Thursday, January 10, 2008

Unsung heroes


First, the Women in Science blog has a great post about the six women programmers of ENIAC, "the first purely electronic, Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems".

Scientific American has a podcast about a recent book -- Seth Shulman's The Telephone Gambit -- with compelling evidence showing that Alexander Graham Bell "plagiarized a key element of the telephone" from Elisha Gray. The podcast carries a fairly wide-ranging interview with the author of the book.

Finally, I must point to Olivia Judson's post about Alfred Russel Wallace, the 'other' scientist who had independently "arrived at the idea of evolution by natural selection.

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