Spotting frauds lets man touch van Goghs

Question: How many engineering jobs let you take a van Gogh off the wall and hold it in your hands?

Answer: If you're both an electrical engineering professor and a research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, like Cornell's C. Richard Johnson Jr., you just might do this, says Susan Karlin of "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. A big concern of his is "fraud and how to detect it." Is that alleged van Gogh in hand authentic? Answering this can be done with high-resolution imaging associated with signal-processing algorithms that zero in at the brushstroke level.

Currently, Johnson's focus is on canvas thread counts — the number of horizontal threads crossing a vertical line one centimeter long — to identify paintings from the same roll of canvas. This is telling for an artist who bought canvas in rolls, as van Gogh often did. Radio-opaque material in an X-ray helps reveal signature weave density. Johnson's team is currently distributing the software free to museums.

For me, he says, this kind of research is "like having a backstage pass. I go to conservation studios and can take a van Gogh out of its frame and examine it."

Question: "I was famous for the kites I made, and my sleds were the envy … of all the boys in town." What invention is this woman world famous for today, more than a century after a court battle for the patent and after she was awarded the "Decoration of the Royal Legion of Honour from Queen Victoria"? You probably don't know her name but have doubtless used countless of this product when shopping …

Answer: She was Margaret Knight (1838-1914), one of the first American women to be awarded a patent, says Jack Challoner in "1001 Inventions That Changed the World." She was a prolific inventor from the age of 12, when an accident in a textile mill prompted her to design a safety feature to protect workers from the loom.

However, of her 27 patents, the flat-bottomed paper bag is her most widely remembered invention. Knight was working in a paper-bag factory after the American Civil War when she saw the need for a boxier shape to replace the envelope-slim bags unsuitable for bulky items. Since the flat-bottomed bag could be made only by hand, Knight designed a wooden prototype of a bag-maker that she sent to a machine shop, where an unscrupulous employee stole her design and got the patent. But the decision was overturned in court, with Knight bagging what was rightfully hers from the beginning.

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@cs.com. © Bill Sones and Rich Sones, Ph.D.