An obscure white genius, again, this time a man who seems to have anticipated much of what came after him by at least one generation... go to the second link for an excerpt of his classic short work
The Ether and its Vortexes which seems to have anticipated scalar interferometry by more than two.
The classic example of the man who works in obscurity all his life and leaves things behind for the rest of us to pick up on. The oddest trait of our people and in some ways the most admirable. To work for a world we may never see is critical for the race to move forward.
http://www.navi.net/~rsc/krafft.html
http://www.navi.net/~rsc/krafft02.htm
Quote:
In 1926 a small work appeared called "Spirazines", which was an attempt by it's author to explain the reproduction of life forms from a mechanistic rather than a "vitalistic" basis. The author was Carl Frederick Krafft, and his work anticipated and presaged many of the findings and directions of the next five generations of scientific research.
Krafft was a patent examiner who was, apparently, self taught. This might explain, in part, why he had such difficulty getting published or recognised in "official" circles. He writes in his 1931 work, "Can Science Explain Life", a reworking of his earlier work:
"The Spirazine hypothesis was conceived in December, 1925. During the year 1926 every possible effort was made to obtain publication of it in the scientific magazines, but without success. In some cases the article was returned without any comments whatever, which may have been an expiditious but not a very honorable method of executing the duties which attach themselves to the office of editorship....In still other cases it was returned with certain evasive excuses, as for example it was "too technical", although the real reason was probably that the author was not sufficiently noted." [...]
In his entire career of innovating explanatory theory in biology, chemistry and physics, Krafft was noted only once: an abstract of his work on Spirazines was recorded in Chemical Abstracts, 22, 2584 (July 20, 1928).
Most of Krafft's works ended up as donations to libraries where, at least, they could be found later by interested researchers in nearly pristine condition.
In that first reprint, Krafft presented for the first time a likely structure for the genetic material, essentially a double helix, which he dubbed a "reversely twisted spiral", predating Watson and Crick by over 30 years...
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