[meteorite-list] Scalecube Family

[Martin Altmann]

Dear Doug,

a really excellent synopsis!

Some illustrations:

Here we have the monument in Dacice, commemorating the production of the
first sugar cube:
http://www.zuckersammler.de/gfx/tauschtage/dacice_03_01.jpg

A pilgrimage site for sugar cube fanatics from all over the World.
These first produced cubes became popular as "Viennese Sugar Cubes" ("Wiener
Würfelzucker").

Sugar cubes are an important field of private collecting,
The number of collectors worldwide is estimated to exceed 2 million
individuals, - compare to the 1000-2000 meteorite collectors in existence;
the largest collections unite up to 150,000 specimens and locales.

Indeed, as you presumed, the today's brand: Diamant-Zucker is still in the
possession of the descendants of Eugen Langen, who improved 1870 the T cube
production with his "Langen'schen Würfelverfahren" (and designed btw the
Wuppertal Schwebebahn, the Steel Dragon). In dissociation to the Viennese
Cube, he named his cubes "Cologne Cubes".
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/e/eb/Eugen-langen.jpg

Today the Viennese Cubes are still a standard unit to visualize the sugar
content of food and drinks in an equipollent of sugar cubes. (1 can of Coke 
contains 13 sugar cubes).

The weight of the Viennese Cube in that case is 3.7 grams.
(See also your 3.6grams of C&H and Dixie Crystals cubes).

Unfortunately I couldn't find the edge length of the Viennese standard cube
(The Viennese Ur-cube was caramelized by the marauding mob during the
Viennese October Revolt in 1848)

>From an unsecured source I read, that Diamant-Zucker, therefore the founders
of the Cologne cube, is selling nowadays cuboids of roughly 1cm x 2cm x 2cm
with a weight of 2grams (or so) as standard, hence half cubes.

Here we have a painting, depicting Howard experimentalizing the ablation of
meteorites while their fiery descents and the forming of flight-oriented
shapes by dint of sugar.
http://www.elvis-paintings.de/gfx/bilder/celebrity_art_ruehmann.jpg


Here a modern construction of the test arrangement 
http://www.issuemanagement.de/images/feuerzangenbowle.jpg

Side-product was the conical sugar loaf:
http://home.clara.net/mawer/image-sugarloaf2.jpg

but that's another chapter, Sugar...

Best!
Martin




-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
[mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von
mexicodoug
Gesendet: Freitag, 9. November 2007 06:33
An: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Cc: Martin Altmann
Betreff: Re: [meteorite-list] Scalecube Family

Dear List,

Hmmm.  Very meteorite related!  Now for a fun post.  Great history on the 
Scale Cube, Svend, and thanks Mike for the additional information!  Given 
all the interest in scale cubes, I've compiled a history of the scale cube 
prior to the ones developed by the Russians and NASA (it is below my answer 
to Martin's question).  There wasn't much info available on your sites about

what was used before NASA, except the cube that Mike Jensen kindly posted 
regarding Haro's Heros.  These cubes are definitely related to meteorites, 
more than many will probably even know.

But first: Martin foreshadowed:
"(are sugar-cubes in USA metric?)"

No, they are not, unless you measure them with  a centimeter ruler :-)  In 
the US they are actually certified scale cubes. They are loosely 1/2 or 1 
Tea-spoon amounts of sugar, which scale to one cup of Tea.  I don't think 
the ones in Europe are a centimeter cubed either, for that matter, are they?

That would be a real diet lite cube being just 0.8 to 1.1 grams...  Now a 
question for you: German Zuckerwürfels aren't even cubes, are they?  and how

many/what dimensions are in a 500g box that sells for under what $2 ( In the

US sugar cubes are one cent each.)? 
http://www.wopping.com/images/product/1483.jpg . Maybe at least Diamant 
Würfelzuckers (which have a pedigree back to Langen)?

About the original scale cube.  These were actually first crystallized as "T

Cubes" or Tea Cubes, and they were literally covered in Tea that was 
underlied with a saucer.  By Victorian times they were the de facto scale 
cube of choice in Europe to measure size.  The material of construction was,

in fact, sugar.  The first application was a non-hazardous fixed aliquot of 
sugar for a nice cup of tea.  But I am getting ahead of myself...

Sugar was introduced by conquering Moroccans into Europe during the conquest

of Spain in about 800 AD.  Christopher Columbus had an steamy affair with 
Beatriz in the Canary Islands on the way to discover the Americas and 
delayed continuing on the maiden voyage a month so he could romantically 
take some of here sugarcane, which he brought to the new world with him to 
remember her.  (Columbus was a sugar broker in Genoa.)

However, for the first ~1500 years, the process to make sugar didn't lend to

cube-making due to all the sticky and wasted carmel produced in the boiling 
kettles as syrup was concentrated.

This all changed when the first prototype modern sugar cubes were reputedly 
invented by Edward C. Howard in 1813.  Mr. Howard, an inspiration for the 
future Edisons of the world, invented the "Howard Vacuum-Pan" - the most 
important development in the history of sugar to the present day, from which

he greatly increased his wealth by enforcing the patents.  It is actually an

enclosed and sealed metal vat allowing sugar syrup to be produced from plant

extract by driving off the water at only 55 C (Instead ove 100+ C) under 
partial vacuum pressures resulting in a more uniform crystalline form easily

set in moulds.  This process is still used worldwide (utilizing a staged 
modification ca. 1830 invented by a free African-American scientist) and 
makes in the necessary syrup for easy and uniform granulations.  T-Cube 
making requires a uniform granulate that is being dried, mixed with a trace 
amount of syrup again, and then pressed.  NASA honored the T cubes by 
placing the letter "T" on top of every scale cube it produced.

The young Englishman Howard, got into laying these sweet foundations after 
Joseph Banks, a well known meteorite collector, gave him three meteorites to

analyze: Sienna (Italy, 1794, LL5), Benares (India, 1798, LL4) and the 
recently fallen Wold Cottage (UK, 1795, L6). Banks, a serious collector came

across the Wold Cottage mass being exhibited in London along with written 
declarations by witnesses to the fall, and hired Howard in 1800 to see if 
these stones that were said to have fallen from the sky were similar, as the

geology of the areas was different.  Howard had just invented a potent 
explosive and won a medal of honor, and had an aristocratic background, so 
Banks thought he was the right young man for the job.

The meteorite got Howard more interested in metal alloys when he studied the

similar metals in them, and uniquely placed him to set the foundations of 
producing engineering vats and vessels that culminated with the landmark 
Vacuum-Pan http://home.clara.net/mawer/vacuum.jpg and other applications he 
developed in his real jobs for the next dozen years (Howard was more a 
chemical mercenary than a meteoriticist), and always kept a keen eye open 
for better metallic alloys ever since he made a few quid working for the 
meteorite collector Banks.  Michael Farady was inspired by Howard et. al.'s 
analyses and in the 1820's played with these metals, alloys (including 
meteorites which he was interested in) and electricity, and then figured out

how to generate electricity around 1831 using a wrapped metal core.

Howard's labor in meteorites was peeked by the analysis of different natural

iron alloys, and in many of them he identified an interesting alloying with 
nickel.  He really didn't know what to make of this, but he noticed that 
there were similar compositions of the metallic components no matter where 
the stone or natural metal was found in some cases.  So he declared in 
public in front of the stoodgy establishment, plainly, that it just fell out

of the sky under unknown circumstances, as was suggested by some of his 
sources for the materials. By 1805, these stony and metalline substances 
that had fallen on the Earth became known as meteoric stones and shortly 
later meteoric irons, thanks to British Howard and French Proust's (also 
looking for new metals and alloys) unspecified material from the sky idea. 
Later, people got tired of saying meteoric stone and just called it 
meteorite for short, forever preserving the initial beliefs of the infamous 
debate of 1802-1803 begun by Howard among the London scientific aristocracy.

For this, Howard became a Howardite, after dumped meteorites like a 
hot-potato as an avocation, but Prost remained a Frenchman, and Biot got 
most of the credit posthumously for something already gaining wide 
acceptance when he wrote his adventure story, on LÁigle, instead of just a 
boring chemical analysis like Howard and others had done before him.

Ref: Howard, E. C., Bournon, J. L. and Williams, J. L. 1802.  Experiments 
and observations on certain stony and metalline substances, which at 
different times are said to have fallen on the Earth; also on various kinds 
of native iron. "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London",

Vol. 92, pp. 168-212.

Genesis of Production T-Cubes.  It took a while for sugar refineries to 
catch up with the more expensive initially patented process used by Howard. 
The recent use and technology of sugar beet refining to make sugar 
established central Europe's place as an industry.  Once such refinery in 
present day Moravia, Czech Republic, had somewhat updated theirs was run by 
a  the Swiss Jakub Rad, from Rhreinfelden, working in Dacice (In German: 
Datschitz), right across the border from Austria.  In 1841, one year into 
his new position as Director after coming from Vienna, Juliana, Jakub's 
wife, cut her finger while sawing a loaf of sugar and preparing his lunch 
and that of their 16 children.  Loaves of sugar were the common ways to 
distributed sugar pretty much from the beginning up until then.  Irately, 
she chased him back to work and sat the managers and Jakub down, waving her 
bloody finger.  Jakub listened and she received the first box of sugar cubes

by Christmas that same year.  A year and a half later the plant was in full 
production with a patented press making Tea-cubes.  These were the first 
officially produced T-Cubes in the history of humanity.

Next, there was the German improvement on Rad's pressing process for 
production of cubes.  The German industrialist Eugen Langen got into the 
business in 1870, and invented a better method for T-cube production and 
implemented this in his sugar beet factories and it became even a bigger 
hit.  The English finally took notice.  Henry Tate licensed the Langen 
method for making precision T-Cubes and built a refinary on the Thames River

which opened in 1878 to produce precision cubes, the English appropriated 
immediately the idea as their own and Tea Cube production was booming. 
Tate's company later merged with its principal competitor, Lyle and formed 
what still is Europes biggest sugar company and Tea Cube producer - Tate & 
Lyle.

Meanwhile, in the USA, as usual, the Germans dominated the technology of 
making sugar like they did in Europe..... In 1799 the German William 
Havenmeyer started running Mr. Seaman's sugar refinery in New York after 
leaving his position in London.  However, he was not particularly creative 
and failed to see the significance of the T-cubes in a 1799 London while 
Wold Cottage was on display - though a meteorical storm was certainly 
brewing that would make T-cubes a hit.  On the contrary, Havenmeyer and his 
successor cronies settled on using cheap negro and immigrant labor and 
monopolizing the sugar production by the same textbook that Bill Gates 
studied.  It wasn't until 1906, that the company he founded, put sugar cubes

into massive production in America in the leading company, which today is 
the Domino Food Group (the market leader in sugar in the US for over a 
century).

If we assume finely granulated sugar pressed into cubes by Domino Sugar has 
a density of 1.0 g/cm3 and they sell 198 in a one pound bag (2.291 g/cube), 
that would make a volume of 2.78 cm3 per cube, or 1.32 cm length of a side. 
A half inch is 1.27 cm.  So it is close, but, 2.291 grams is intended as an 
estimate of the half the amount of sugar most people prefer in their tea, as

to use two T-cubes, a.k.a., close to a teaspoon of sugar.  Domino also makes

another bigger T-cube, close to twice as heavy at 4.725 grams each.  This is

close to the one teaspoon cube and preferred sweetening amount, but doesn't 
allow for those with a lesser sweet tooth..

The other US company C&H and Dixie Crystals cubes there are 126 in a one 
pound box = 3.6 grams each. (@ 1.0 g/mL that's 1.53 cm on a side).  These 
dimensions are estimates based on the density I am using, but I would be 
surprised if the length of the side were off more than 1 millimeter (7%).

Finally, here's a couple of pictures of modern Tea-cube producing machines:
http://www.aquarius.nl/page323.aspx
http://www.suedzucker.de/images/bilder/faq/zuckersorten/glueckswuerfel.jpg

Finally, any, dealers in meteorites after reading this, when illustrating 
their Howardites, could certainly could sweeten the deal by including these 
cubes with purchases.  A Tea-cube is a must when scaling any Howardite, lest

we should forget the man's real passion.  And it is true that a T-cube was 
the most common scale reference right up to the Russian and NASA 
productions!

Würfelly yours,
Doug


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin Altmann" <altmann at meteorite-martin.de>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2007 6:39 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Scalecube Family


Mike,

the Scherff-cube is missing in your collection,
was the most used meteorite-cube before the Buhl-cube.
(Got blue edges with time).

Best!
Martin

(are sugar-cubes in USA metric?)

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com
[mailto:meteorite-list-bounces at meteoritecentral.com] Im Auftrag von Mike
Bandli
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 8. November 2007 02:17
An: 'Meteorite List'
Betreff: [meteorite-list] Scalecube Family

On June 21, 2007 Paul wrote:

"I have to wonder if ten years from now, there will be people collecting the
different types of scalecubes/centimeter cubes as people on this list are
collecting meteorites."

Ten years? How about five months! My Scalecube family:

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-11/877141/cubes.jpg

>From left to right: Buhl 1cm Cube, Unknown 1cm Cube, NASA 'Scale Block' 1
inch Cube, Drake 1 inch Certified Cube, Drake 1cm Cube, Drake 1cm prototype.

Kudos to Drake D. for building such a great 1 inch cube! Its well worth the
money and perfect for other scientific/forensic photography.

What strange hobbies I have...

Kind regards,

Mike Bandli
www.Astro-Artifacts.com




______________________________________________
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list

______________________________________________
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list 

______________________________________________
Meteorite-list mailing list
Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list