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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

50.   Learning From Nature


Car     We have long been seeking for other means of using the energy from the sun. Recently, I mentioned that a single acre of our Ohio farms received from the sun, in the three summer months, energy equivalent to that developed by burning 250,000 gallons of gasoline - enough to take care of the ordinary needs of over 2,400 cars for a year under the present rationing! If we could devise some method of capturing that sun energy, there would be no need for rationing at all.

     When man appeared on this earth, he must have - found vegetation in all forms. Green leaves of many kinds were trapping that sun energy and converting it into plant growth. We are now using through coal and petroleum the sun energy given to those green leaves millions of years ago.

     We do utilize, in another way, a small portion of the power by harnessing waterfalls - Niagara's great powerhouses are just using the energy of yesterday's sunshine.

     It is not because nature is trying to keep that secret - we just haven't fully evaluated the problem or spent anything like enough time working on it. Many people have studied this subject and all have made contributions.



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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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