How Robert Wood’s creepy invention helped the Allies win World War I

Robert Wood helped perfect one design . That innovation made a lot of creepy science photograph , gave a distinctive character to raves , and , oh yeah , helped the Allies win World War I. How ? By veil signals in plain lot .

One of the unbelievable things about science is the domino gist of one tiny discovery . cypher one thing out and its effects cause wavelet . It may not just advance one field of science , but change the way other scientists do their enquiry , give people a different way of seeing the Earth , and perhaps modify the course of a war . This is , possibly , what Robert Williams Wood did when he created Wood ’s Glass .

birth in 1868 , Wood had drop most of his impressive scientific career researching optics . And he wanted to discover a way to see the world other than — in a literal sense . Ultraviolet visible radiation and infrared light were well - known , but it was very unvoiced for people to see them . Since both type of light were follow by copious amounts of seeable light , the seeable spectrum loosely overmaster the ultraviolet and infrared light , in much the agency city lights overwhelm starlight .

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After much experimentation , he derive up with a atomic number 56 - sodium - silicate glass with a bit of oxidized nickel make in . It was nothing more than a filter , drive out seeable light and allowing infrared and ultraviolet luminousness to pass through . of a sudden , the humanity became a very different place . Wood himself used the methamphetamine hydrochloride to produce very creepy exposure , such as a landscape painting in infrared or himself in ultraviolet radiation . Other masses slapped it over sure light bulb so that only ultraviolet light came through . And that is how black lights ( and Red Army Faction ) were invented .

Sometime after World War I , Wood get on how the USA had used it . Wood ’s shabu allowed invisible signals to be sent and receive between allies via a kind of optical telegraphy . Unless both sides know exactly the wavelength of light being sent , and had the appropriate glass , the signals could n’t be intercepted .

Today most people use a chintzy and more crevice - resistant descendent of Wood ’s glass , but one insight branched out into a thousand uses . Wood ’s invention changed everything from the way of life scientist could honour the world , to party tantrum , to the very fortune of a world at war .

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