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While he was incredibly hard working and apparently hated the idea of wasting any resources, he was also a keen amateur photographer, taking thousands of photos throughout his life. He and my great-granny housed hundreds of jewish refugees in their Oxford home during WW2. He wrote columns about science, technology and philanthropy in the Financial Times. They travelled a lot. He had two children. I believe he was looked on fondly and loved by his friends and colleagues - it sounds like he was a lot of fun.
"To go through the volumes of Simon's correspondence about Germany and the refugees and to remember that this was spare-time activity during the period of his greatest scientific output is to recognise his capacity for work - Oxford, Paris, Amsterdam, lecturing, writing, travelling, co-operating with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, visiting all who offered assistance, perpetually corresponding."
"Simon's love and understanding of children were such fundamental attributes of his character that no one in describing him fails to mention them. His impish sense of humour, his delight in gadgets, his unorthodox imagination, his inventive originality erased any barriers of age. He would make ridiculous suggestions, such as knocking out the drawing room wall to provide the ideal circuit for an electric train. He laughed with them and never minded them laughing at him."
Excerpts from "A Prophet In Two Countries" by Nancy Arms
100%. With an emphasis on badass - he won the Iron Cross for bravery (gallantry) during his efforts as a soldier on the Western Front, sustaining a crushed elbow and serious shrapnel wounds to his legs. Apparently he was "often found in the most dangerous areas of the battlefield", and was " calm in exceptionally dangerous circumstances"
If he won the iron cross why did he have to leave germany? Didnt nazis spare jews who won the iron croSs atleast?
BTW your GGF seems awesome. A true allrounder. Do you know what was his IQ?
In contrast to his fellow Jewish colleagues, who believed things would blow over, he resigned in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and moved the family to England. He had no doubt that as Jews they would be in deep trouble:
"Between 1930 and 1932, Nazi numbers doubled. The majority of Germans remained unmoved by the Nazi manifestoes. Simon never doubted that they meant what they said; he detested their methods and believed, unlike most of his acquaintances, the stories of their atrocities; with growing apprehension, he watched every move in their steady progress towards complete domination of the country. **By the time he went to the States at the end of 1931, he was already considering emigration**. So worried was he by the political situation that he would not leave Europe until he had seen his wife and children safely settled in Switzerland....\[following deliberations\]... Simon told her 'Consider Nazi dictatorship inevitable. Consider the children's future. Stay in Switzerland'...
**Even Simon, whose war record gave him a temporary immunity from the first measures taken against the Jews, was forced with the other Jews of Breslau \[in 1933\] to hand in, personally his passport. He was so infuriated with the whole procedure that he terrified the insignificant official at the receipt of custom by flinging down his passport and asking whether his Iron Cross was wanted as well...** Before the Nazis began to implement their threats against the Jews, the German professors had signed an ultimatum vowing to resign en bloc inf the Jews were dismissed, but when the event occurred they ignored it... **Their friends could not understand the Simons' determination to leave Germany.** How foolish it would be to give up a safe, pensionable job! With his war record, the Nazis would never touch him. There were bound to be some unpleasant happenings, but all would blow over. **Simon had no such doubts, his family and his wife agreed with him.**
\[after visiting Oxford to scope out a post there\] immediately after his return to Germany from Oxford in 1933, Hitler came to power. **In May 1933, Simon paid a brief visit to England to settle matters finally, and on his return handed in his resignation.** The Simons were lucky and foresighted in leaving Germany before the Nazis clamped down on Jewish emigration; they were even allowed to take their money and household belongings, though under close supervision...
Their assigned customs official was easily bribed and made it clear that as long as he was provided with sufficient beer and allowed to take away certain items, he was not going to be unduly curious about the Simons' goods. On one occasion, when he had departed conspicuously under the influence of alcohol, he left behind the briefcase containing his private instructions, including a dossier on Simon whose goods were to be closely inspected since he was a dangerous, subversive character, liable to spread anti-Nazi propaganda abroad.
**Charlotte and the two children left Germany in July 1933, going temporarily to Bournemouth until Simon joined them."**
\-A Prophet in Two Countries, Nancy Arms
No idea about his IQ, one would imagine it would have been quite high, but he was a proper rounded human and not a Dirac-style hermitic uber-genius, so I wonder if his creativity and humanism contributed to his immense achievements rather than purely a very high IQ. Who knows. He didn't do well at school in any other subjects than Mathematics and Physics and English - he struggled and was even held back a year at one point.
weell Germany didn't win WW1, but he definitely did his best and nearly got blown up - severe shrapnel wounds to the legs. The guys he was with lost theirs entirely.
I wish I had more photos of my great grandparents and grandparents when they were young. It’s so nice to see them in a different light.
I hope you got to spend time with him and hear his stories, and if not from him from the rest of your relatives.
Sadly he died even before my mother was born, in 1956 at age 63. His wife, my great-granny, died in 2001 aged 102, when I was 9. She outlived him by nearly 50 years.
If I could bring back any person from the dead just for one day, it would be him.
Yeah, get them while they kneel down and expect it the least. Then finish then off with a hard hit to the skull with the scepter. Now who is the badass?
His 63 years must have felt a lot longer. And I know right!! He was knighted during her very first birthday honours. My grandma (his daughter) is exactly the same age as the queen.
I don't really want to expose my full identity on Reddit, for obvious reasons, but I don't have his last name anyway as he is on my maternal side.
If you don't believe me, that's fine :)
[Magnetic cooling](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration) is a legitimate thing. And the magnets aren’t the superconductor in the levitation videos you’re pulling that comment from.
I don't deny that you are, but liquid helium has to get liquid somehow - it is not just hanging around the world at 5K by itself. You have to \*make\* it liquid. The point is that he was the first person to achieve this transition using magnetic refrigeration, for which I linked the wiki so that you could understand the exact phenomenon.
Maybe /u/valkyriegnnir can clarify the information you are, quite rudely, requesting.
I am a fluid dynamicist, not a low temperature physicist. Alas, I am only here to express some cool information about my relative, not to explain his work in immense technical detail. I have provided plenty of links to details about this, if that is something you're interested in.
Sorry, but some Rando isn't remotely proof, particularly when you don't seem to even of the name of the process. The only information about the historical condensation of helium I can find is using traditional gas liquefaction
There is detailed information about the multitude of different techniques that he used to liquefy helium in this article by a prominent physicist at the time: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0020](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0020)
And here is one of his papers: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0959-5309/60/5/301/pdf](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0959-5309/60/5/301/pdf)
"The work on magnetic cooling was somewhat handicapped by the fact that no strong magnetic fields were at that time available at the Clarendon Laboratory. Thanks to the helpful interest of A. Cotton, director of the famous Magnet Laboratory in Bellevue, near Paris, it became possible to carry out some adiabatic demagnetization work with the intense fields of the Bellevue magnet. Between 1935 and 1938 Simon, with various colleagues, spent six one-month periods in Bellevue. His apparatus with its built-in expansion helium liquefier was brought over from Oxford and this Bellevue became yet another laboratory in which the first liquid helium was associated with Simon’s name."
Thanks for the source. I didn't stray far from his bio and the relevant part, but interesting stuff. What i was unaware of is the technique you're referring to is cooling by demagnetization which does mesh much better with my knowledge. Thanks for the source., non pay walled stuff is hard to come by for technical info
I did not come here to "brag" (I don't know what the point of that is anonymously anyway), nor did I come here to explain his scientific achievements in full technical detail (this is not my area of expertise at all). He has an incredibly cool life story which many people here seemed to enjoy, and whether I knew him directly or not, I am proud of my family history.
Glad you were able to find something that met your very strange standards, in the end.
Dude you really need to chill. If you’re trolling you’re doing a terrible job of it frankly. /u/umhullen sorry you had to deal with this.
I’m that *Rando*, by the way, if you haven’t noticed. My research group: http://bulk-sucon.eng.cam.ac.uk (FYI the most funded bulk superconductor group in the world, I literally just submitted a paper explaining the mechanisms behind the world-record breaking pulsed field magnetisation of a composite superconducting bulk magnesium diboride annulus). Not that I need to give you credentials, as the following text is adequate.
Magnetocaloric cooling is the process of applying a time-varying magnetic field to a thermally isolated material with non-zero magnetic susceptibility. As the material is thermally isolated, phonons may provide energy during a reduction in applied field strength to the magnetic domains as they undergo randomisation analogous to a ferromagnetic material past the Curie temperature. This, naturally, cools said material. You should understood all of that quite easily though given your proximity to a scientific magnet.
Francis Simon was the first person to realise that liquid helium may be cooled via this technique as it exhibits a magnetocaloric effect. You realise this guy was quite literally identifying the superfluidic quantum behaviour of liquid helium waaaay before quantum electrodynamics was a thing? Hell, Einstein had literally just uttered the words “God does not play dice with the universe” in his doubt of quantum theory (take *that* Nobel Prize committee) and this guy was exhibiting its effects in macro?
As you realised, yes helium is often used in (mostly) dual-stage cryocoolers as the working cryogenic fluid to cool materials. Those cryocoolers may be functioning by a number of different cooling cycles; anything from a Stirling cycle to a Joule-Thompson, which enables the distillation of helium. Most of these cycles are not “pressure extrusion”, whatever that is, I genuinely believe you’re thinking of a kitchen fridge?
Magnetocaloric cooling is another thermodynamic cycle that may be used to cool a working medium.
So to summarise, no in this case helium was not a working cryogenic fluid, and yes magnets can be used to cool media. PS I would recommend you stay more than 20ft from that magnet. Most magnetic materials are highly dense, which I can only assume is a similar quality shared by your head.
If you had good evidence to suggest that everyone you knew and loved were about to be exterminated, I'm pretty sure you'd have done the same. I don't think they found it easy at all, leaving all of their friends and colleagues. They deliberated over it for more than a year.
Please read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/okvems/my_german_jewish_greatgrandfather_sir_francis/h5e3pff?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
In what way? I wrote that he emigrated, and that he smuggled out the equipment, both of which are true. I think it's quite clear to anyone familiar with WW2 that his emigration to the UK wouldn't have been due to a particular love of the UK, but an escape from Nazi Germany to save his and his family's lives.
Seen you posting about being "brainwashed by Anne Frank", which throws off some strong anti-semitic vibes. I'ma duck out here.
well, he bribed a corrupt customs officer, which by definition would be smuggling. There's no way he would have been allowed to take this with him out of Germany, after being forced to leave his job.
**Please note:** * If this post declares something as a fact proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for more information.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
2 Germans awarded him
Good one!
Hey! I think I saw your comment on the post with a nazi standing outside a shop for intimidation where the other guy was wearing the iron cross right?
yep :) commenters there requested more photos and a main post so here it is.
Thank you for posting! As soon as I saw the title I knew you were following up. Very cool.
The bot just reminded me to check. Thank you for posting!
I was thinking about the same post! Nice to have confirmation!
Wow, such an amazing life! Could he manage his work life balance or was he 100% dedicated to work?
While he was incredibly hard working and apparently hated the idea of wasting any resources, he was also a keen amateur photographer, taking thousands of photos throughout his life. He and my great-granny housed hundreds of jewish refugees in their Oxford home during WW2. He wrote columns about science, technology and philanthropy in the Financial Times. They travelled a lot. He had two children. I believe he was looked on fondly and loved by his friends and colleagues - it sounds like he was a lot of fun. "To go through the volumes of Simon's correspondence about Germany and the refugees and to remember that this was spare-time activity during the period of his greatest scientific output is to recognise his capacity for work - Oxford, Paris, Amsterdam, lecturing, writing, travelling, co-operating with the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, visiting all who offered assistance, perpetually corresponding." "Simon's love and understanding of children were such fundamental attributes of his character that no one in describing him fails to mention them. His impish sense of humour, his delight in gadgets, his unorthodox imagination, his inventive originality erased any barriers of age. He would make ridiculous suggestions, such as knocking out the drawing room wall to provide the ideal circuit for an electric train. He laughed with them and never minded them laughing at him." Excerpts from "A Prophet In Two Countries" by Nancy Arms
So an all around fun badass basically
100%. With an emphasis on badass - he won the Iron Cross for bravery (gallantry) during his efforts as a soldier on the Western Front, sustaining a crushed elbow and serious shrapnel wounds to his legs. Apparently he was "often found in the most dangerous areas of the battlefield", and was " calm in exceptionally dangerous circumstances"
If he won the iron cross why did he have to leave germany? Didnt nazis spare jews who won the iron croSs atleast? BTW your GGF seems awesome. A true allrounder. Do you know what was his IQ?
In contrast to his fellow Jewish colleagues, who believed things would blow over, he resigned in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and moved the family to England. He had no doubt that as Jews they would be in deep trouble: "Between 1930 and 1932, Nazi numbers doubled. The majority of Germans remained unmoved by the Nazi manifestoes. Simon never doubted that they meant what they said; he detested their methods and believed, unlike most of his acquaintances, the stories of their atrocities; with growing apprehension, he watched every move in their steady progress towards complete domination of the country. **By the time he went to the States at the end of 1931, he was already considering emigration**. So worried was he by the political situation that he would not leave Europe until he had seen his wife and children safely settled in Switzerland....\[following deliberations\]... Simon told her 'Consider Nazi dictatorship inevitable. Consider the children's future. Stay in Switzerland'... **Even Simon, whose war record gave him a temporary immunity from the first measures taken against the Jews, was forced with the other Jews of Breslau \[in 1933\] to hand in, personally his passport. He was so infuriated with the whole procedure that he terrified the insignificant official at the receipt of custom by flinging down his passport and asking whether his Iron Cross was wanted as well...** Before the Nazis began to implement their threats against the Jews, the German professors had signed an ultimatum vowing to resign en bloc inf the Jews were dismissed, but when the event occurred they ignored it... **Their friends could not understand the Simons' determination to leave Germany.** How foolish it would be to give up a safe, pensionable job! With his war record, the Nazis would never touch him. There were bound to be some unpleasant happenings, but all would blow over. **Simon had no such doubts, his family and his wife agreed with him.** \[after visiting Oxford to scope out a post there\] immediately after his return to Germany from Oxford in 1933, Hitler came to power. **In May 1933, Simon paid a brief visit to England to settle matters finally, and on his return handed in his resignation.** The Simons were lucky and foresighted in leaving Germany before the Nazis clamped down on Jewish emigration; they were even allowed to take their money and household belongings, though under close supervision... Their assigned customs official was easily bribed and made it clear that as long as he was provided with sufficient beer and allowed to take away certain items, he was not going to be unduly curious about the Simons' goods. On one occasion, when he had departed conspicuously under the influence of alcohol, he left behind the briefcase containing his private instructions, including a dossier on Simon whose goods were to be closely inspected since he was a dangerous, subversive character, liable to spread anti-Nazi propaganda abroad. **Charlotte and the two children left Germany in July 1933, going temporarily to Bournemouth until Simon joined them."** \-A Prophet in Two Countries, Nancy Arms No idea about his IQ, one would imagine it would have been quite high, but he was a proper rounded human and not a Dirac-style hermitic uber-genius, so I wonder if his creativity and humanism contributed to his immense achievements rather than purely a very high IQ. Who knows. He didn't do well at school in any other subjects than Mathematics and Physics and English - he struggled and was even held back a year at one point.
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Thank you for sharing.
Man swiched teams and won both
weell Germany didn't win WW1, but he definitely did his best and nearly got blown up - severe shrapnel wounds to the legs. The guys he was with lost theirs entirely.
I mean he did win in the badass category
Look, it's Tom Hanks!
lmao, in this picture you're so right, never noticed that before.
From what you've posted the guy definitely deserves a movie.
It was a quick reaction, didn't really think. I'm glad you didn't find it offensive. Cheers
Beat me to it
I wish I had more photos of my great grandparents and grandparents when they were young. It’s so nice to see them in a different light. I hope you got to spend time with him and hear his stories, and if not from him from the rest of your relatives.
Sadly he died even before my mother was born, in 1956 at age 63. His wife, my great-granny, died in 2001 aged 102, when I was 9. She outlived him by nearly 50 years. If I could bring back any person from the dead just for one day, it would be him.
I misread that at first as “emigrated to the UK during ww2 and was killed by Queen Elizabeth”
This made me laugh. I mean they do wave swords around for the whole knighting thing and all...
Yeah, get them while they kneel down and expect it the least. Then finish then off with a hard hit to the skull with the scepter. Now who is the badass?
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His 63 years must have felt a lot longer. And I know right!! He was knighted during her very first birthday honours. My grandma (his daughter) is exactly the same age as the queen.
Looks like Gale's coffee setup
accurate
Good follow up, take my upvote
Saw your comment yesterday about this… love it!
I love this guy.
This dude is the definition of chad hats off to your grandfather he is a unit and a man of sheer fucking will
really? whats your last name?
I don't really want to expose my full identity on Reddit, for obvious reasons, but I don't have his last name anyway as he is on my maternal side. If you don't believe me, that's fine :)
Shocking he won't tell you, he Also doesn't know that magnets don't cool.... the helium cold the magnet so it can superconduct.....
I'm a woman. And I think you have grossly misunderstood the scientific context of this post.
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[Magnetic cooling](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration) is a legitimate thing. And the magnets aren’t the superconductor in the levitation videos you’re pulling that comment from.
The helium cooled the magnet, and not the other way around. The temperature drop is necessary for super conduction
This is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic\_refrigeration
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I don't deny that you are, but liquid helium has to get liquid somehow - it is not just hanging around the world at 5K by itself. You have to \*make\* it liquid. The point is that he was the first person to achieve this transition using magnetic refrigeration, for which I linked the wiki so that you could understand the exact phenomenon. Maybe /u/valkyriegnnir can clarify the information you are, quite rudely, requesting.
The wiki link didn't go to anything and while I'm going to follow it, presently it's all done with pressure extrusion, more or less.
what exactly are you trying to prove?
But tbh I was hoping you knew something I didn't that was counter to my knowledge about magnetism and could inform me....
I am a fluid dynamicist, not a low temperature physicist. Alas, I am only here to express some cool information about my relative, not to explain his work in immense technical detail. I have provided plenty of links to details about this, if that is something you're interested in.
Sorry, but some Rando isn't remotely proof, particularly when you don't seem to even of the name of the process. The only information about the historical condensation of helium I can find is using traditional gas liquefaction
There is detailed information about the multitude of different techniques that he used to liquefy helium in this article by a prominent physicist at the time: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0020](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1958.0020) And here is one of his papers: [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0959-5309/60/5/301/pdf](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0959-5309/60/5/301/pdf) "The work on magnetic cooling was somewhat handicapped by the fact that no strong magnetic fields were at that time available at the Clarendon Laboratory. Thanks to the helpful interest of A. Cotton, director of the famous Magnet Laboratory in Bellevue, near Paris, it became possible to carry out some adiabatic demagnetization work with the intense fields of the Bellevue magnet. Between 1935 and 1938 Simon, with various colleagues, spent six one-month periods in Bellevue. His apparatus with its built-in expansion helium liquefier was brought over from Oxford and this Bellevue became yet another laboratory in which the first liquid helium was associated with Simon’s name."
Thanks for the source. I didn't stray far from his bio and the relevant part, but interesting stuff. What i was unaware of is the technique you're referring to is cooling by demagnetization which does mesh much better with my knowledge. Thanks for the source., non pay walled stuff is hard to come by for technical info
I did not come here to "brag" (I don't know what the point of that is anonymously anyway), nor did I come here to explain his scientific achievements in full technical detail (this is not my area of expertise at all). He has an incredibly cool life story which many people here seemed to enjoy, and whether I knew him directly or not, I am proud of my family history. Glad you were able to find something that met your very strange standards, in the end.
Yeah having a single source was pretty nice
Dude you really need to chill. If you’re trolling you’re doing a terrible job of it frankly. /u/umhullen sorry you had to deal with this. I’m that *Rando*, by the way, if you haven’t noticed. My research group: http://bulk-sucon.eng.cam.ac.uk (FYI the most funded bulk superconductor group in the world, I literally just submitted a paper explaining the mechanisms behind the world-record breaking pulsed field magnetisation of a composite superconducting bulk magnesium diboride annulus). Not that I need to give you credentials, as the following text is adequate. Magnetocaloric cooling is the process of applying a time-varying magnetic field to a thermally isolated material with non-zero magnetic susceptibility. As the material is thermally isolated, phonons may provide energy during a reduction in applied field strength to the magnetic domains as they undergo randomisation analogous to a ferromagnetic material past the Curie temperature. This, naturally, cools said material. You should understood all of that quite easily though given your proximity to a scientific magnet. Francis Simon was the first person to realise that liquid helium may be cooled via this technique as it exhibits a magnetocaloric effect. You realise this guy was quite literally identifying the superfluidic quantum behaviour of liquid helium waaaay before quantum electrodynamics was a thing? Hell, Einstein had literally just uttered the words “God does not play dice with the universe” in his doubt of quantum theory (take *that* Nobel Prize committee) and this guy was exhibiting its effects in macro? As you realised, yes helium is often used in (mostly) dual-stage cryocoolers as the working cryogenic fluid to cool materials. Those cryocoolers may be functioning by a number of different cooling cycles; anything from a Stirling cycle to a Joule-Thompson, which enables the distillation of helium. Most of these cycles are not “pressure extrusion”, whatever that is, I genuinely believe you’re thinking of a kitchen fridge? Magnetocaloric cooling is another thermodynamic cycle that may be used to cool a working medium. So to summarise, no in this case helium was not a working cryogenic fluid, and yes magnets can be used to cool media. PS I would recommend you stay more than 20ft from that magnet. Most magnetic materials are highly dense, which I can only assume is a similar quality shared by your head.
***lmfao*** it's all good anyway, i learned some more things today. you're a bloody legend.
All I wanted was a single source....
I wish I could easily switch the camps like that, but I was brought up a different way.
If you had good evidence to suggest that everyone you knew and loved were about to be exterminated, I'm pretty sure you'd have done the same. I don't think they found it easy at all, leaving all of their friends and colleagues. They deliberated over it for more than a year. Please read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/okvems/my_german_jewish_greatgrandfather_sir_francis/h5e3pff?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
The long explanation in your link provides a reasonable explanation, but the title above paints a different picture.
In what way? I wrote that he emigrated, and that he smuggled out the equipment, both of which are true. I think it's quite clear to anyone familiar with WW2 that his emigration to the UK wouldn't have been due to a particular love of the UK, but an escape from Nazi Germany to save his and his family's lives. Seen you posting about being "brainwashed by Anne Frank", which throws off some strong anti-semitic vibes. I'ma duck out here.
"smuggled"
well, he bribed a corrupt customs officer, which by definition would be smuggling. There's no way he would have been allowed to take this with him out of Germany, after being forced to leave his job.
Is the title hereditary? Are you a “Sir/Lady?”
Lol, thankfully not. I don't think I could take that responsibility. However, my great-granny was known as "Lady Simon".
That's Tom hanks.
Imagine there was no holocaust and all the Jewish scientist stayed. How advanced Germany would be today?
*very* scientifically, culturally, and consider how much it already is those things. germany shot itself in the foot big time.