When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

How did the common barnyard chicken save a New Zealand town from mistimed street lamps?

The North and South Islands of New Zealand distribute electricity through a national grid that spans both islands and connects the major power stations and cities together, with substantial amounts of power coming from hydroelectricity generated on rivers on the South Island. When electricity was first made available in the early 1900's, however, stand-alone power stations were created to support separate portions of the country.

One small town decided to use the nightly free electricity from their local station to light the town street lights. The individual responsible for turning the lights on at dusk and off at dawn was not very reliable, however, and furthermore, he did not adjust his actions to account for seasonal changes in the length of the day, or for storms which brought dark skies early to the town.

The town leaders asked an electrical engineer at the power station to design a lighting control system which was reliable, sensitive to changes in local light conditions, and inexpensive. After some thought, the engineer went home and added a simple electrical switch and a stiff spring underneath the roost (a wooden shelf on which his chickens slept at night) of his chicken house. He made the spring powerful enough that the roost would sag and depress the switch only when at least half of the chickens were sitting on it. At dusk, the chickens settled down for the night and turned on the street lamps, and at dawn they awoke, leapt from the roost to catch the early worm, and turned the lamps off! Since chickens can't read clocks very well, they would adjust their sleeping pattern to match the seasonal changes in sunset and sunrise, and would even go to bed early when a big storm darkened the sky. Best of all, his cheep system was very cheap! – reported by Alan Gibb, in New Scientist magazine (May 26, 2001)

The Dawn of the Space Age

How did English school teacher Geoffrey Perry discover a secret Soviet launch site?

Geoffrey Perry (1928 – 2000) was a physics teacher at Kettering Grammar/Boys School in England, and has a strong interest in artificial satellites. He was the founder of the Kettering group, which monitored both American and Soviet orbiting satellites via photography and short-wave radio signals at the dawn of the Space Age. This amateur group began with a small numbers of Perry's neighbors and pupils (girls as well as boys). Over time it grew to include a large number of members of professional fields such as electrical engineering, communications, and meteorology, all joined together for a common purpose, to observe and study the burgeoning international space exploration underway.

Information on satellite launches and capabilities was routinely kept classified by all governments involved, for both security and publicity reasons, but Perry showed the world how much it was possible to learn about these missions by simply monitoring unclassified data transmissions from space, without using any particularly expensive or proprietary equipment.

On their own, Perry and the Kettering group discovered a new, unpublicized USSR launch site for satellites. They tracked the launch of the Cosmos 112 in 1966, and discovered that the delay in receiving its signal and its rate and direction of motion into orbit were inconsistent with a launch from the official Soviet site of Baikonur. They deduced that a new, secret site lay 200 miles south of Archangelsk, later identified as Plesetsk. Though they were probably not the first people in the world to figure out that the Soviet Union had a second launch site, they were the first to publish this fact, and to alert the Western world, all without the benefit of large, expensive government laboratories or equipment.

Perry first notified the British aerospace magazine Flight International of his team's discovery, but received no response. After he reported the hidden site coordinates at a meeting of the British Interplanetary Society, he discovered that an American researcher named Charles Sheldon from the Library of Congress attempted to cite the details of the discovery in a manuscript, only to have it classified by the CIA. Sheldon then apparently alerted the press to Perry's letter to Flight International, and the story broke immediately in the New York Times, forever changing Perry's life by bringing him well-deserved publicity for his tireless efforts. (It would later be revealed that the CIA had long suspected that Plesetsk was a test launch site for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and had spied on the location with U-2 spy planes. They would not confirm Perry's discovery for fear of having the capabilities of the American network of spy satellites brought to public knowledge.)

In 1967, Perry discovered that the Soviets were making an unpublicized, unmanned test of a Soyuz spacecraft (one that could carry a crew, and hence a major step forward in the Space Race currently underway). The London Evening Standard news paper broke the story, with a banner headline proclaiming "Schoolboys Tune In To A Space Secret."

Geoffrey Perry was quickly acknowledged as an expert in spacecraft and satellite monitoring, and for the rest of his life he inspired people all over the world to directly involve themselves in international space programs. The Kettering Group logo was a rose (taken from the Kettering School blazer badge), surrounded by an orbiting satellite. Perry would explain with delight that the satellite had a highly elliptical orbit "to support the popular belief that I am eccentric!"