China passed us in life-expectancy in 2022, and also in fertility, going the other way. In China lifespan at birth increased to 77.3 years. In the US it dropped an additional 0.9 years, to 76.8. US lifespans suffered from continuing COVID and an increase in accidents, heart disease, suicide, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Black men were hit particularly hard, so that today, a black man in the US has the same life expectancy as he would in Rwanda. China seems to have avoided this, but should expect problems due to declining fertility and birth rates.
China passed us in life expectancy in 2022.
Fertility rates will eventually burden the US too, as US fertility is only slightly greater than in China, 1.78 children per woman, lifetime, compared to 1.702 in China. But China has far fewer people of childbearing ages, relatively, and only 47% are women. Three decades of one child policy resulted in few young adults and a tendency to abort girls. Currently, the birthrate in China is barely more than half ours: 6.77 per 1000, compared to 12.01 per 1000. And the proportion of the aged keeps rising. China will soon face a severe shortage of care-givers, and an excess of housing.
Years of low birthrate preceded the “Lost decades” of financial crisis in Japan and the USSR. Between 1990 and 2011, business stagnated and house prices dropped. China faces the same; few workers and more need for care: it’s not a good recipe.
Beginning about 1991, Japan saw a major financial collapse with banks failing, and home values falling. China seems over-due.
Few children also signals a psychic lack of confidence in the country, and suggests that, going forward, there will be a lack of something to work for. Already Chinese citizens don’t trust the state to allow them to raise healthy children. They have stopped getting married, especially in the cities, and look more to have fun.
Affluent women claim they can’t find a good man to marry: one who’s manly, who will love them, and who will reliably raise their standard of life. Women seem less picky in China’s rural areas, or perhaps they find better men there. However it goes, urban women get married late and have few children, both in China and here. China produces great, sappy, soap operas though: a country girl or secretary in a high-power job meets a manly, urban manager who lovers her intensely. A fine example is “The Eternal Love” (watch it here). It involves time travel, and a noble romance from the past. Japan produced similar fiction before the crisis. And a crisis seems to be coming.
While Japan and Korea responded quietly to crisis and “the lost decades,” allowing banks to fail and home values to fall, Russia’s response was more violent. It went to war with Chechnya, then with Belarus and Ukraine, and now with NATO. I fear that China will go to war too — with Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It’s a scary thought; China is a much tougher enemy than Russia. There is already trouble brewing over new islands that they are building.
Robert Buxbaum January 25, 2023. If you want to see a Korean soap opera on the Secretary – manager theme, watch: “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim”. (I credit my wife with the research here.) I suspect that Americans too would like sappy shows like this.
The main products of my company, REB Research, involve metallic membranes, often palladium-based, that provide 100% selective hydrogen filtering or long term hydrogen storage. One way to understand why these metallic membrane provide 100% selectivity has to do with the fact that metallic atoms are much bigger than hydrogen ions, with absolutely regular, small spaces between them that fit hydrogen and nothing else.
Palladium atoms are essentially spheres. In the metallic form, the atoms pack in an FCC structure (face-centered cubic) with a radius of, 1.375 Å. There is a cloud of free electrons that provide conductivity and heat transfer, but as far as the structure of the metal, there is only a tiny space of 0.426 Å between the atoms, see below. This hole is too small of any molecule, or any inert gas. In the gas phase hydrogen molecules are about 1.06 Å in diameter, and other molecules are bigger. Hydrogen atoms shrink when inside a metal, though, to 0.3 to 0.4 Å, just small enough to fit through the holes.
The reason that hydrogen shrinks has to do with its electron leaving to join palladium’s condition cloud. Hydrogen is usually put on the upper left of the periodic table because, in most cases, it behaves as a metal. Like a metal, it reacts with oxygen, and chlorine, forming stoichiometric compounds like H2O and HCl. It also behaves like a metal in that it alloys, non-stoichiometrically, with other metals. Not with all metals, but with many, Pd and the transition metals in particular. Metal atoms are a lot bigger than hydrogen so there is little metallic expansion on alloying. The hydrogen fits in the tiny spaces between atoms. I’ve previously written about hydrogen transport through transition metals (we provide membranes for this too).
No other atom or molecule fits in the tiny space between palladium atoms. Other atoms and molecules are bigger, 1.5Å or more in size. This is far too big to fit in a hole 0.426Å in diameter. The result is that palladium is basically 100% selective to hydrogen. Other metals are too, but palladium is particularly good in that it does not readily oxidize. We sometime sell transition metal membranes and sorbers, but typically coat the underlying metal with palladium.
We don’t typically sell products of pure palladium, by the way. Instead most of our products use, Pd-25%Ag or Pd-Cu. These alloys are slightly cheaper than pure Pd and more stable. Pd-25% silver is also slightly more permeable to hydrogen than pure Pd is — a win-win-win for the alloy.
There was a major advance in nuclear fusion this month at the The National Ignition Facility of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), but the press could not figure out what it was, quite. They claimed ignition, and it was not. They claimed that it opened the door to limitless power. It did not. Some heat-energy was produced, but not much, 2.5 MJ was reported. Translated to the English system, that’s 600 kCal, about as much heat in a “Big Mac”. That’s far less energy went into lasers that set the reaction off. The importance wasn’t the amount in the energy produced, in my opinion, it’s that the folks at LLNL fired off a small hydrogen bomb, in house, and survived the explosion. 600 kCal is about the explosive power of 1.5 lb of TNT.
Many laser beams converge on a droplet of deuterium-tritium setting off the explosion of a small fraction of the fuel. The explosion had about the power of 1.2 kg of TNT. Drawing from IEEE Spectrum
The process, as reported in the Financial Times, involved “a BB-sized” droplet of holmium -enclosed deuterium and tritium. The folks at LLNL fast-cooked this droplet using 100 lasers, see figure of 2.1MJ total output, converging on one spot simultaneously. As I understand it 4.6 MJ came out, 2.5 MJ more than went in. The impressive part is that the delicate lasers survived the event. By comparison, the blast that bought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie took only 2-3 ounces of explosive, about 70g. The folks at LLNL say they can do this once per day, something I find impressive.
The New York Times seemed to think this was ignition. It was not. Given the size of a BB, and the density of liquid deuterium-tritium, it would seem the weight of the drop was about 0.022g. This is not much but if it were all fused, it would release 12 GJ, the equivalent of about 3 tons of TNT. That the energy released was only 2.5MJ, suggests that only 0.02% of the droplet was fused. It is possible, though unlikely, that the folks at LLNL could have ignited the entire droplet. If they did, the damage from 5 tons of TNT equivalent would have certainly wrecked the facility. And that’s part of the problem; to make practical energy, you need to ignite the whole droplet and do it every second or so. That’s to say, you have to burn the equivalent of 5000 Big Macs per second.
You also need the droplets to be a lot cheaper than they are. Today, these holmium capsules cost about $100,000 each. We will need to make them, one per second for a cost around $! for this to make any sort of sense. Not to say that the experiments are useless. This is a great way to test H-bomb designs without destroying the environment. But it’s not a practical energy production method. Even ignoring the energy input to the laser, it is impossible to deal with energy when it comes in the form of huge explosions. In a sense we got unlimited power. Unfortunately it’s in the form of H-Bombs.
Four years ago, when the average lifespan of American men was 3.1 years longer than today, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology dropped the standard for normal- acceptable blood pressure for 50+ years olds from 140/90 to 120/80. The new standard of normal was for everyone regardless or age or gender despite the fact that virtually no one over 50 now reached it. Normal is now quite un-common.
By the new definition, virtually everyone over 50 now is diagnosed with high blood pressure or hypertension. Almost all require one or two medications — no more baby aspirin. Though the evidence for aspirin’s benefit is strong, it doesn’t lower blood pressure. AHA guidance is to lower a patients blood pressure to <140/90 mmHg or at least treat him/her with 2–3 antihypertensive medications.4
Average systolic blood pressures for long-lived populations of men and women without drugs.
The graphs shows the average blood pressures, without drugs in a 2008 study of the longest-lived, Scandinavian populations. These were the source of the previous targets: the natural pressures for the healthiest populations at the time, based on the study of 1304 men (50-79 years old) and 1246 women (38-79 years old) observed for up to 12 years. In this healthy population, the average untreated systolic pressure is seen till age 70, reaching 154 for men, and over 160 for women. By the new standards, these individuals would be considered highly unhealthy, though they live a lot longer than we do. The most common blood-pressure drug prescribed in the US today is atenolol, a beta blocker. See my essay on Atenolol. It’s good at lowering blood pressure, but does not decrease mortality.
The plot at left shows the relationship between systolic blood pressure and death. There is a relationship, but it is not clear that the one is the cause of the other, especially for individuals with systolic pressure below 160. Those with pressures of 170 and above have significantly higher mortality, and perhaps should take atenolol, but even here it might be that high cholesterol, or something else, is causing both the high blood pressure and the elevated death risk.
The death-risk difference between 160 and 100 mmHg is small and likely insignificant. The minimum at 110 is rather suspect too. I suspect it’s an artifact of a plot that ignores age. Only young people have this low number, and young people have fewer heart attacks. Artificially lowering a person’s blood pressure, even to this level does not make him young, [2][3] and brings some problems. Among the older-old, 85 and above, a systolic blood pressure of 180 mmHg is associated with resilience to physical and cognitive decline, though it is also associated with higher death rate.
The AHA used a smoothed version of the life risk graph above to justify their new standards, see below. In this version, any blood pressure looks like it’s bad. The ideal systolic pressure seems to be 100 or below. This is vastly too low a target, especially for a 60 year old. Based on the original graph, I would think that anything below 155 is OK.
smoothed chart of deaths per 1000 vs blood pressure. According to this chart, any blood pressure is bad. There is no optimum.
I suspect that the Scandinavians live longer because they drink mildly, exercise mildly, have good healthcare (but not too good), and have a low crime rate. They seem to have dodged the COVID problem too, even Sweden that did next to nothing. it’s postulated that the problem is over medication, including heart medication.
Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2023. The low US lifespan is startling. Despite spending more than any other developed countries on heath treatments, we have horribly lower lifespans, and it’s falling fast. A black man in the US has the same expected lifespan as in Rwanda. Causes include heart attacks and strokes, accidents, suicide, drugs, and disease. Opioids too, especially since the COVID lockdowns.
Humans are funny little creatures. I suspect that God keeps us around for our entertainment value. Each culture provides God its own entertainment. The British by invading basically every country on earth wearing tall, furry hats. We Americans provide grand stunts, like landing on the moon, or an automobile race around the world in 1908 when there were no roads or gas stations. And the French took love, dining, and dueling to a high, almost comic level. In France, the great and near great dueled well into the 20th century. The great French mathematician, Galois dueled to the death over love or politics. The great rationalist philosopher, Descartes, fought a duel, disarmed his opponent, and forgave him because of love. The science fiction writing philosopher, Cyrano de Bergerac, was famous for many duels, typically over the insults in his writing (or his nose).
In France, the great and near-great dueled well into the 20th century.
Instead of writing about those fellows, this post is about two Napoleonic generals, Pierre Dupont de l’Étang and François Fournier-Sarlovèze, who fought 30 duels with each other over 19 years writing a contract to kill each other whenever possible. They didn’t start as generals, of course, but rose through the ranks, though dueling was illegal, in theory, most of the time. They dueled on foot and horseback, mostly with swords, but also with pistols, and managed to wound each other at every meeting. They never quite managed to kill one another, or settle things, but they kept going at it till they became friends, of a sort. They were not that bad dualists, Fournier was a crack shot with a pistol and had killed others in duels. DuPont was better with the sword, but both were good at dodging death by blocking their vital organs.
The antaganism started with a duel, as one might expect. Fournier, a lieutenant at the time, had just killed a popular Strasbourg townsman named Blumm in a pistol duel. The townsman had no experience with pistols so this was sort-of murder, and resented. There was to be a party that evening, and Fournier’s commanding officer sent captain DuPont with a message to Fournier to keep him away until tempers subsided. Fournier attempted to attend anyway, and felt insulted by DuPont’s efforts to keep him out. Fournier challenged DuPont, and DuPont accepted, choosing military swords. Fournier would have challenged the commanding officer, but one does challenge so far above one’s station in France.
They met the next day at dawn. DuPont won the first duel, injuring Fournier by a severe cut to the shoulder. At this point, first blood, most American dualists would have called it quits, and might have become friends. In the duel between Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Jackson, Benton put two bullets into Jackson but didn’t kill them, and they went on to become friends, and colleagues in congress. But for these two, one deadly meeting was not enough. They decided to duel again as soon as Fournier recovered. That took a month. Fournier rechallenged, they fought again with military swords. This time DuPont was injured. At the next duel, both were injured. Again and again, whenever they met, with swords, cutlases, lances, rapiers, and at last with pistols.
Fournier (left) and DuPont (right). Fournier fought for Napoleon in the Spanish and Russian campaigns, and went on to help write the military code of conduct. DuPont fought in the Austrian, Dutch, and Spanish campaigns, eventually becoming Minister of War for Louis XVIII and deputy of the Charente “The Dualsts” film was shot in and around Fournier’s home town. The painting at left hangs in city hall.
They drew up a contract that they would try to kill each other whenever they were 30 leagues from each other (90 miles) and not otherwise occupied with a war. The duels would pause whenever one of them was promoted since one didn’t duel with someone of higher rank. The two proved to be excellent officers and advanced at a good rate, with occasional stops in prison because of the political turmoil of the time, but not because of their dueling. Fournier went to jail for financial mismanagement and for insulting Napoleon after the Russian Campaign, DuPont went to jail too, for losing to the Spanish, and later for supporting the Royalists. They were released because the army always needs good officers who are brave and successful (Read about their lives on Wikipedia, or here).
Sometimes they would meet by accident and try to kill each other in bars, restaurants, and hotels. Mostly they would meet by arrangement at appointed times in the woods, sharing a hearty meal and good insults before dueling. Sometimes they chatted with each other through the duels. They appreciated each others skill and complimented each other on promotions, especially when it allowed them to try to kill one another (there is a comic movie like this — Mr and Mrs Smith?). During one encounter, DuPont stuck Fournier to the wall through the neck with his sword, and Fournier requested that he move closer so they could continue fighting this way. Now that’s dedication.
Eventually, DuPont got engaged and they decided to fight to the death, hunting each other in a woods with pistols (two each). As it happened, DuPont disarmed Fournier, and forced him to agree to fight no more. It was a happy ending suitable to a movie. Actually, a movie made about them, “The Dualists, 1967.” DuPont became minister for War for Louis XVIII (released for being too royalist), and wrote poetry including “the art of war”. Fournier helped write the French code of military conduct.
Dueling didn’t stop here, but continued in France well into the 20th century. The last dual between members of the government was in 1967, see photo below. René Ribière, Gaullist speaker of the National Assembly fought Gaston Differe, Mayor of Marseilles and Socialist candidate for the French presidency. They used epees, long, sharp swords. Differe wounded Ribiére twice, both times in the arm, and Jean de Lipkowskiin called an end to the duel “. Several French duels of the 20th century, are caught on film.
Le député maire socialiste de Marseille et bon escrimeur Gaston Defferre (C) et le député gaulliste du Val d’Oise René Ribière s’affrontent en duel le 21 avril 1967 dans le jardin d’une maison de Neuilly sous le regard d’un des témoins M. Cassagne (de dos). René Ribière avait demandé réparation par les armes à la suite d’un différend survenu à l’Assemblé nationale au cours duquel Defferre l’ayant traité d'”abruti” avait refusé de lui présenter des excuses. / AFP PHOTO
The point of this essay, assuming there is one, is the love of God for us. A less loving God would have had the comedy of the generals end after only two or three duals, or after one killed the other. Here, He allowed them to fight till friendship prevailed. Also of note is that that French are not surrender monkeys, as some claim. They are masters of honor and history, and we love them.
Robert E. Buxbaum, December 28, 2022. In the US, dueling is more like gang warfare, I include here pirates like William Kidd and John Lafitte, the Hamilton-Burr duel with trick pistols, the western shootouts of Jim Bowie, Wyatt Earp, etc., the Chicago rivalries of the 1930s and the drug wars of Detroit. At present, Detroit has four shootings per day, but only one death per day. The movie “8 Mile” includes fights, shooting, and several rap duels, fought with deadly words. If you won’t fight for something, there is a sense that it isn’t worth much.
This week, the Artemis I, Orion capsule splashed down to general applause after circling the moon with mannequins. The launch cost $4.1 Billion, and the project, $50 Billion so far, of $93 Billion expected. Artemis II will carry people around the moon, and Artemis III is expected to land the first woman and person of color. The goal isn’t one I find inspiring, and I feel even less inspired by the technology. I see few advances in Artemis compared to the Saturn V of 50 years ago. And in several ways, it looks like a step backwards.
The graphic below compares the Artemis I SLS (Space Launch System) to the Saturn V. The SLS is 10% lighter, but the payload is lighter, too. It can carry 27 tons to the moon, while the Saturn V sent 50 tons to the moon. I’d expect more weight by now. We have carbon fiber and aramids, and they did not. Add to this that the cost per flight is higher, $4.1 B, versus $1.49 B in 2022 dollars for a Saturn V ($185 million in 1969 dollars). What’s more there was no new engine development or production, so the flight numbers are limited: Each SLS launch throws away five, space shuttle engines. When they are all gone, the project ends. We have no plans or ability to make more engines.
Comparison of Apollo Saturn V and Artemis SLS. The SLS has less lift weight and costs more per launch.
As it happens, there was a better alternative available, the Falcon heavy from SpaceX. The Falcon heavy has been flying for 5 years now, and costs only $141 million per launch, about 1/30 as much as an Artemus launch. The rocket is largely reusable, with 3D printed engines, and boosters that land on their tails. Each SLS is expensive because it’s essentially a new airplane built specially for each flight. Every part but the capsule is thrown away. Adding to the cost of SLS launches is the fuel; hydrogen, the same fuel as the space shuttle. Per energy it’s very expensive. The energy cost for the SLS boosters is high too, and the efficiency is low; each SLS booster costs $290M, more than the cost of two Falcon heavy launches. Falcon launches are cheap, in part because the engines burn kerosine, as did the Saturn V at low altitude. Beyond cost hydrogen has low thrust per flow (low momentum), and is hard to handle; hydrogen leaks caused two Artemis scrubs, and numerous Shuttle delays. I discussed the physics of rocket engines in a post seven years ago.
This graph of $/kg to low earth orbit is mostly from futureblind.com. I added the data for Artemis SLS. Saturn V and Falcon use cheaper fuel and a leaner management team.
It might be argued that Artemis SLS is an inspirational advance because it can lift an entire moon project in one shot, but the Saturn V lifted that and more, all of Skylab. Besides, there is no need to lift everything on one launch. Elon Musk has proposed lifting in two stages, sending the moon rocket and moon lander to low earth orbit with one launch, then lifting fuel and the astronauts on a second launch. Given the low cost of a Falcon heavy launch, Musk’s approach is sure to save money. It also helps develop space refueling, an important technology.
Musk’s Falcon may still reach the moon because NASA still needs a moon lander. NASA has awarded the lander contract to three companies for now, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Dynetics-Aerodyne makers of the Saturn V, and Musk’s SpaceX. If the SpaceX version wins, a modified Falcon will be sent to the moon on a Falcon heavy along with a space station. Artemis III will rendezvous with them, astronauts will descend to the moon on the lander, and will use the lander to ascend. They’ll then transfer to an Orion capsule for the return journey. NASA has also contracted with Bezos’s Blue origin for planetary, Earth observation, and exploration plans. I suspect that Musk’s lander will win, if only because of reliability. There have been 59 Falcon launches this year, all of them with safe landings. By contrast, no Blue Origin or Dynetics rocket has landed, and Blue Origin does not expect to achieve orbital velocity till 2025.
As best I can tell, the reason we’re using the Artemis SLS with its old engines is inspiration. The Artemis program director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson is female, and an expert in space shuttle engines. Previous directors were male. Previous astronauts too were mostly male. Musk is not only male, but his products suffer from him being considered a horrible person, a toxic male, in the Tony Stark (Iron Man) mold. Even Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are considered better, though their technology is worse. See my comparison of SpaceX, Virgin Blue, and Blue Origin.
To me, the biggest blocks to NASA’s inspirational aims, in my opinion, are the program directors who gave us the moon landing. These were two Nazi SS commanders (SS Sturmbannführers), Arthur Rudolph and Wernher Von Braun. Not only were they male and white, they were barely Americanized Nazis, elevated to their role at NASA after killing off virtually all of their 20,000, mostly Jewish, slave workers making rockets for Hitler. Here’s a song about Von Braun, by Tom Lehrer. Among those killed was Von Braun’s professor. In his autobiography, Von Braun showed no sign of regret for any of this, nor does he take blame. The slave labor camp they ran, Dora-Mittelbau, had the highest death rate of all slave labor camps, and when some workers suggested that they could work better if they were fed, the directors, Rudolph and Von Braun had 80 machine gunned to death. Still, Von Braun got us to the moon, and his inspirational comments line the walls at NASA, Kennedy. Blackwell-Thompson and Bezos are surely more inspirational, but their designs seem like dead ends. We may still have to use Musk’s SpaceX if we want a lander or a moon program after the space shuttle’s engines are used up. As Von Braun liked to point out, “Sacrifices have to be made.”
Some years ago, I thought to help my daughter understand statistics by reanalyzing the data from a 2004 study on coffee and Parkinson’s disease mortality, “Coffee consumption, gender, and Parkinson’s disease mortality in the cancer prevention study II cohort: the modifying effects of estrogen” , Am J Epidemiol. 2004 Nov 15;160(10):977-84, see it here
For the study, a cohort of over 1 million people was enrolled in 1982 and assessed for diet, smoking, alcohol, etc. Causes of deaths were ascertained through death certificates from January 1, 1989, through 1998. Death certificate data suggested that coffee decreased Parkinson’s mortality in men but not in women after adjustment for age, smoking, and alcohol intake. They used a technique I didn’t like though, ANOVA, analysis of variance. That is they compare the outcome of those who drank a lot of coffee (4 cups or more) to those who drank nothing. Though women in the coffee cohort had about 49% the death rate, it was not statistically significant by the ANOVA measure (p = 0.6). The authors of the study understood estrogen to be the reason for the difference.
Based on R2, coffee appears to significantly decrease the risk of Parkinson’s mortality in both men and women.
I thought we could do a better by graphical analysis, see plot at right, especially using R2 to analyze the trend. According to this plot it appears that coffee significantly reduces the likelihood of death in both men and women, confidence better than 90%. Women don’t tend to drink as much coffee as men, but the relative effect per cup is stronger than in men, it appears, and the trend line is clearer too. In the ANOVA, it appears that the effect in women is small because women are less prone Parkinson’s.
There is a confounding behavior that I should note, it’s possible that people who begin to feel signs of Parkinson’s, etc. stop drinking coffee. I doubt it, give the study’s design, but it’s worth a mention. The same confounding is also present in a previous analysis I did that suggested that being overweight protected from dementia, and from Alzheimer’s. Maybe pre-dementia people start loosing weight long before other symptoms appear.
My favorite fuel cells burn hydrogen-rich hydrocarbon fuels, like methane (natural gas) instead of pure hydrogen. Methane is far more energy dense, and costs far less than hydrogen per energy content. The US has plenty of methane and has pipelines that distribute it to every city and town. It’s a low CO2 fuel, and we can lower the CO2 impact further by mixing in hydrogen to get hythane. Elon Musk has called hydrogen- powered fuel cells “fool cells”, methane-powered fuel cells look a lot less foolish. They easily compete with his batteries and with gasoline. Besides, Musk has chosen methane as the fuel for his proposed starship to Mars.
Solid oxide fuel cells, SOFCs, can use methane directly without any pre-reformer. They operate at 800°C or so. At these temperatures, methane reacts with water (steam) within the fuel cell to form hydrogen by the reaction, CH4 + H2O –> 3H2 + CO. The hydrogen, and to a lesser extent the CO is oxidized in the fuel cell to create electricity,, but the methane is not 100% consumed, generally. Unused methane, CO, and some hydrogen exits a solid oxide fuel cell along with the products of combustion, CO2 and water.
Several researchers have looked for ways to recycle this waste fuel to capture the energy value. Six years ago, I patented a membrane method to extract the waste fuel and recycle it, see a description here. I now see this method as too complex, and have applied for a patent on a simpler version, shown below as Figure 1. As before the main work is done by a membrane but here I dispense with the water gas shift reactor, and many of the heat exchangers of the previous approach.
Simple way to improve fuel use in a high temperature fuel cell, using just a membrane.
The fuel cell system of Fig. 1 operates at somewhat elevated pressure, 2 atm or more. It is expected that the majority of the exhaust going to the membrane will be CO2 and water. Most of this will pass through the membrane and will exhaust to the air. The rest is mixed with fresh methane and recycles to the fuel cell. Despite the pressure of the fuel cell, very a little energy is needed for recirculation since the methane does not go through the membrane. The result is a light, simple, and energy efficient process. If you are interested, please contact me at REB Research. Or you can purchase the silicone membrane module here. Alternately, see here for flux information and other applications.
It’s good to have hero, someone whose approach to life, family and business you admire that you might reasonably be able to follow. As an engineer, inventor, I came to regard Peter Cooper of New York as a hero. He made his own business and was a success, in business and with his family without being crooked. This is something that is not as common as you might think. When I was in 4th grade, we got weekly assignments to read a biography and write about it. I tended to read about scientists and inventors then and after. I quickly discovered that successful inventors tended to die broke, estranged from their family and friends. Edison, Tesla, Salk, Goodyear, and Ford are examples. Tesla didn’t marry. Henry Ford’s children were messed up. Salk had a miserable marriage. Almost everyone working on the Atom Bomb had issues with the government. Most didn’t benefit financially. They died hated by the press as mass-murderers, and pursued by the FBI as potential spies. It was a sad pattern for someone who hoped to be an inventor -engineer.
The one major exception I found was Peter Cooper, an inventor, industrialist, and New York politician who was honest, and who died wealthy and liked with a good family. One result of reading about him was to conclude that some engineering areas are better than others; generally making weapons is not a path to personal success.
Tom Thumb, the blower at right is the secret to its light weight per power.
Peter Cooper was different, both in operation and outcome. Though he made some weapons (gun barrels) and inverted a remote control torpedo, these were not weapons of mass killing. Besides he but thee for “the good side” of the Civil War. And, when Cooper made an invention or a product, he made sure to have the capital available to make a profit on it too. He worked hard to make sure his products were monopolies, using a combination of patents and publicity to secure their position.
Brand management helps.
Cooper was a strong family man who made sure to own his own business, and made sure to control the sources of key materials too. He liked to invest in other businesses, but only as the controlling share-holder, or as a bond holder, believing that minor share-holders tend to be cheated. He was pro monopoly, pro trusts, and a big proponet of detailed contracts, so everyone knew where they stood. A famous invention of Cooper’s was Jello, a flavored, light version of his hide-glue, see the patent here. Besides patenting it, he sold the product with his brand, thus helping to maintain the monopoly.
Cooper was generous with donations to the poor, but not to everyone, and not with loans. And he would not sign anyone’s note as a guarantor. Borrowers tended to renege, he found, and they resent you besides. You lose your money, and lost them as a friend. He founded two free colleges, Cooper Union, and the Cooper-Limestone Institute, plus an inventor’s institute. (I got my education, free from Cooper Union.) Cooper ran these institutions in his lifetime, not waiting till he was dead to part with his money. Many do this in the vain hope that others will run the institution as they would.
Peter Cooper always sought a monopoly, or a near monopoly, patenting his own inventions, or buying the rights to others’ patents to help make it so. He believed that monopolies were good, saying they were the only sort of business that made money while allowing him to treat his workers well. If an invention would not result in a monopoly, Peter Cooper gave the rights away.
The list of inventions he didn’t patent include the instruments to test the quality of glue and steel (quality control is important), and a tide-powered ferry in New York. Perhaps his most famous unpainted invention was a lightweight, high power steam locomotive, “The Tom Thumb”, made in 1840. Innovations included beveled wheels to center the carriage on its rails, and a blower on the boiler fire, see photo above. The blower meant he could generate high-power in a small space at light weight. These are significant innovations, but Cooper did not foresee having a monopoly, so he didn’t pursue these ideas. Instead, he focussed on making rails and wire rope; he patented the process to roll steel, and the process for making coke from coal. Also on his glue/jello business. Since he made these items from dead cows and horses, he found he could also sell “foot oil” and steam-pounded leather, “Chamois”. He also pursued a telephone/ telegraph business across the Atlantic, more on that below, but only after getting monopoly rights for 50 years.
Cooper managed to stay friends with those he competed with by paying license fees for any patents he used (he tried to negotiate low rates), or buying or selling the patent rights as seemed appropriate. He also licensed his patents, and rented out buildings he didn’t need. He rented at a rate of 7% of the sale price, a metric I’ve used myself, considering rental to be like buying on loan. There is a theory of stock-buying that matches this.
The story the telegraph cable across the Atlantic is instructive to seeing how the pieces fit together. The first significant underwater cable was not laid by Cooper, by a Canadian inventor, Frederick Gisborne. It was laid in 1852 between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Through personal connections, Gisborne’s company got exclusive rights for 30 years, for this and for a cable that would go to Newfoundland, but he didn’t have the money or baking to make it happen. The first cable failed, and Gisborne ran out of money and support. Only his exclusive rights remained. This is the typical story of an inventor/ engineer/businessman who has to rely on other peoples’ money and patience.
A few months after the failure, a friend of Cooper’s, Cyrus Field, convinced Cooper that good money could be made, and public good could be done, if Cooper could lay such a cable all the way to London. One thing that attracted Cooper to the project was that the cable could be made as an insulated iron-copper rope in Cooper’s own factory. Cooper, Field, and some partners (see painting below) bought Gisborne’s company, along with their exclusive rights, and formed a new company, The New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, see charter here. The founders are imagined* with a globe and a section of cable sitting on their table. Gisborne, though not shown in the painting, was a charter member, and made chief engineer. Cooper was president. He also traveled on the boat with Gisborne to lay the cable across the St. Lawrence – just to be sure he knew what was going on. This cable provided a trial for The Trans Atlantic cable.
The founding individuals to lay a transatlantic cable. Peter Cooper at left is the chairman, Cyrus Field is standing, Samuel Morse is at the back. Frederic Gisborne, a founder, does not appear in the paining. Typical.
Samuel Morse was hired as an electrician; he is pictured in the painting, but was not a charter member. Part of the problem with Morse was that he owned the patent on Morse-telegraphy, and Cooper didn’t want to pay his “exorbitant” fees. So Cooper and Field bought an alternative telegraph patent from David Hughes, a Kentucky school teacher. This telegraph system used tones instead of clicks and printed whole letters at a time. By hiring Morse, but not his patents, Cooper saved money, while retaining Morse’s friendship and expertise. The alternative could have been a nasty spat. Their telegraph company sub-licensed Hughes’s tone-method a group of western telegraph owners, “The Western Union,” who used it for many years, producing the distinctive Western Union Telegrams. With enough money in hand and credibility from the Canadian trial, the group secured 50 years monopoly rights for a telegraph line across the Atlantic. Laying the cable took many years, with semi-failed attempts in 1857, 1858, and 1865. When the eventual success came in 1866, the 50 years’ monopoly rights they’d secured meant that they made money from the start. They could treat workers fairly. Marconi would discover that Cooper wrote a good contract; his wireless telegraph required a widely different route.
I should also note that Peter Cooper was politically active: he started as a Democrat, helped form the Republican Party, bringing Lincoln to speak in NY for the first time, and ended up founding the Greenback-Labor Party, running for president as a Greenback. He was strongly for tariffs, and strongly against inflation. He said that the dollar should have the same value for all time for the same reason that the foot should have the same length and the pound the same weight. I have written in favor of tariffs off and on. They help keep manufacturing in America, and help insure that those who require French wine or German cars pay the majority of US taxes. They are also a non-violent vehicle for foreign policy.
Operating under these principles, through patents and taxed monopolies, Peter Cooper died wealthy, and liked. Liked by his workers, liked by much of the press, and by his family too, with children who turned out well. The children of rich people often turn out poorly. Carnegie’s children fought each other in court, Ford’s were miserable. Cooper’s children continued in business and politics, successfully and honorably, and in science/ engineering (Peter Coper Hewitt invented the power rectifier, sold to Westinghouse). The success of Peter Cooper’s free college, Cooper Union, influenced many of his friends to open similar institutions. Among his friends who did this were Carnegie, Pratt, Stevens, Rensselaer, and Vanderbilt. He stayed friends with them and with other inventors of the day, despite competing in business and politics. Most rich folks can not do this; they tend to develop big egos, and few principles.
Robert Buxbaum, November 30, 2022. I find the painting interesting. Why was it painted? Why is Gisborne not in it and Morse in the painting — sometimes described as vice President? The charter lists Morse as “electrician”, an employee. Chandler White, holding papers next to Cooper, was Vice President. My guess is that the painting was made to help promote the company and sell stock. They made special cigars with this image too. This essay started as a 5th grade project with my son. See a much earlier version here.
MY home-made still, and messy lab. Note the masking tape seal and the nylon hoses. Nylon is cheaper than copper. The yellow item behind the burner is the cooling water circulation pump. The wire at top and left is the thermocouple.
I have an apple tree, a peach tree, and some grape vines. They’re not big trees, but they give too much fruit to eat. The squirrels get some, and we give some away. As for the rest, I began making wine and apple jack a few years back, but there’s still more fruit than I can use. Being a chemical engineer, I decided to make brandy this year, so far only with pears and apples.
The first steps were the simplest: I collected fruit in a 5 gallon, Ace bucket, and mashed it using a 2×4. I then added some sugar and water and some yeast and let it sit with a cover for a week or two. Bread yeast worked fine for this, and gives a warm flavor, IMHO. A week or so later, I put the mush into a press I had fro grapes, shown below, and extracted the fermented juice. I used a cheesecloth bag with one squeezing, no bag with the other. The bag helped, making cleanup easier.
The fruit press, used to extract liquid. A cheese cloth bag helps.
I did a second fermentation with both batches of fermented mash. This was done in a pot over a hot-plate on warm. I added more sugar and some more yeast and let it ferment for a few more days at about 78°F. To avoid bad yeasts, I washed out the pot and the ace bucket with dilute iodine before using them– I have lots of dilute iodine around from the COVID years. The product went into the aluminum “corn-cooker” shown above, 5 or 6 gallon size, that serves as the still boiler. The aluminum cover of the pot was drilled with a 1″ hole; I then screwed in a 10″ length of 3/4″ galvanized pipe, added a reducing elbow, and screwed that into a flat-plate heat exchanger, shown below. The heat exchanger serves as the condenser, while the 3/4″ pipe is like the cap on a moonshiner still. Its purpose is to keep the foam and splatter from getting in the condenser.
I put the pot on the propane burner stand shown, sealed the lid with masking tape (it worked better than duct tape), hooked up the heat exchanger to a water flow, and started cooking. If you don’t feel like making a still this way, you can buy one at Home Depot for about $150. Whatever route you go, get a good heat exchanger/ condenser. The one on the Home-depot still looks awful. You need to be able to take heat out as fast as the fire puts heat in, and you’ll need minimal pressure drop or the lid won’t seal. The Home Depot still has too little area and too much back-pressure, IMHO. Also, get a good thermometer and put it in the head-space of the pot. I used a thermocouple. Temperature is the only reasonable way to keep track of the progress and avoid toxic distillate.
A flat-plate heat exchanger, used as a condenser.
The extra weight of the heat exchanger and pipe helps hold the lid down, by the way, but it would not be enough if there was a lot of back pressure in the heat exchanger-condenser. If your lid doesn’t seal, you’ll lose your product. If you have problems, get a better heat exchanger. I made sure that the distillate flows down as it condenses. Up-flow adds back pressure and reduces condenser efficiency. I cooled the condenser with water circulated to a bucket with the cooling water flowing up, counter current to the distillate flow. I could have used tap water via a hose with proper fittings for cooling, but was afraid of major leaks all over the floor.
With the system shown, and the propane on high, it took about 20 minutes to raise the temperature to near boiling. To avoid splatter, I turned down the heater as the temperature approached 150°F. The first distillate came out at 165°F, a temperature that indicated it was not alcohol or anything you’d want to drink. I threw away the first 2-3 oz of this product. You can sniff or sip a tiny amount to convince yourself that this this is really nasty, acetone, I suspect, plus ethyl acetate, and maybe some ether and methanol. Throw it away!
After the first 2-3 ounces, I collected everything to 211°F. Product started coming in earnest at about 172°F. I ended distillation at 211°F when I’d collected nearly 3 quarts. For my first run, my electronic thermometer was off and I stopped too early — you need a good thermometer. The material I collected and was OK in taste, especially when diluted a bit. To test the strength, I set some on fire, the classic “100% proof test”, and diluted till it to about 70% beyond. This is 70% proof, by the classic method. I also tried a refractometer, comparing the results to whiskey. I was aiming for 60-80 proof (30-40%).
My 1 gallon aging barrel.
I tried distilling a second time to improve the flavor. The result was stronger, but much worse tasting with a loss of fruit flavor. By contrast, a much better resulted from putting some distillate (one pass) in an oak barrel we had used for wine. Just one day in the barrel helped a lot. I’ve also seen success putting charred wood cubes set into a glass bottle of distillate. Note: my barrel, as purchased, had leaks. I sealed them with wood glue before use.
I only looked up distilling law after my runs. It varies state to state. In Michigan, making spirits for consumption, either 1 gal or 60,000 gal/year, requires a “Distilling, Rectifying, Blending and/or Bottling Spirits” Permit, from the ATF Tax and Trade Bureau (“TTB”) plus a Small Distiller license from Michigan. Based on the sale of stills at Home Depot and a call to the ATF, it appears there is little interest in pursuing home distillers who do not sell, despite the activity being illegal. This appears similar to state of affairs with personal use marijuana growers in the state. Your state’s laws may be different, and your revenuers may be more enthusiastic. If you decide to distill, here’s some music, the Dukes of Hazard theme song.
