| OCTOBER 2 - BIRTHS | |
| Christian René de Duve | |
(source) |
 Born 2
Oct 1917
Belgian cytologist and biochemist who discovered lysosomes (the digestive organelles of the cell) and peroxisomes (organelles that are the site of metabolic processes involving hydrogen peroxide). Lysosomes have now been shown, by de Duve and others, to be engaged in a series of cellular activities during which biological material must be degraded. The lysosomes are used in defense mechanisms, against bacteria, during resorption and secretion. They can also be used for a controlled degradation of the cell in which they are contained, e.g. to remove worn out components. For this work he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George Palade. |
| Lord Alexander R Todd | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1907; died 10 Jan 1977.
Baron Alexander R(obertus) Todd (of Trumpington) was a British biochemist whose research on the structure and synthesis of nucleotides, nucleosides, and nucleotide coenzymes gained him the 1957 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nucleotides - found in the chromosomes of the cell-kemels, also in cell plasma - are connected with the units of heredity. In combination with proteins they constitute the virus molecules and many coenzymes are nucleotides of low molecular weight but with a special structure. It was known that they are built up of three quite different "building stones": phosphoric acid, a sugar, and a heterocyclic base containing nitrogen, assembled in one macromolecule. Todd researched how they are connected to each other. |
| Willy Ley | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1906; died 24 Jun 1969.
German-American engineer who was a founder of the German Rocket Society. The society was the first group of men (with the sole exception of Robert Goddard) to experiment with rockets. Ley introduced Wernher von Braun to the society. Ley was consultant for the science fiction film Frau im Mond in which the countdown from ten to zero was introduced. Fiercely anti-Nazi, unlike Von Braun, in 1934, he emigrated to the U.S. rather than pursuing military applications of rocketry. In the U.S., he became a popularizer of space exploration and travel, writing many popular books. |
| Charles Stark Draper | |
 |
Born 2
Oct 1901; died 25 Jul 1987.
American aeronautical engineer, educator, and science administrator who earned degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT then, in 1939, became head of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a centre for the design of navigational and guidance systems for ships, airplanes, and missiles from World War II through the Cold War. He developed gyroscope systems that stabilized and balanced gunsights and bombsights and which were later expanded to an inertial guidance system for launching long-range missiles at supersonic jet targets. He was "the father of inertial navigation." The Project Apollo contract for guiding man and spacecraft to the moon was also placed with the Instrumentation Lab. |
| Robert Julius Trumpler | |
(source) |
Born 2 Oct 1886; died 10 Sep 1956.
Swiss-born U.S. astronomer who moved to the US in 1915 and worked at the Lick Observatory. In 1922, by observing a solar eclipse, he was able to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity. He made extensive studies of galactic star clusters, and demonstrated (1930) the presence throughout the galactic plane of a tenuous haze of interstellar material that absorbs light generally that dims and reddens the light from of distant clusters. The presence of this obscuring haze revealed how the size of spiral galaxies had been over-estimated. Whereas Harlow Shapley, in 1918, determined the distance to the centre of the Milky Way to be 50,000 light-years away, Trumpler's work reduced this to 30,000 light-years. [Image, right (source)] |
| Karl Terzaghi | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1883
Karl (Anton von) Terzaghi was a civil engineer who founded the branch of civil engineering science known as soil mechanics, a term he coined for the study of the properties of soil under stresses and under the action of flowing water. Soil dynamics, which deals with soil properties and behaviour under changing stress conditions. such as may occur due to earthquakes, bomb blasts, fast-moving traffic, wind or wave action. The effect vibrations have on soils is of vital importance to engineers studying the effects of earthquakes. |
| Conrad Schlumberger | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1878; died 1936.
German geophysicist and petroleum engineer noted for the invention, in 1927, of a method of continuous electric logging of boreholes. Beginning in 1912, Conrad Schlumberger conceived the idea for electrical measurements to map subsurface rock bodies. He was first joined by his brother, Marcel, in 1919 for work together in Normandy, France, opening their first office in 1921. For three years from 1923, Schlumberger teams conducted geophysical surveys in Romania, Serbia, Canada, South Africa, Belgian Congo and the U.S. Electrical prospecting was used for the first time to map a subsurface oil-bearing structure - a salt dome in Romania. In 1927, the first electrical resistivity log was recorded in a well in Pechelbronn, France. |
| Sir Berkeley Moynihan | |
| Born 2
Oct 1865; died 1936.
Berkeley George Andrew Moynihan, 1st Baron Moynihan (of Leeds), was a British surgeon and teacher of medicine who was a noted authority on abdominal surgery. About research, he wrote in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics (1920), "A discovery is rarely, if ever, a sudden achievement, nor is it the work of one man; a long series of observations, each in turn received in doubt and discussed in hostility, are familiarized by time, and lead at last to the gradual disclosure of truth." Another quote: "The stomach is so sensitive an organ that it cannot refrain from weeping when its neighbours are in trouble, and its voice is sometimes so loud as to drown that of the real sufferer." |
|
| Baron Gerard de Geer | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1858; died 1943.
Gerhard (Jakob), Friherre De Geer (Baron) was a Swedish geologist, originator of the varve-counting method used in geochronology. A varve is a seasonal coarse-fine layer of clay deposited in still water.The layers were produced by the annual melt-water sequence with rapid melting and discharge in summer depositing coarse sediments, versus slow settling of fine-grained material during the winter months. The method he devised of counting of layers in glaciers was good for dating back to 18,000 years. Although only accurate to that time, it was useful for studies of the Ice Age. Image: In 1920 De Geer visited the United States to study the varves of New England; he is shown sampling varves at the Essex locality. |
| Sir Patrick Geddes | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1854; died 17 Apr 1932
Scottish biologist and sociologist who was one of the modern pioneers of the concept of town and regional planning. He studied under Darwin's champion, Thomas Henry Huxley. As a professor of botany, Geddes emphasized the development of sexual reproduction as a major step in organic evolution and, with the naturalist John Arthur Thomson, published The Evolution of Sex (1889). Geddes turned his attention to sociology after an attack of blindness in Mexico hampered his biological experimentation. His researches in India, Palestine, Mexico, and Scotland led to his conviction that the development of human communities was primarily biological in nature, consisting of interactions among people, their environment, and their activities. |
| Sir William Ramsay | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1852; died 23 Jul 1916
Scottish chemist who discovered the "inert gases", neon, krypton and xenon, and co-discovered argon, radon, calcium and barium. Nobel laureate (1904) "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system." Died in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. |
| Eliza Maria Mosher | |
(EB) |
Born 2
Oct 1846; died 16 Oct 1928.
American physician and educator whose wide-ranging medical career included an educational focus on physical fitness and health maintenance. Upon receiving her M.D. degree (1875), she began private practice in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1877 she was made resident physician at the Massachusetts State Reformatory Prison for Women at Sherborn, Mass. Subsequently, she became superintendent of the institution, though an injury to her knee forced her to return to private practice and university positions. In private research she investigated medical aspects of posture. She designed the seats in several types of rapid-transit streetcars, and invented an orthopedically sound kindergarten chair and was a founder of the American Posture League. |
| Sir Edward Burnett Tylor | |
(source) |
Born 2
Oct 1832
English anthropologist regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology. After travelling in the U.S. (1855-56) he proceeded to Cuba (1856), where he met Henry Christy the ethnologist. Together they visited Mexico, where Christy's influence greatly stimulated Tylor's interest in anthropology. Seeing the rich prehistoric remains in Mexico led Tylor to make a systematic study of the science. In his most important work, Primitive Culture (1871), being influenced by Darwin's theory of biological evolution, he developed the theory of an evolutionary, progressive relationship between primitive and modern cultures. By 1883, he was Keeper of the University Museum at Oxford and Professor of Anthropology there 1896-1909. He was knighted in 1912.  Primitive
culture: Researches ..., by Edward Burnett Tylor |
| Julius von Sachs | |
| Born 2
Oct 1832; died 29 May 1897.
(Ferdinand Gustav) Julius von Sachs was a German botanist, born in Breslau, whose work on nutrition, tropism (response to environmental stimuli), and transpiration of water greatly advanced the knowledge of plant physiology during the second half of the 19th century. He discovered chlorophyll, and its location in plant cells. |
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| OCTOBER 2 - DEATHS | |
| Richard E(dwin) Shope | |
(source) |
 Died
2 Oct 1966 (born 25 Dec 1901)
American animal pathologist and virologist who was first to isolate an influenza virus, first to vaccinate animals against influenza, and first to identify (1928) the causative agent as a virus in the 1918-19 Spanish influenza pandemic. The laboratory and field studies he made of viruses in animals provided knowledge in protecting both animals and humans against viruses. He researched cancerous tumors in animals. In studying the role of mosquitoes as carriers of sleeping sickness disease, he caught the potentially fatal disease himself from them. Fortunately, he recovered completely (one of the few who did so without permanent brain damage). His co-worker, Dr. Delphine Clark, recovered "live virus" from his blood, the first to be taken from a live human.« |
| Marie Stopes | |
(source) |
Died
2 Oct 1958 (born 15 Oct 1880)
Scottish scientist, educator and birth control advocate was born in Edinburgh. She was awarded a doctorate at Munich, Germany, for her work on fossilised plants (1902). As a young girl she said she would spend the first 20 years of her life in science, the second 20 in social projects, and the final 20 years writing poetry - and she did just that. She made her name through her writing and campaigning on family planning services. Her work resulted in UK's first family planning clinic in Holloway, north London, without publicity on 17 March 1921, offering a free service to married women. Its aim was two-fold, first to reach the poor and give them access to birth control, secondly to gather scientific data about contraception. Died near Dorking, Surrey. |
| Freelan O. Stanley | |
(source) |
Died 2 Oct 1940 (born 1 Jun 1849)
American inventor, who with his twin brother Francis, were the most famous manufacturers of steam-driven automobiles. Francis previously had invented a photographic dry-plate process (1883), and as the Stanley Dry Plate Company the brothers had engaged in the manufacturing of the plates. They sold the company to Eastman Kodak in 1905, as their interest had turned to steam-powered automobiles. They began working on steam powered cars in 1897, and built thousands of them them until the 1920's as the Stanley Motor Company. At racing events, they often competed successfully against gasoline powered cars (1902-09). They set a world record in 1906 for fastest mile in 28.2 seconds (127 mph or 205 kph). [Image right: 1910 Stanley Model 71] The
Stanley Steamer: America's Legendary Steam Car,
by
Kit Foster. |
| Philipp Forchheimer | |
| Died
2 Oct 1933 (born 7 Aug 1852)
Austrian hydraulic engineer who made significant studies of groundwater hydrology. Early in his academic career, he worked on problems of soil mechanics. Later, he turned to hydraulic problems, establishing the scientific basis of the discipline by applying standard techniques of mathematical physics - in particular Laplace's equation - to problems of groundwater movement. Laplace's equation had already been well developed for heat flow and fluid flow. Forchheimer extended the preexisting mathematical theory to calculations of groundwater flow. He was also the first to both mathematically and experimentally examine the features of dambreak waves in a rectangular channel (with his PhD student Armin Schoklitsch).« |
|
| Svante Arrhenius | |
(source) |
Died
2 Oct 1927 (born 19 Feb 1859)
Svante (August) Arrhenius was a Swedish physical chemist who was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered to the advancement of chemistry by his electrolytic theory of dissociation." Electrolytes are chemical compounds which will conduct an electric current when fused or dissolved in certain solvents, usually water. He discovered that even when there is no current flowing through the solution, such compounds separate into particles carrying an electrical charge, called ions. He also investigated the viscosity of solutions and how reaction speed changes with temperature. After 1900, his interests diversified into cosmic physics, meterology and the theory of immunity.« Arrhenius:
From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect, by Elisabeth
Crawford. |
| Eugen Langen | |
(source) |
Died
2 Oct 1895 (born 9 Oct 1833)
German engineer who pioneered in building internal-combustion engines. In 1866 Eugen Langen, who owned a a sugar refining company, financed Nikolaus August Otto (1832-91), developed a more efficient gas engine. The Otto & Langen company produced stationary gas engines (usually powered by coal gas). Otto went on to build, in 1876, the prototype of the so-called Otto-cycle engines used in most modern automobiles, fueled primarily with gasoline, alcohol or benzene. Langen also devised the Wuppertaler suspension railway which opened in 1901. His Schwebebahn (swinging railway) has operated successfully along the Wupper river for almost 100 years. It has survived two world wars and continues to operate profitably and safely today. |
| François Arago | |
(source) |
Died
2 Oct 1853 (born 26 Feb 1786)
Dominique François Jean Arago was a French physicist and astronomer who discovered the chromosphere of the sun (the lower atmosphere, primarily composed of hydrogen gas), and for his accurate estimates of the diameters of the planets. Arago found that a rotating copper disk deflects a magnetic needle held above it showing the production of magnetism by rotation of a nonmagnetic conductor. He devised an experiment that proved the wave theory of light, showed that light waves move more slowly through a dense medium than through air and contributed to the discovery of the laws of light polarization. Arago entered politics in 1848 as Minister of War and Marine and was responsible for abolishing slavery in the French colonies. |
| Benjamin Waterhouse | |
Age 79 (source) |
Died
2 Oct 1846 (born 4 Mar 1754)
American physician and scientist who pioneered smallpox vaccination and fostered an aggressive campaign to inoculate Americans against smallpox. He studied the researches of English physician Edward Jenner and followed with his own experiments. On 8 Jul 1800, Waterhouse introduced Jenner's method of vaccination into America by inoculating his five-year-old son, Daniel Oliver, and a household servant with vaccine obtained from England. Vaccinations of three more Waterhouse children and another servant soon followed. Whereas Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and others had previously used inoculation in the U.S., Waterhouse was the American physician who established it as a general practice.« The
Life and scientific and medical career of Benjamin Waterhouse, (Three
centuries of science in America) |
| OCTOBER 2 - EVENTS | |
| Atomic clock | |
In 1956, the Atomicron, the first atomic clock in the U.S., was unveiled
at the Overseas Press Club in New York City. The basis of the timing was
the constant frequency of the oscillations of the caesium atom - 9,192,631,830
MHz. It was priced at $50,000. The Atomicron measured 84" high, 22" wide
and 18" deep.*« |
|
| X-ray movie | |
In 1937, films of moving X-ray images on a fluorescopic screen showing
the movement of organs of the human body were shown at the American Roentgen
Ray Society convention. in New York
City. The images were filmed
with a home 16-mm movie camera at 16 frames per second (reduced to 12 or
8 fps for thicker bodies). Two seconds exposure could capture two or three
beats of the heart, the act of breathing, movements of the diaphragm or
motion of joints. Film clip loops could be projected to show repeating
motion. The films were made by Drs William H. Stewart, William J. Hoffman
and Francis H. Ghiselin from Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital. They reported
their technique at the previous year's convention.«  |
|
| Large steam turbine generator | |
|
In 1903, the first U.S. steam-turbine of large capacity for commercial
service was placed in service at the Fiske Street station of the Commonwealth
Edison Co., Chicago, Illinois. It was built by General Electric Co in Schenectady,
N.Y., and had been factory-tested on 4 Mar 1903. Compared to the reciprocating
engine it replaced, the turbine needed only one-third of its floor space,
had only one-eight of its weight, and cost only one-third as much. The
turbine developed 6,500 h.p. operating with steam at a pressure of 175
lbs/sq.in. and a temperature of 375 deg. F.*« |
|
| Tin can key opener patented | |
|
In 1866, the first U.S. patent for a tin can with a key opener was issued
to J. Osterhoudt of New York City (No. 58,554). Described as an "improved
method of opening tin cans," the can featured a projecting lip and key.*« |
|
| Darwin's voyage ends | |
 |
In 1836, Charles Darwin returned
from his voyage on the HMS Beagle to the Pacific. It would be 23
years before he published Origin of Species. |
| First camel in America | |
|
In 1721, the first record of the importation of an African camel into America
was an advertisement in the Boston Gazzette, announcing that the
camel was being exhibited in Boston, Mass., and that it stood 7 feet high
and 12 feet long. The first commercial importation of a number of camels
into the U.S. was made in 1856 to be used for military purposes, following
an appropriation of $30,000 made by Congress on 3 Mar 1855 (10 Stat. L.
639).*« |
|
| First refracting telescope | |
|
In 1608, Johannes Lippershey (c.1570-c.1619) demonstrated a new invention,
the first optical (refracting) telescope - prototype of the modern telescopes
- to the Netherlands States General. Lippershey was a lens grinder who
furnished spectables. An apprentice discovered that - by separating both
a long-focus lens and a short-focus lens in front of the eye - distant
objects appeared closer. Lippershey mounted lenses in tubes, applied for
a patent in 1608, and also offered them for sale to the Dutch government,
which appreciated their military value. When Galileo heard of the device,
he made a similar arrangement and used it to study the heavens. It was
named a "telescope" by a guest at
an outdoor banquet 14 Apr 1611 honouring Galileo, where he demonstrated
it to the assembly.« |
|
