January 15 - Today in Science History


JANUARY 15 - BIRTHS
Edward Teller
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1908; died 9 Sep 2003 Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the world's first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. After studying in Germany he left in 1933, going first to London and then to Washington, DC. He worked on the first atomic reactor, and later working on the first fission bombs during WW II at Los Alamos. Subsequently, he made a significant contribution to the development of the fusion bomb. His work led to the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb (1952). He is sometimes known as "the father of the H-bomb." Teller's unfavourable evidence in the Robert Oppenheimer security-clearance hearing lost him some respect amongst scientists.
R.B. Braithwaite
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1900; died 21 Apr 1990. Richard Bevan Braithwaite was a British philosopher, who trained in physics and mathematics, but turned to the philosophy of science. He examined the logical features common to all the sciences. Each science proceeds by inventing general principles from which are deduced the consequences to be tested by observation and experiment. Braithwaite was concerned with the impact of science on our beliefs about the world and the responses appropriate to that. He wrote on the statistical sciences, theories of belief and of probability, decision theory and games theory. He was interested in particular with the laws of probability as they apply to the physical and biological sciences.« Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory, Probability and Law in Science, by R.B. Braithwaite.
Artturi Ilmari Virtanen
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1895; died 11 Nov 1973. Finnish biochemist whose investigations directed toward improving the production and storage of protein-rich green fodder, vitally important to regions characterized by long, severe winters, brought him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945. The AIV method, named for his initials, was storing green fodder in an acid medium to prevent spoilage and retain nutritious nitrogenous material. He found that a mixture of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid was adequate as long as its strength was kept within certain precise limits (a pH of about four). In 1929, he found that cows fed such silage gave milk indistinguishable in taste from that of cows fed on normal fodder, while as rich in vitamins A and C.
Lewis M. Terman
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1877; died 21 Dec 1956. Lewis M(adison) Terman was a U.S. psychologist who pioneered individual intelligence tests. During WW I, he was involved in mass testing of intelligence for the U.S. army. He expanded an English version of the French Binet-Simon intelligence test with which he introduced the IQ (Intelligence Quotient), being a ratio of chronological age to mental age times 100. (Thus an average child has an IQ of 100). He wrote about this metric in The Measurement of Intelligence (1916). He made a long-term study of gifted children (with IQ above 140) examining mental and physical aspect of their lives reported in the multi-volume Genetic Studies of Genius (1926-59).« Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing, by Henry L. Minton.
Henry Livingstone Sulman
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1861; died 31 Jan 1940. British metallurgist, one of the originators of the froth flotation process for concentrating ores preliminary to the extraction of metal (with H.F.K. Picard, U.S. patent No. 835120, 6 Nov 1906). In this latter method, crude ore is ground to a fine powder and mixed with water, frothing reagents, and collecting reagents. These reagents, such as oil or fatty acids, are chosen for a preferential affinity for metalliferous matter over the waste material (gangue). When air is blown through the mixture, mineral particles cling to the bubbles, which rise to form a froth on the surface, whereas gangue settles to the bottom. The froth is skimmed off, and processed. Sulman had previously worked on several methods for the extraction of gold, including treatment with cyanogen bromide.
Sofya Kovalevskaya
	Born 15 Jan 1850; died 10 Feb 1891. Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya was a mathematician and novelist who made valuable contributions to the theory of differential equations.
Josef Breuer
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1842; died 20 Jun 1925. Austrian physician and physiologist whose cathartic method was acknowledged by Sigmund Freud and others as the principal forerunner of psychoanalysis. Breuer found (1880) that he had relieved symptoms of hysteria in a patient, Bertha Pappenheim, (called Anna O. in his case study), after he had induced her to recall past unpleasant experiences under hypnosis. By describing her traumatic experiences and feelings about them to Breuer she seemed to get some relief from debilitating symptoms such as partial paralysis and hallucinations. Although Breuer's treatment was not nearly as successful as he and Freud claimed, she eventually overcame her symptoms to become an innovative social worker and a leader of the women's movement in Germany.
Warren De la Rue
	Born 15 Jan 1815; died 19 Apr 1889. English pioneer in astronomical photography, the method by which nearly all modern astronomical observations are made.
Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff
c. 1850 (source)	Born 15 Jan 1803; died 20 Dec 1877. German mechanic who, as an instrument maker in Paris, invented the Ruhmkorff coil, his version of the induction coil (after Nicholas Joseph Callan's earlier invention of 1836). Ruhmkorff's induction coil could produce sparks over 1 ft (30 cm) in length, and became popular for energizing discharge tubes, especially those for generating X-rays (discovered by Roentgen, 1895). The device uses a primary coil and iron core concentric with a secondary coil with a large number of turns. By using a contact breaker giving abrupt and rapid interruptions in the primary coil current, a concentrated, changing magnetic field produced a high voltage in the secondary coil. He also invented a thermo-electric battery in 1844.«
William Starling Sullivant
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1803; died 30 Apr 1873. American botanist who was the foremost U.S. bryologist in his time. Sullivant graduated in the same year his father died, and took over his surveying business. He began studying and the plant life of central Ohio and published A Catalogue of Plants, Native and Naturalized, in the Vicinity of Columbus, Ohio (1840). When he expanded his interest to the bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), he cataloged not only specimens from the U.S., but also Central America, South America, and various Pacific Ocean islands. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1872. The moss Sullivantia Ohioensis was named in his honour.«
William Prout
(source)	Born 15 Jan 1785; died 9 Apr 1850. English chemist and biochemist noted for his discoveries concerning digestion, metabolic chemistry, and atomic weights. He is best known for formulating Prout's hypothesis (1815) which states that the atomic weights of all elements are exact multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen. At that time the atomic weight of hydrogen was taken to be 1.0, the hypothesis implied that all atomic weights would be whole numbers. In 1818, he isolated urea and uric acid for the first time. Six years later, he found hydrochloric acid in the digestive juices of the stomach. He was the first scientist (1827) to classify the components of food into the three main divisions of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. In 1920, Rutherford named the proton after Prout. "From Protyle to Proton: William Prout and the Nature of Matter, 1785-1985"by W.H. Brock

Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Custom Quotations Search - custom search within only our quotations pages:

Today in Science History Science Store
Click here to browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books


JANUARY 15 - DEATHS

Kenneth Vivian Thimann
	Died 15 Jan 1997 (born 5 Aug 1904) British-born plant physiologist who isolated and purified the plant hormone auxin and identified it as a chemical messenger with principal roles in regulating plant growth.
Oscar Auerbach
	Died 15 Jan 1997 (born 1 Jan 1905) American pathologist whose research showing that cigarette smoking was causally related to lung cancer, based on his examination of thousands of lung tissue samples, gained national prominence in the first Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health in 1964.
William T. Piper
	Died 15 Jan 1970 (born 8 Jan 1881) American manufacturer of small aircraft, best known for the Piper Cub, a two-seater that became the most popular family aircraft. He earned the sobriquet "the Henry Ford of Aviation" for his efforts to popularize air travel. In WW II, Piper delivered more than 5,600 Piper Cubs, long popular as a training plane, to the U.S. government for use as special personnel planes, for photoreconnaissance, and as artillery spotters. Because of their low landing speed, 20 mph (32 kph) and high maneuverability, the Pipers easily eluded enemy fighters. In addition to the Piper Cub, the company manufactured light to medium-sized aircraft for use as business planes.
Henri-Alexandre Deslandres
	Died 15 Jan 1948 (born 24 Jul 1853) French physicist and astrophysicist who in 1894 invented a spectroheliograph, an instrument that photographs the Sun in monochromatic light. (About a year earlier George E. Hale had independently invented a spectroheliograph in the United States.) From 1886 to 1891 he studied the spectra of radiation emitted by molecules. Joining the Paris Observatory in 1889, he turned his energies to astrophysics, first studying molecular spectra and then the spectra of planets, the Sun, and other stars.
Alpheus Hyatt
(source)	Died 15 Jan 1902 (born 5 Apr 1838) U.S. zoologist and paleontologist who studied invertebrate fossil records, the evolution of the cephalopods (a class of mollusks including squids and octopuses) and the development of primitive organisms. Along with E. Cope, he was the most prominent American neo-Lamarckian. Based on the analogy of ontogeny with phylogeny, Hyatt claimed that lineages, like individuals, had cycles of youth, old age, and death (extinction). Decline was programmed in. As maturity leads to old age, the best individuals die, leaving the worst to see the end. This idea became the bulwark of orthogenetic theories in the U.S. Hyatt was the founder and first editor of the American Naturalist, and first president of Woods Hole laboratory.
Jean-Baptiste-Julien d' Omalius d'Halloy
(source)	Died 15 Jan 1875 (born 16 Feb 1783) Belgian geologist who was an early proponent of evolution. From his youth he pursued geological researches. He was one of the pioneers of modern geology who determined the stratigraphy of the Carboniferous and other rocks in Belgium and the Rhine provinces, and also made detailed studies of the Tertiary deposits of the Paris Basin. As noted by Charles Darwin in the preface of Origin of the Species: "In 1846 the veteran geologist ... Halloy published ... his opinion that it is more probable that new species have been produced by descent with modification than that they have been separately created: the author first promulgated this opinion in 1831." Even in his ninety-first year Halloy made a scientific expedition alone, which exertion contributed to his death.
John Landen
	Died 15 Jan 1790 (born 23 Jan 1719) British mathematician who made important contributions on elliptic integrals.



JANUARY 15 - EVENTS

Razing of Jerusalem
(source)	In 1970, the first evidence was uncovered of the razing by fire of Jerusalem by Roman troops led by General Titus in 70 A.D. upon orders from Caesar. Israeli archaeologist Prof. Nahumn Avigad excavated ruins in the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem, a few hundred yards from the Wailing Wall. Three meters (10 feet) under the earth, he found two rooms with evidence of intense heat and ashes. One was apparently a pharmacy, with beautifully carved stone jars, stone weights, and measuring cups. The second was perhaps a woodworking shop. Coins were found which helped precisely date the event. Despite the destruction, the site was valuable because the objects were found buried there as they had been used.*«
Spacecrafts dock
(source)	In 1969, the first docking of two manned spacecraft took place between the Soviet Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5. The spacecraft formed what was termed "the world's first space station" with a crew of four aboard. The remained docked for four and a half hours - three orbits of the Earth. During that time, two cosmonauts 'space walked' from Soyuz 4 to Soyuz 5, becoming the first spacefarers to return to Earth in a different spacecraft from the one in which they went into space. The docking manoeuvre had been practised twice before - in 1967 and 1968 when Soyuz craft had docked together under fully automatic control. [mage: Soyuz 4 from an on-board video camera from Soyuz 5.]
Solar heated house
	In 1955, the first solar-heated and radiation-cooled house in the U.S. started its system. It was built in Tucson, Arizona by solar physicist Raymond W. Bliss, Jr. (6 Oct 1915 - 7 Nov 2004). The system was built at a cost of nearly $4,000 for labour and materials. It was made using a large slanted slab of steel and glass that converted sunlight into heat, which was ducted into the house. Summer cooling used the same ducts and associated fans and controls.
All glass building
	In 1936, the first, all glass, windowless building in the U.S. was completed in Toledo, Ohio as the home of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company Laboratory. It was built using 80,000 translucent water-clear hollow glass blocks, weighing about 150 tons. The two stories contained 39 rooms with an aggregate floor area of about 20,000 sq.ft. The glass blocks which were manufactured at the company's plant in Muncie, Indiana, were a structural part of the building.
Three element vacuum tube
(source)	In 1907, the three-element vacuum tube was issued a U.S. patent to its inventor, Dr Lee de Forest as a "device for amplifying feeble electric currents - such, for example, as telephone currents" (No. 841,387). The tube was evacuated, with some remaining conducting gas molecules, and it was suggested using for the heated electrode such material as platinum, tantalum or carbon. He had made a public annoucement of his device a few months earlier, on 20 Oct 1906 at a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers held in New York City. On 18 Feb 1908, he received another patent for the grid electrode tube (No. 879,532).
Dental inlays
	In 1907, gold dental inlays were first described in the U.S. by H. William Taggart, a Chicago dentist, at the New York Odontological Society. His invention of a method for casting gold inlays by the inverted pattern procedure used the ancient principle of the "disappearing core." The use of gold for the filling of dental cavities was first described a half century earlier, in Oct 1854.
Rotary dining table patent
(source)	In 1889, the idea of a "Rotary Dining Table" was issued a U.S. patent to a Black American inventor, Daniel Johnson of Kansas City, Kansas. His idea was to combine a "rotary table and adjustable chair adapted for saloons of sea-going vessels and of other descriptions, in which the occupants of the chairs may be served in rotation from one stationary base of supply without the danger and inconvenience incident to the person making the circuit of the table when the vessel is upon the seas, and also enabling the persons seated at the table to be served with dispatch." The entire table with its attached chairs was supported on one central rotating shaft - making the seated persons part of a human "Lazy Susan" type of turntable! (No. 396,089) The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity, by Patricia Carter Sluby.
Newspaper
	In 1863, woodpulp paper was first used in the U.S. for a printed newspaper by the Boston Morning Herald of Boston, Mass. It was a four-page eight column newpaper that sold for 3 cents per copy.* [Note: another source gives the date as 14 Jan 1863 and the newspaper as the Boston Weekly Journal.]
Elevator
(source)	In 1861, the safety elevator was patented as a "Hoisting Apparatus" by the American inventor, Elisha G. Otis, of Yonkers, New York. (No. 31,128). His invention was designed to arrest a fall in case of the lifting rope breaking. It used spring-loaded pawls that would release and engage in a mortised track in the walls of the shaft. In 1853, Otis had demonstrated a freight elevator equipped with a safety device to prevent falling in case a supporting cable should break. This increased public confidence and Otis established a company for manufacturing elevators. The first elevator for public use was a steam driven type installed by Otis Brothers (1857) in the five story Broadway department store of E.W Haughtwhat & Co.
Newspaper line drawing
(source)	In 1840, the Steamboat Lexington burnt in Long Island Sound with loss of over 100 lives. Three days later, there appeared in New York what was the first use of a line diagram to illustrate a current event in a U.S. newspaper. The Extra Sun was published with a finely drawn and violently realistic picture of the flaming vessel. Figures are seen lining the rails fore and aft and leaping into the water while a starboard lifeboat spills its occupants into the sea after a clumsy launching, In the foreground, frenzied women and men in stovepipe hats take a precarious refuge on the cotton bales that were the ship's cargo and cling desperately to bits of debris. This best-selling lithograph by Nathaniel Currier launched the future work of Currier and Ives illustrating events.
Top hat
	In 1797, the top hat was first worn in England by James Heatherington, a Strand haberdasher in London. An issue of the Times of that period records that when he left his shop with his extraordinary headwear, a crowd of onlookers assembled, which degenerated into a shoving match. Consequently, Heatherington was summoned to appear in court before the Lord Mayor and fined £50 for going about in a manner "calculated to frighten timid people." Within a month, he was overwhelmed with orders for the new top hats. In France, a painting by Charles Vernet (1758-1836) titled Un Incroyable de 1796 depicts a dandy of his time wearing a stovepipe hat, which might be interpreted as an earlier appearance of the top hat. * [p.159, with name revised from John Etherington based on email of 5 Feb 2005 from descendant Other internet sources state date of 5 Jan 1797.]
British Museum
(source)	In 1759, the British Museum, in Bloomsbury, London, the world's oldest public national museum, opened to the public who were admitted in small groups, by ticket obtained in advance, for a conducted tour. It was established on 7 Jun 1753 when King George II gave his royal assent to an Act of Parliament on 5 Apr 1753 to acquire the collection of Sir Hans Sloane. In his will, he had offered the nation his lifetime collection of 71,000 objects, mostly plant and animal specimens. In return, he requested £20,000 for his heirs (which today would be over £2,000,000). The present museum buildings date from the mid-19th century. Its natural history collection moved to its own museum in 1881. The British Museum set up a laboratory in 1920 for its scientific studies. [Image: Montagu House, a 17th century mansion, first home of the British Museum.]