[WikiEN-l] Long-term searchability of the internet

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 15/01/2011, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> To take a specific example, I very occasionally come across names of
>> people or topics where it is next-to-impossible to find out anything
>> meaningful about them because the name is identical to that of someone
>> else. Sometimes this is companies that name themselves after something
>> well-known and any search is swamped by hits to that well-known
>> namesake. Other times, it is someone more famous swamping a relatively
>> obscure person - a recent example I found here is the physicist Otto
>> Klemperer. Despite having the name and profession, it is remarkably
>> difficult to find information about the physicist as opposed to the
>> composer. If I had a birth year, it would be much easier, of course.
>
> That's the primary advantage of an encyclopedia of course. It doesn't
> rely much on the vagaries of English.

Yeah, but it only helps if there is an entry on the person you are
looking for information on! So far I have the date of his PhD (1923)
in Berlin from the maths geneaology site:

http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=62580

And that he worked with Hans Geiger and was the author of a paper in
1934 ('On the Radioactivity of Potassium and Rubidium'):

http://www.jstor.org/pss/96293

Plug in "Geiger-Klemperer ball counter" to a search engine, and you
begin to get more details (there are a number of devices that are
'loosely' called Geiger counters, but are named for the people that
developed them, such as Geiger-Muller, Geiger-Klemperer, and
Rutherford-Geiger counters).

There is also a William Klemperer (who is a physicist and who has an
article on Wikipedia), who is apparently related to the Otto Klemperer
who is the famous conductor, but I wonder whether he is related to the
Otto Klemperer who is a physicist, and people are confusing the two?

I also found a patent here for an electron lens:

http://www.google.co.uk/patents/about?id=0ClhAAAAEBAJ

Filed by a "Otto Ernst Heinrich Klemperer" on 31 Mar 1944, and issued
December 1946.

Probably the same Otto Klemperer who was the author of "Electron
Optics", which is still in print:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electron-Optics-Cambridge-Monographs-Physics/dp/0521179734

The patent I only just discovered, but that is all I have on this Otto
Klemperer at the moment.

Carcharoth