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1851: Léon Foucault uses a pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It is the first direct visual evidence not based on watching the stars circle in the sky.

Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was born in 1819. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school when he made his first scientific discovery: He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

Without formal scientific training, he worked as a lab assistant and continued tinkering. He used the new Daguerreotype photographic process to take the first photograph of the sun. Together with Armand Fizeau, in 1850 he devised a way to use rotating mirrors to measure the speed of light. They observed that light travels more slowly in water than in air.

Scientists had been trying for two centuries to drop objects from towers and measure their drift as the planet spun beneath them. It didn't work: too quick, too crude, too many interfering factors.

Foucault had an insight. A pendulum hanging on a wire and swinging directly north and south would appear to the observer to slowly move its plane of oscillation as the Earth turned underneath it.

To grasp this, just picture a pendulum at the North Pole. It starts at zero degrees longitude and swings back and forth, as the Earth spins below it. For every hour it's going back and forth, the Earth will have moved 15 degrees of longitude eastward. The effect is less farther away from the poles, but it's still there.

After weeks of work in the cellar of his home, Foucault hung a 5-kilogram (11-pound) pendulum from a 2-meter (6½-foot) cable in January 1851. He observed a small clockwise motion of the pendulum's apparent plane of oscillation. The pendulum was going straight back and forth, but the Earth moved for Foucault.

(Sources disagree on whether the crucial experiment took place on Feb. 6, Feb. 7 or Feb. 8. We've taken the middle course here.)

Foucault refined his apparatus and also derived his "sine law" showing the governing influence of latitude on how much a free-swinging pendulum would move. Specifically, the angular speed (in clockwise degrees per sidereal day) is 360 times the sine of the latitude. A Foucault pendulum will rotate through a full 360 degrees at the North Pole (the sine of 90 degrees is 1), but not at all at the equator (the sine of zero degrees is zero).

Foucault arranged a demonstration for the scientists of Paris on Feb. 3. He told them, "You are invited to see the Earth turn." And so they did, as they watched Foucault's pendulum move on an 11-meter wire at the Paris observatory.

French President Louis Napoléon was a science buff, and he arranged for Foucault to give a public demonstration of his remarkable pendulum on March 31. Under the lofty roof of the Pantheon in Paris, Foucault hung a 62-pound brass sphere on a 220-foot cable. A pointer attached to the bottom of the sphere traced patterns in sand on a low wood platform.

The public was dazzled. President Napoleon soon became Emperor Napoleon III, and he gave Foucault the position of Physicist Attached to the Imperial Observatory. While there, Foucault's work on the centrifugal governor improved the precision of surveying instruments.

Despite Foucault's imperial support, the university-trained scientists of Paris sniffed at him as an untrained upstart. They turned him down several times for membership in the French Academy of Sciences, before finally admitting him in 1865. Foucault died in 1868 at the age of 49.

Source: Various

Dear Mr. Know-It-All, I'm a college student who makes money volunteering for medical experiments. Do I have to accept whatever fee the researchers offer me, or can I negotiate for more?

In principle, you're entitled to the same economic rights as the researchers, who likely spent long hours pleading for more dough from whatever drug company is footing their bills. So don't let the doctors guilt you into thinking that it's somehow unethical to treat guinea pigging as a regular job rather than a selfless calling. If they were the ones getting poked and prodded and restricted to bland food, they'd be keen to secure a fair wage, too.

That said, your odds of receiving a raise are practically nil. The supply of willing test subjects far exceeds the demand, a situation that puts human guinea pigs at a serious negotiating disadvantage. And since budgets are usually set long before the call goes out for volunteers, the researchers may not have much wiggle room.

Bob Helms, a veteran participant in clinical trials who edited the now-defunct zine Guinea Pig Zero, says he has managed to negotiate a higher fee only once, for an experiment that was unusually agonizing. (It involved catheters and pooping in baskets.) Helms banded together with his fellow test subjects and threatened to break protocols or drop out altogether, eventually persuading the experiment's sponsor to offer an $800 bump.

If you feel strongly that a study's hassles merit extra pay, Helms recommends waiting until the experiment has commenced before making your case. Having borne witness to your distress, the researchers may turn sympathetic and cough up some cash. Just don't expect to be invited back—assertiveness is not a valued trait in your line of work.

I've heard that it's possible to have cremated remains launched into space. Sounds fantastic, but what happens if the rocket explodes before escaping the exosphere? Will my heirs get a full refund?

Your descendents won't receive any money back, but you will be granted a second shot at celestial interment free of charge. The company that runs these missions, Celestis, is a subsidiary of Houston-based aerospace company Space Services. Celestis arranges to stash remains-filled containers on commercial satellites or scientific probes. (The ashes of astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, for example, were placed in a NASA lunar explorer.)

But only a symbolic portion of each client's remains is blasted into space—1 to 7 grams, depending on which memorial package you buy. That thimbleful represents less than 0.1 percent of the total ashes created by cremation. "We do not launch the entire amount of cremated remains because such a service would be cost-prohibitive to the consumer," says Charles Chafer, CEO of Space Services. Indeed, getting a single gram of ashes into deep space costs a minimum of $12,500. (You get a price break if you want to make your final journey with a partner—the two-participant Gemini Capsule Option starts at $18,750.)

The upshot: If the rocket explodes short of orbit, there will be plenty of your cremains left on Earth to mount another mission. Celestis will give you top priority for the next launch, and your heirs won't be billed for the do-over. In any case, it may take a while for your remains to join those of Timothy Leary and Gene Roddenberry: Celestis has flown only seven missions since its founding in 1997, and two of those flights failed.

I was recently robbed while withdrawing money from an ATM. As the victim, do I have a right to see the bank's surveillance footage of the incident?

Whether or not to share the video—assuming it exists—is entirely up to the police. The video is now evidence, so even if you approach the bank directly, the request would likely have to be approved by the detective assigned to the case. And his top priority is catching the bad guy, not helping to heal your psychological wounds.

Still, cops are generally sympathetic to requests along these lines, so if you ask nicely—and don't come off as some Charles Bronson-style vigilante—you can probably sneak a peek. "The police usually work with a victim, unless they believe it is a false report," says Tom Lekan, a bank security expert at The Atlantis Company, a consulting firm in Cleveland. "Showing the victim the video is not unusual."

Be prepared for letdown, though. Given the typically shoddy quality of surveillance footage, even if the perp didn't wear a mask, he may look like nothing more than a grayish blob.

Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wiredmag.com.

On the shore of Lake Isabella, about 150 miles north of Los Angeles, a crowd of flight techs, most of them either pierced or tattooed, swarms around a small white airplane. It's called an Icon A5. It's a collaboration between an F-16 pilot and a skateboard designer, and it looks like an odd, rakish sea monster.

Today is the plane's first flight. Aeronautical calculations, computer simulations, and wind tunnel tests have been performed, of course. And yet ... every maiden flight is a dance with death. If all that math was foolproof, after all, no one would need test pilots.

At 6:30 am, the winds are calm. Jon Karkow pulls a parachute over his shoulders, hugs his girlfriend—a long embrace with whispers exchanged—and clambers into the cockpit; the A5 is remarkably stable on the water for something with a knife-edged underside. The tech crew chief closes the cockpit and gives the carbon-fiber skin a few pats; Karkow fires up the propeller and taxis the A5 out onto the lake.

Back on the beach, a square-jawed guy with closely cropped hair watches, frowning, his arms crossed. Kirk Hawkins started Icon Aircraft, and he has spent the past five years designing and building the A5. It's a plane like no other—the wings fold at the push of a button, making it easy to store and trailer. The side windows pop out so pilots can feel the wind, and the cockpit has just a few gauges. Meant to evoke something sporty, like a jet ski, instead of a lumbering Cessna or a tough-to-fly experimental kludge, the plane is supposed to let anyone who can afford the $139,000 price tag become a barnstormer. In a few weeks, a prototype will be on display at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin—mecca for air enthusiasts. If the A5 flies today, and flies well, it could create a new market for airplanes.

In a way, the A5 was made possible by the Federal Aviation Administration. In 2004, the FAA implemented the most far-reaching change to aviation rules in 50 years by creating an entirely new category. Dubbed light-sport aircraft, the category is a sort of intermediate designation between those small private planes parked at every regional airport in the country and flimsy-looking, ultralight "experimental" craft, which are built from kits and flown by the seat of the pants. Hawkins' A5 is cheaper than the former and more consistent than the latter, and if the economy doesn't put an end to the purchasing of expensive toys, Hawkins thinks A5s are destined for the top of the wish lists of the Ferrari-and-speedboat crowd. "Those kit-built airplanes are like early PCs," he says. "They're cool, but there's nothing easy or intuitive about them. The Icon A5 is going to be completely different."

The FAA has long had strict certification rules for aircraft and pilots. Anyone who wants to sell a new type of plane has to spend tens of millions of dollars on tests and paperwork for the Feds. At the same time, becoming a pilot takes fortitude and a big bank account: A certificate to fly a private, single-engine piston aircraft requires a complete exam by an FAA-certified physician and a minimum of 40 hours of instruction (running almost $10,000). And why would you want to? The myth of barnstormers in open-cockpit machines landing and taking off at will, of flying as the ultimate expression of freedom—like Denys Finch-Hatton soaring over the Great Rift Valley in Out of Africa—is mostly a lie. Even small airports are surrounded by chain link and security gates, and private pilots in "controlled airspace"—above 18,000 feet near busy airports—have to file flight plans and do what air traffic control tells them. It has all the charm of driving on a freeway.

Over the past few decades, all that regulation and cost have nearly killed innovation in the small aircraft market. In 1978, the US produced more than 14,000 single-engine, piston-powered airplanes. As of 2007, that number was 2,000. A classic of the genre, the Cessna Skyhawk, is a slow, ugly beast that, save for a few refinements, looks today just like it did when it was introduced in 1955.

Luckily for wing nuts, the FAA also certifies experimental planes. Pilots can fly just about anything, as long as they build it and fly it themselves. This is where most of the innovation in small-craft aviation has come from in the past couple of decades: fabric-winged two-seaters and carbon-fiber kit planes with clean aerodynamic shapes and customized performance. Today, one in seven single-engine piston airplanes is experimental. Putting one of these kits together is hardly a minor project, of course, and when you're done you still have to get a pilot's certificate.

The new light-sport category makes it much easier for amateur fliers to take to the air. Planes in this class must have just one engine, and maximum airspeed is 138 miles per hour. Sport pilots must stay below 10,000 feet (lower than most jetliners) and fly only during the day, in clear skies and away from busy airports. But that's still a lot of room to barnstorm. And wannabe pilots need only 20 hours of instruction to get certified.

Giants like Cirrus and Cessna are rushing to bring out light-sport airplanes; Cessna has already taken more than 1,000 orders on its new SkyCatcher, which won't be delivered until the end of the year. It costs about $112,000, half what the next-lowest-priced Cessna does. Unfortunately, it also looks like a baby Cessna, and most of those orders are headed straight to flight schools as entry-level models. Meanwhile, the light-sport designation has been a magnet for entrepreneurs. In just five years, a flock of upstart companies have introduced almost 90 planes that meet the new standards.

Hawkins wanted a piece of that market. To explain why, he offers to take me flying. "Look," he says, muscling a tiny airplane off the beach in his bathing suit and Nike water shoes, "flying is fun! Or it's supposed to be, anyway." Our aircraft is an Aventura II—it's amphibious, like the A5, but made of aluminum tubes covered with fiberglass, Dacron, and Kevlar. It looks a little like a 7-foot-tall ostrich head.

And Hawkins looks a little like someone dreamed up by the guys down in marketing. As a boy, he wanted to be an astronaut. He grew up racing motocross and jet skis, then spent a summer as a bush pilot in Alaska. After the first Gulf War, he flew F-16s over southern Iraq—and came home to get master's degrees in engineering and business from Stanford. He's 41, frequently wears untucked striped dress shirts and Diesel jeans, and possesses the smooth, fighter-pilot cool that's tough to pull off unless you actually are a pilot.

We squeeze into the cockpit, just big enough for the two of us, and when I rest my elbow on the open window I notice that it's a mere 8 inches down to the waterline. Hawkins fires up the 100-horsepower motor. In seconds we're airborne, skimming over the lake at 85 mph, the wind in our hair. Hawkins yanks and banks in crazy circles, flies 2 feet over the ripples, plays chicken with brown hillsides, and falls into formation with a flock of pelicans. "When you see hawks, they'll engage with you!" he shouts over the noise of the prop, climbing toward a pair of vultures at 500 feet. "We could go camping at the next lake over! We could land right there and have a picnic!"

Hawkins dives toward a dirt road that runs alongside the lake. He's grinning, laughing; we both are, and for the first time in my life I feel like, well, like I'm really flying and not just cruising in a tin can.

"Flying like this is easy. Anyone can do it," he says, giving me the stick and telling me to bring the Aventura into a level buzz above the water. "Night. Weather. Flying into LAX while working the radio and avoiding traffic. Those are difficult," Hawkins says. "Stick-and-rudder basics are easy. I could teach you to solo in five hours. You couldn't fly at night or in congestion or in the fog, but you wouldn't take a jet ski out at night in a shipping lane, either."

Actually, the Aventura is one of those kit planes, just one step up from ultralights, and it's anything but easy. You have to devote hundreds of hours to building it yourself, and it still costs $70,000. Getting it from your garage or hangar to a body of water for takeoff means putting on and taking off the wings, a process that can take two people four hours. And although it's a simple airplane, it's fickle to fly, looks and feels flimsy, and is uncomfortable. Hawkins' plan, then, was simple: Keep the fun. Fix the rest.

On a balmy night in Los Angeles a month before the A5's maiden flight, 500 people gather in Icon's parking lot. The bar is seeing a lot of action, and motocross videos loop on big LCDs. This is the official unveiling of the A5, wrapped for now in black silk.

Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, the Flying Tomato, is knocking back beers in skintight black leather pants and skater sneakers. Further contributing to the X Games vibe, Troy Lee, a celebrity in the world of motocross and mountain biking, is chatting with fellow Icon board members. There's tech guru Esther Dyson, an early Icon investor. And there's Dick Rutan, brother of aviation visionary and X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne designer Burt and the first person to fly around the world nonstop on a single tank of gas. None of them have seen the plane yet.

When the FAA announced its new rules, Hawkins was getting his second Stanford degree, in the Sloan business program. His engineering experience had left him infatuated with the power of design, and the light-sport changes made him think he could build a truly sexy airplane—one designed for a high-end consumer instead of a traditional pilot. Why have a complicated instrument panel and glass cockpit when all you were going to do was fly around a lake on a beautiful day? "Flying had this complex, regulated-transportation mentality," Hawkins says, "but the best flying I've ever done was always at low altitudes with the window open. I wanted to make a great flying airplane that creates an emotional response but isn't intimidating, that makes you want to fly it, like driving a great sports car."

Using his biz school assignments as an excuse to do market research, Hawkins became convinced of an "enormous pent-up demand" for light aircraft, and the industry naturally welcomed his enthusiasm. "Cessna wants more share of the same old market," says Dan Johnson, president of the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association. "Icon wants to break into a whole new one."

Hawkins' approach to starting an aerospace company was more Boing Boing than Boeing. In a class called Ambidextrous Thinking, he met an ex-banker named Steen Strand, who would later invent a skateboard that could slide and skid like a snowboard. Dubbed the Freebord, it went on to sell 70,000 units; Hawkins brought him in for that cult design expertise. "I wasn't a pilot, and that seemed a big no-no to me," Strand says. Before he can explain how he got over that obstacle, our conversation is interrupted by pulsing music and flashing lights; it's time for the unveiling. Hawkins whips off the black shroud. There's the A5, painted in gleaming silver and red.

"Every switch and button on the plane became a product of design exploration," Strand says, giving me a tour of the plane a few minutes later. "Airplanes have always been about form following function, but if you look at a snowmobile or a jet ski, there's a lot of stuff that has less to do with function than with aesthetics and the way it makes you feel. A Cessna is the product of a completely different culture." Which is clear the minute Shaun White steps up to the plane. "Dude, I so want one of these!" he says, tossing his mane of red hair. "I've always wanted to fly, and I could get to Mammoth in, like, an hour. Then I'd really be the Flying Tomato!"

Back on Lake Isabella, as the A5 motors out to the middle of the water, Steen Strand and his design team watch with surprising calm. "To design an airplane that consumers want in a flight-weight vehicle is hard," says Matthew Gionta, Icon's VP of engineering. He spent 13 years at Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan's aerospace company. He was slated to lead the design of SpaceShipTwo when Hawkins brought him to Icon.

First of all, the A5's cockpit had to be roomy, but the fuselage aerodynamic. As an amphibian, it needed a tapering, knife-edged lower hull so it could hydroplane quickly, but it also had to be stable and wide enough to swim and jump from. Then, making it trailerable meant giving it folding wings, which add weight and complexity the same way a hardtop convertible weighs down a car. "The laws of physics don't change," Gionta says. "And a lot of airplanes aren't very easy to fly. With this, every force has to be the same in pitch and roll so it's smooth and fun and predictable." Gionta looks out at the water and the taxiing plane.

Seconds later, the A5 rises up on its hull. And then, with no apparent effort, it lifts from the water like a gull. "Nice," Strand says.

Behind the stick, Karkow makes a long, wide loop, just 10 feet above the lake's surface, and then slides smoothly back down onto the water. It takes all of 90 seconds. "Totally badass!" Hawkins barks. "We've got a Porsche 911!"

Two hours later, Karkow takes the plane up again. It's another short hop, but this time he rises 70 feet off the lake and swings a lazy circle around us. The A5 looks steady and smooth, a solid piece of professional engineering. Karkow brings it lower and banks into a gentle turn, taking one more small circle before dropping back onto the lake with a splash, to more cheers and whoops. "No surprises at all," he says as he climbs out of the cockpit. Which is what every engineer wants to hear.

There's a long test program ahead, but for now Hawkins is armed with prototypes and a video that he can take to Oshkosh to generate buzz and orders. (He'll get 70 at the air show a couple of weeks later.) Despite his market research, no one knows if fun-loving guys outside the Oshkosh crowd will actually buy A5s, especially in the midst of a global financial meltdown. "The economy is terrible right now," says Joel Peterson, chair of JetBlue Airways and an Icon investor, "but there are enough pilots out there that even if he gets a small market share, it'll be enough. And anyway, Kirk is an extreme-sports guy, and no one personifies the market like him."

As the airplane slides from the lake onto its trailer, Hawkins splashes around the shore shaking hands. Then he gathers his staff for an important announcement. "We're out here on the water," he says, "and we've got two jet skis and a speedboat. Anyone wanna go wakeboarding?"

Contributing editor Carl Hoffman (carlhoffmn@earthlink.net) wrote about Canadian diamond mines in issue 16.12.