[Elecraft] Scientific terms (WAS: Commercial CW Station KSM on the air)

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

And "kc" used to frustrate the purists (and college instructors everywhere!)
because without the interval specified it's meaningless. The correct term is
kc/s or kilocycles per second. 

For example, someone might offer you a job with a pay of, say, $100. It
would make a significant difference if you were getting the $100 per hour,
per day, or per month! 

So 1 Hz = 1 cps or 1 c/s

Actually Hertz demonstrated that electromagnetic waves existed. At the time
he (nor anyone else) had much understanding of what they were dealing with,
especially in terms of how frequency affected their propagation.

At the Hz was adopted there was a lot of grumbling about students having to
memorize an arbitrary name for a unit of measurement rather than use a
self-explanatory name like "kilocycles per second". It was an empty argument
because, the time hertz became a unit of measurement, most techs and
engineers had adopted the shorthand "kc" which meant those coming after had
to learn that they were leaving off a critical bit of information required
for it to make sense. 

It's nice that we remember those who make significant contributions to a
field, but it's just something else for later generations to remember. Will
they relate the name to the unit? Who knows? Even if not, future generations
will likely still use "volt", "pascal", "colomb", "watt", "ohm", "siemens",
" Weber", "bel" ... The list of scientific units named for famous scientists
and inventors is very long indeed!   

Ron AC7AC


-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Peter PA0PJE
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 12:09 PM
To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Commercial CW Station KSM on the air


<quote>
> For What It's Worth:
>(all the OT's use Kc since Hertz hadn't been invented in the heyday of 
>marine radiotelegraphy) etc

Well, be it known then, that Hertz "invented"  these cycles and, as a
courtesy to that, his name was given to them, so kHz is the expression and
let's keep it that way. They were invented long before the heyday of marine
radiotelegraphy even before the heyday of whatever radiotelegraphy.

73,
Peter, PA0PJE
K2 #4766