Next time you find that you have done something stupid, take comfort in the following story that I found in a book about my local area. Smart people also do stupid things. You can still win the Nobel Prize.
Swedish inventor Gustaf Dalén lived 1869-1937. He revolutionised shipping by automating lighthouses. His system of automatic regulators and gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys meant that every little treacherous reef could be illuminated at night making commercial shipping much safer. The light source used gas but everything was automated so you could drop by once per year for maintenance and to refill the gas supply.
So you needed safe containers for transporting and storing gas. These are the gas cylinders with regulators that we know today, for instance from your garden gas grill.
One thing Gustaf Dalén wanted to study was how different cylinders responded to heat.
So one day in 1912 he came to Alby, Botkyrka, to do an experiment.
Gustaf Dalén was a good friend of Lars Magnus Ericsson who had taken an early retirement from the phone company he founded. Ericsson had bought a mansion in rural Alby south of Stockholm where he now experimented with ways to modernise farming. He had the perfect place for Dalén’s project.
In a quarry next to the lake, helpers had started a large fire in the morning. Arriving from Stockholm with canisters of different types, the test could start.
The first two cylinders they placed directly in the fire. Observing from a safe distance, these cylinders very quickly exploded before the manometers could pick up any changes in pressure.
The next five cylinders they hung in a cable over the fire for the heating to happen gradually. After a while, one of them punctured and a flame shot out, and soon the next three showed similar behaviour. The manometers picked up changes in pressure.
But the fifth cylinder was larger and endured the heat without showing any signs of deterioration. They waited for half an hour, still nothing happened.
Then they approached the cylinder.
Then it exploded.
Everyone survived but Gustaf Dalén was hit by shrapnel and very badly burnt. He hovered between life and death for weeks but eventually recovered though he was blinded for life.
Gustaf Dalén was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics the same year.
Found in the book Historiska Alby by Martin Rosén, 2004. Thanks to my good neighbour who kindly lend me her copy. More about Gustaf Dalén on Wikipedia.
