| OCTOBER 11 - BIRTHS | |
| Robert Gale | |
(source) |
 Born 11
Oct 1945
Physician, co-founder of International Bone Marrow Registry, and a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation. Gale has received much attention for the assistance he has given foreign governments in treating radiation victims - to the Soviet Union (1986) after the Chernobyl disaster and to Brazil (1987) following an accident in Goiania. As a specialist in bone marrow transplants, he volunteeredto treat Chernobyl victims and was invited by Mikhail Gorbachev to travel with a group to Moscow immediately after the April 1986 accident. He operated with bone marrow transplants on 13 Chernobyl victims. However, many of the highly exposed Chernobyl survivors have since died from latent radiation effects. |
| Friedrich Bergius | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1884; died 30 Mar 1949.
German chemist, who invented converting coal dust and hydrogen directly into gasoline and lubricating oils without isolating intermediate products, (Stuttgart, 25 June 1921). Bergius succeeded, during distillation of coal, in forcing hydrogen under high pressure to combine chemically with the coal, transforming more carbon from the coal into oils than is possible with conventional distillation. To solve heat distribution and temperature regulation problems, Bergius invented treating a mixture of pulverized coal in oil with the gas under high pressure. For his work in developing the chemical high pressure hydrogenation method necessary for this process he shared the 1931 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Carl Bosch of Germany. |
| Lewis Fry Richardson | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1881; died 30 Sept 1953.
British physicist and psychologist who first applied mathematics in weather prediction. In his life, he held various posts: at the National Physical Laboratory, the Meteorological Office, and several university posts in physics or technology. Also, he was a chemist with National Peat Industries and in charge of the physical and chemical laboratory of the Sunbeam Lamp Co. Richardson applied the mathematical method of finite differences to predicting the weather (1922). He wrote several books applying mathematics to the causes of war. He contributed to calculus and the theory of diffusion for eddy-diffusion in the atmosphere. The Richardson number, a quantity involving gradients of temperature and wind velocity, is named after him. |
| Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1871; died 31 Mar 1945.
American archaeologist and social activist who gained renown for her discoveries of ancient remains in Crete. She went to Crete in 1900, and with the encouragement of Arthur Evans, began to excavate a Minoan site at Kavousi where she discovered some Iron Age Tombs. From 1901-05 she led a large team that excavated the early Bronze Age Minoan town of Gournia, becoming the first woman to head a major archaeological dig. As a community of humble artisans, Gournia was of particular interest to archaeologists, complementing as it did the more elaborate palaces being unearthed at Knossos and elsewhere. In 1908 she published her monumental work on Gournia. During WW I she went to Corfu to help nurse the Serbians (1916).  Born
to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes, by Mary Allsebrook |
| Charles Atwood Kofoid | |
Early 1900's (source) |
Born 11
Oct 1865; died 30 May 1947.
American zoologist whose classification of many new species of marine protozoans helped establish systematic marine biology. Named director of the University of Illinois Biological Experiment Station in Havana, IL. (1895-1903), Kofoid investigated plankton in the river and backwater lakes. He joined the newly founded Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1903). Kofoid was a member of their scientific staff on the US Fish Commission Steamer Albatross during the Albatross Expedition (l904-5) off the coast of San Diego, CA. Two summers (1908,9), he toured the marine biological stations of Europe, buying instruments and collecting information on buildings and aquaria to help plan the San Diego Marine Biological Station. |
| James Gayley | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1855; died 25 Feb 1920.
American metallurgist who invented a device to ensure uniform humidity in the air stream going into blast furnaces. With prior experience at several iron works, Gayley was hired by the Edgar Thomson Steel Works as Superintendent of the Blast Furnaces (1885). In this capacity was an economist, and made a record reduction in the coke consumption. He invented the bronze cooling plate for blast furnace walls, the auxiliary casting stand for Bessemer steel plants, and was the first to use the compound condensing blowing engine with the Blast Furnace. He also invented the dry-air blast, for which the Franklin Institute awarded him the Elliott Cresson medal. Gayley rose to first vice-president of the U.S.Steel Corp and acquired a large fortune. |
| Henry John Heinz | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1844; died 14 May 1919.
Businessperson who founded H.J. Heinz Co.and invented the "57 varieties" slogan was a born salesman. His entrepreneur and business genius had roots in post-Civil War Pittsburgh, where iron, steel and glass factories were forging industrial America. By age 12 he was peddling produce from the family garden. At 25, in 1869, he and a friend launched Heinz & Noble. Its first product: Henry's mother's grated horseradish, bottled in clear glass to reveal its purity. Heinz & Noble thrived until an overabundance of crops in 1875 brought bankruptcy. But Henry plunged back in, eventually building a model factory complex along the Allegheny River. By 1896, at only 52, the pickle king had become a millionaire and celebrity. |
| Joseph Gillott | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1799; died 1877
A pioneer of the steel pen, born in Sheffield. An English engineer Bryan Donkin patented a steel pen point in 1803 but did not commercially exploit his patent. In 1830, steel makers (William Joseph Gillott, William Mitchell, James Stephen Perry) mainly in Birmingham, England developed the machine production technique for cheap long wearing steel pen nibs. Tempered steel sheet was stamped to produce the basic nib then shaped, slit and the tip formed. More than most other metals, stainless steel has the elasticity needed to give the variety of penmanship styles available from the quill pen. By 1850 quill pen usage was fading and the quality of the steel nibs had been improved by tipping them with hard alloys of iridium, rhodium and osmium. |
| Heinrich Olbers | |
(source) |
Born 11
Oct 1758; died 2 Mar 1840.
(Heinrich) Wilhelm (Matthäus) Olbers was a German astronomer and physician, born in Arbergen, Germany. While practising medicine at Bremen, he calculated the orbit of the comet of 1779, discovered the minor planets (asteroids) Pallas (1802) and Vesta (1807), and discovered five comets (all but one already observed at Paris). He also invented a method for calculating the velocity of falling stars. He is also known for Olber's paradox which asks "why is the night sky dark if there are so many bright stars all around to light it?" Image: Monument in Bremen, Germany. |
| Fausto D'Elhuyar | |
(source) |
Born 11 Oct 1755; died 6 Jan 1833.
Spanish chemist and mineralogist who assisted his older brother Juan José in experiments to separate tungsten metal from its wolframite ore (1783). Two years earlier, Swedish chemist Carl Scheele discovered tungstic acid, though did not isolate the elemental form, from a mineral known since about 1758 as tung sten (Swedish, heavy stone; which is now known as scheelite). The Elhuyar brothers, working at the Seminary of Bergara, succeeded in extracting the metal by reducing tungstic acid with charcoal. For the first time, Basque scientists entered the history of science. Each became a directorof a school of mines, but in different countries. Although Juan José discovered tungsten metal, Fausto became better known.« [Image right: wolframite] |
|
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| OCTOBER 11 - DEATHS | |
| Franklyn Perring | |
c. 1950's |
 Died
11 Oct 2003 (born 1 Aug 1927)
English botanist and conservationist, who was was one of the most influential botanists of his generation. He made a significant contribution to conservation as the co-author (with Max Walters) of the Atlas of the British Flora (1962), one of the most important British natural history publications of the 20th century. This compilation precisely was initiated in 1954 by the Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) to record the incidence of all British flowering plants. Perring was a senior member of the team of researchers. Using a map of the country in 10 km grid squares, each square was visited, and the plants there recorded. Later, he encouraged zoologists to make similar atlases of distribution for mammals, butterflies, and other life forms. |
| Vito Volterra | |
(source) |
Died
11 Oct 1940 (born 3 May 1860)
Italian mathematician who made important contributions to calculus, and mathematical theories in astronomy, elasticity and biometrics. His mathematical talent appeared as a young boy. In 1905, he began to develop the theory of dislocations in crystals that led to improved understanding of the behaviour of ductile materials. During WWI he established the Italian Office of War Inventions and designed weapons for use by airships, for which he proposed the use of helium instead of flammable hydrogen. He is remembered for achievements in function theory and differential equations. In biology, in 1925, he formulated a pair of differential equations relating populations of prey and predators (also independently proposed by Alfred J. Lotka in 1925).« |
| Jean Henri Fabre | |
(source) |
Died
11 Oct 1915 (born 22 Dec 1823)
French entomologist and author who popularized insect natural history. He wrote ten volumes of Souvenirs entomologiques (1879-1907) in which he recorded his perceptive field observations of insect behaviour. Although his career began as a professor of physics, and in 1866 he isolated alizarin (the colouring agent in madder), his life work became the study of insects, about which he wrote in elegant prose. From his study of parasitic wasps he deduced that much of the wasp's behaviour is inherited and not learned. Victor Hugo dubbed him "the insects’ Homer" and Edmond Rostand named him the "Virgil of insects." Darwin cited him as "an incomparable observer."«  Fabre's
Book of Insects, by Jean-Henri Fabre, et al. |
| James Prescott Joule | |
(source) |
Died
11 Oct 1889 (born 24 Dec 1818)
English physicist, inventor, Joule's Law; who established that the various forms of energy - mechanical, electrical, and heat - are basically the same and can be changed, one into another. Thus he formed the basis of the law of conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics. Died at Sale, Cheshire. |
| Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein | |
(source) |
Died
11 Oct 1852 (born 16 Apr 1823)
German mathematician whose work covered a range of topics including the theory of elliptic functions, and quadratic and cubic forms, which led to cyclotomy, the reciprocity theorem for cubic residues, and also theorems for quadratic and biquadratic residues from partition of prime numbers.« |
| Guillaume Amontons | |
(source) |
Died
11 Oct 1705 (born 31 Aug 1663)
French physicist, who developed the air thermometer - which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) with temperature - and used it (1702) to measure change in temperature in terms of a proportional change in pressure. This observation led to the concept of absolute zero in the19th century. Deaf since childhood, Amontons worked on inventions for the deaf, such as the first telegraph, which relied on a telescope, light, and several stations to transmit information over large distances. Amontons' laws of friction, relied upon by engineers for 300 years, state that the frictional force on a body sliding over a surface is proportional to the load that presses them together and is also independent of the areas of the surfaces. |
| OCTOBER 11 - EVENTS | |
| Ozone layer | |
(source) |
In 1995, Americans Mario Molina
and Sherwood Rowland, and Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize
in chemistry for their work warning that CFCs are eating away Earth's ozone
layer. In 1970, Dr. Crutzen showed that nitrogen oxides are important in
the natural balance of ozone in the upper atmosphere. Thus research rapidly
escalated into global biogeochemical cycles. In 1974, Drs. Molina and Rowland
established that there was a threat to the ozone layer from man-made chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs), such as gases then used in spray cans. More than a decade before
the Antarctic ozone hole was discovered, their research stirred the international
response to control the emissions of CFCs to protect the ozone layer. |
| Magellan ends mission | |
|
In 1994, the space probe Magellan
ended its mission to explore Venus when flight controllers lowered its
orbit into Venus' dense atmosphere and it plunged toward the surface. Radio
contact was lost the next day. Although much of Magellan was vaporized,
some sections are thought to have hit the planet's surface intact. Launched
4 May 1989 in the cargo bay with the STS-30 Space Shuttle Atlantis
mission, Magellan arrived at its planned polar orbit around Venus
on 10 Aug 1990. As it circled once
every 3-hr 15-min, the planet rotated slowly beneath it, and Magellan
had collected radar images of the surface in strips about 17-28 km (10-17
mi) wide and radioed back the information on the large shield volcanoes,
vast lava plains and sparse craters.« |
|
| Telephone | |
 |
In 1983, the last hand-cranked (magneto) telephones in the United States
went out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, were
switched to direct-dial service. Prior to that time a resident's number
could be as short as 33. Those living
close enough to the telephone office might get to answer the phone, even
if they were outside because the operator could just yell out the window! |
| Jodrell Bank | |
(source) |
In 1957, the Jodrell Bank radio telescope,
the world's largest radio telescope, designed
by Sir Bernard Lovell, began operating.
Though the telescope is popularly
known
for tracking and communicating with man-made satellites, its prime function
is the study of the universe by means of radio waves emitted by distatant
stars. The radiation received from meteors, the moon, the Andromeda Galaxy,
and the Milky Way offers new information daily about the origins of life
on this planet and the possibilities of life on other worlds. The building
of the telescope was fraught with mishaps and frustrations-financial, political,
and otherwise; yet, through his perseverance, Sir Bernard Lovell made its
creation a reality. |
| Glass wool | |
(source) |
In 1938, R. Games Slayter (died 15 Oct 1964) and John H. Thomas patent
glass
wool and the machinery to make it. Games Slayter, the driving force
behind Owens Corning technology and innovation, sought to make a finer
glass fiber material. In 1932, Dale Kleist, a young researcher under Jack
Thomas (Slayter's research assistant), working on an unrelated experiment
accidentally caused a jet of compressed air to strike a stream of molten
glass, resulting in fine glass fibers. By Fall 1932, Kleist refined the
process by using steam, to make glass fiber material thin enough for commercial
fiber glass insulation. From March 1933, Games Slayter directed Jack Thomas
in experiments using glass wool, instead of natural or other synthetic
fibers, on textile machinery. |
| Edison patent | |
|
In 1892, Thomas A. Edison was issued a patent
for an "Electrical Depositing-Meter" (U.S. No. 484,183). |
|
| Adding machine | |
(source) |
In 1887, a patent for the adding machine was granted to Dorr Eugene Felt
of Chicago, Illinois. His Comptometer was the first practical key-driven
calculator with sufficient speed, reliablility and economic benefit. He
called his original prototype
the "Macaroni box", a rough model that Felt
created over the year-end holidays in 1884-85. The casing was a grocery
macaroni box, assembled with a jackknife using meat skewers as keys, staples
as key guides and elastic bands for springs. Door improved his design,
producing his earliest commercial wooden-box Comptometer from 1887
thru 1903, leading to the first steel case Model A (1904 that would be
standard for the remainder for all "shoebox" models. Electric motor drive
was introduced in the 1920's. |
| Camera roll film | |
(source) |
In 1881, roll film for cameras
was patented by David H. Houston, who was a Scottish immigrant that travelled
to homestead in Dakota (1879) on a 400-acre farm, 30 miles NE of Fargo.
His many patents ranged from a disc plow to a portable camera. George Eastman
bought 21 patents on cameras from him, including the invention that made
Houston famous - a portable camera designed in 1879, for which Houston
received $5000 plus monthly royalties for life. This camera suited the
everyday person, rather than a professional photographer's big studio camera
on wheels. First sold by Eastman in 1881 for $25, the Kodak camera came
loaded with a 100-exposure film that Houston would process and reload the
camera for $10. Houston died a rich man in 1906. |
| Steam ferryboat | |
(source) |
In 1811, the first steam-powered ferryboat, the Juliana, began operation
by between New York City and Hoboken, NJ. Its inventor,
John Stevens, designed improvements in steamboats, obtained one of the
first U.S. patents (1791) and experimented on the Passaic River, (1798
- 1800), with the steamboat, Polacca, but unsuccessfully due to
excessive vibrations and leaks. By 1803, Stevens had patented an improved
multitubular boiler and outfitted the Little Juliana which sailed
successfully in New York harbor (1804) and thus was one of the earliest
twin screw sailboats. After building other ships, in 1811, he bought a
commercial ferry license in NY state and operated a horse powered ferry
while building the first steam ferry, Juliana. |
