperware and Earthshine?
Last week I happened upon an interesting American Experience
documentary about Tupperware on PBS. It was a fascinating tale
of how a woman, Brownie Wise, became so enamored with some
Tupperware that she met with and convinced Earl Tupper to pull
his products out of stores and sell strictly through home parties.
Brownie devoted virtually all her waking hours to Tupperware
parties and to building up a worldwide network of Tupperware
salesladies and distributors. Her eventual fall from grace came
about from being so successful that orders for the products
exceeded the production capacity of the Tupperware facility.
Surprisingly, Mr. Tupper was not ecstatic with the demand for
his products but berated her for not managing her sales properly!
He also was miffed that Brownie had become the face of
Tupperware to the world. He fired her and sold the company.
Leonardo was a superb artist but he was also an even more
impressive scientist and engineer. His many thousands of pages
of notes contain designs for inventions ranging from helicopters
and hang gliders to machine guns and submarines. He even had
a design for a car powered by a spring – not a bad idea in these
days of high gas prices! But, did you know about “Leonardo,
Godfather of Tupperware”? That’s the title of a brief news item
by Jocelyn Selim in the May issue of Discover magazine.
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of Italy’s Museo Ideale, spent lots
of time pouring over Leonardo’s notes - not an easy task since
Leonardo used mirror-image handwriting, which reads from right
to left. Vezzosi found some recipes for mixtures that Leonardo
said would harden into materials that could be used to make
unbreakable handles for knives, jewelry, cups or vases or even
chessboards. He wrote about mixing colors with animal glues
and adding organic fibers.
Vezzosi tried some of the recipes, which required building up
hardened layers of the stuff and ended up making a compound
that resembled Bakelite, the first synthetic polymer, patented by
Leo Baekeland in 1907. Bakelite started the plastics revolution
that led to, among many other products, Tupperware! Once
again, Leonardo was centuries ahead of his time.
Then I spotted in the May 27 Star Ledger an article by Kevin
Coughlin about “Earthshine”. Sure enough, it was Leonardo
who first suggested that the earth reflected light from the sun and
that this reflected light (Earthshine) allows us to see the dark
portions of a crescent moon. Why should we care about
Earthshine? For one thing, that sunlight that gets reflected back
into space, part of it lighting up the moon, won’t heat up our
earth and won’t contribute to global warming. With the release
of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, global warming
should be a hot topic for at least a few weeks this summer.
Let’s look at the warming situation a bit closer. The power
coming from the sun is partly reflected, the rest making its way
into our atmosphere and does such good things as light our days
and grow our plants. After this, the Earth radiates heat back into
space. Ideally, the amount of energy we get from the Sun is
perfectly balanced by the amount reflected and radiated back into
space. If you’re a savvy physicist, you can figure out what the
temperature of the Earth is. (Actually, it’s the so-called black
body temperature but we won’t worry about that.) The equation
that tells you this temperature involves the “albedo” of the Earth.
If you don’t recognize the word “albedo”, neither does my
spellchecker.
My dictionary defines albedo as the fraction of electromagnetic
radiation reflected from a surface. For our purposes, we can say
the Earth’s albedo is the fraction of the total sunlight hitting the
Earth that gets reflected back into space in all directions. The
more light reflected, the more Earthshine, the lower the
temperature of the Earth. What determines the amount of light
reflected? One factor is cloudiness. Clouds reflect about half the
light that hits them. So, to keep us cool, we want more clouds,
right? Maybe, maybe not. It turns out clouds also are like
blankets and tend to block heat being radiated back into space.
Philip Goode, a scientist at the nearby New Jersey Institute of
Technology (NJIT), is the leader of a project funded by NASA to
study Earthshine. A visit to the NJIT Web site resulted in my
printing out a 14-page proposal by Goode for the funding. The
proposal must be several years old and the Star Ledger article
seems to indicate that the project has been a success. How do
you measure Earthshine? You can use satellites to get some idea
of the reflected light but a satellite gives a relatively local
measurement. What Goode and his colleagues have been doing
is to measure the Earthshine by looking at crescent moons and
seeing how much light from the Earth is lighting up the dark part
of the moon.
Using the moon gives a more global picture than is possible with
a satellite. Clouds come into the picture when they take the
Earthshine data and correlate it with the global cloud cover as
determined from NASA weather satellites. Goode and Stephen
Koonin at the California Institute of Technology have done their
work at the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California. An
observatory in Ukraine has joined in. The more widely the
observatories are scattered the more global the coverage.
What has emerged from the study so far is the surprising finding
that Earthshine has varied by as much as 5 percent since 1985.
In the period from 1997 to 2001 thinner cloud cover let more
sunlight hit the Earth. At the same time the thinner cloud cover
may have allowed more heat to be radiated back into space. It’s
not an easy problem to try to figure out what the total effect is on
our climate. What Goode and his colleagues hope is to provide
enough data for those who model and predict global climate
changes to refine their models to include realistic cloud cover
effects. These modelers must be able to take data from the more
distant past, then predict the more recent past and see how their
predictions stack up against what actually happened. Hopefully,
that will lend confidence to any future predictions.
I close with a heavy heart. I’ve just returned from funeral
services for a good friend. Frank Vaccaro was a colleague in the
battery group at Bell Labs, a runner (8 New York City
marathons!) and a fellow golfer who died last week of lung
cancer. My Jewish friends often refer to a fellow as a real
mensch, someone with admirable qualities. Frank fit that
description. In trying to think of a way to pay tribute to this
prince of a guy, I think back several years to a par 4 hole on the
Quail Brook Golf Course. Frank’s drive was good but not
outstanding. After his long second shot, and two or three more
by me, we searched the green and surrounding area for his ball.
Mystified, we looked in the cup and there it was – an eagle! It’s
the only eagle I’ve ever witnessed by a member of a 4-some in
which I’ve played. Frank, I’m glad to have shared that happiest
of golfing moments with you. We won’t forget you.
Allen F. Bortrum
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