| OCTOBER 24 - BIRTHS | |
| Pierre-Gilles de Gennes | |
(source) |
 Born 24
Oct 1932; died 18 May 2007.
French physicist who was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for "discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers." He described mathematically how, for example, magnetic dipoles, long molecules or molecule chains can under certain conditions form ordered states, and what happens when they pass from an ordered to a disordered state. Such changes of order occur when, for example, a heated magnet changes from a state in which all the small atomic magnets are lined up in parallel to a disordered state in which the magnets are randomly oriented. Recently, he has been concerned with the physical chemistry of adhesion. |
| Nathaniel Wyeth | |
(source) |
Born 24 Oct 1911; died 6 Jul 1990.
Nathaniel Convers Wyeth was an American chemist and inventor of the PET plastic beverage bottle. His patent was asssigned to Du Pont for the "Biaxially Oriented Poly(Ethylene Terephthalate) Bottle" and described these bottles as "useful in bottling liquids under pressure such as ... carbonated beverages" which had "excellent strength properties, are impact resistant, and are capable of holding liquids under pressures as high as about 100 p.s.i.g." (U.S. No. 3,733,309, issued 15 May 1973). It was the first plastic suitable to hold carbonated beverages that was safe enough to satisfy the food safety requirements. His other career contributions include development of polymer processing equipment, synthetic textile fibres, and other plastic products. Andrew Wyeth, distinguished American painter, was his brother. [Image right: PET bottles.] |
| J. Tuzo Wilson | |
1989 (source) |
Born 24
Oct 1908; died 15 Apr 1993.
Canadian geologist and geophysicist who established global patterns of faulting and the structure of the continents. Wilson did much to establish the new discipline of plate tectonics during the early 1960s and was the first to use the term 'plate' to refer to the rigid portions (oceanic, continental, or a combination of both) into which the Earth's crust is divided. In 1963 he produced some of the earliest evidence in favour of the sea-floor spreading hypothesis of Harry H. Hess when he pointed out that the further away an island lay from the mid-ocean ridge the older it proved to be. In 1965, he introduced the new concept of a transform fault where plates slide past each other without any creation or destruction of material. |
| Aleksandr Osipovich Gelfond | |
(source) |
Born 24
Oct 1906; died 7 Nov 1968.
Russian mathematician who originated basic techniques in the study of transcendental numbers (numbers that cannot be expressed as the root or solution of an algebraic equation with rational coefficients). He profoundly advanced transcendental-number theory, and the theory of interpolation and approximation of complex-variable functions. He established the transcendental character of any number of the form ab, where a is an algebraic number different from 0 or 1 and b is any irrational algebraic number, which is now known as Gelfond's theorem. This statement solved the seventh of 23 famous problems that had been posed by the German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. |
| Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker | |
(source) |
Born 24
Oct 1873; died 24 Mar 1956.
English mathematician who made pioneering contributions to the area of the special functions, which is of particular interest in mathematical physics. Whittaker is best known work is in analysis, in particular numerical analysis, but he also worked on celestial mechanics and the history of applied mathematics and physics. He wrote papers on algebraic functions and automorphic functions. His results in partial differential equations (described as most sensational by Watson) included a general solution of the Laplace equation in three dimensions in a particular form and the solution of the wave equation. On the applied side of mathematics he was interested in relativity theory and he also worked on electromagnetic theory. |
| Hippolyte Mège Mouriés | |
(source) |
Born 24
Oct 1817; died 31 May 1880.
French inventor of margerine who began his science carreer at age 16 as a chemist's assistant. By the 1840's he had improved the syphilis drug, Copahin. He recieved various patents, including tanning, effervescent tablets, paper paste and sugar extraction. By the 1850's he had turned to food research and developed a health chocolate with his calcium phosphate protein. He also developed a method that gained 14% more white bread from a given quantity of wheat, for which he was awarded two gold medals. After 1862, he concentrated his research on fats. His margerine process was based on the cold saponifiation of milk in fat emulsions (French patent No. 86489, 15 Jul 1869). Another patent he held was for canned meat (1875)*. |
| Wilhelm Eduard Weber | |
(source) |
Born 24
Oct 1804; died 23 Jun 1891.
German physicist who investigated terrestrial magnetism. For six years, from 1831, Weber worked in close collaboration with Gauss. Weber developed sensitive magnetometers, an electromagnetic telegraph (1833) and other magnetic instruments during this time. His later work (1855) on the ratio between the electrodynamic and electrostatic units of charge proved extremely important and was crucial to Maxwell in his electromagnetic theory of light. (Weber found the ratio was 3.1074 x 108 m/sec but failed to take any notice of the fact that this was close to the speed of light.) Weber's later years were devoted to work in electrodynamics and the electrical structure of matter. The magnetic unit, weber, is named after him. |
| Hendrik Willem Bakhuis-Roozeboom | |
(source) |
Born 24
Oct 1854; died 8 Feb 1907.
Dutch physical chemist who publicized Gibbs's phase rule throughout Europe. Having originally heard about it from Van der Waals, Bakhuis-Roozeboom converted Gibbs theory into practice. Whereas Gibbs had rarely experimented, Bakhuis-Roozeboom made all sorts of measurements that served to prove the validity of the phase rule, and in addition, worked out the details of its application to many individual cases. The modern chemistry of alloys benefits greatly from his amplification of the understanding of the phase rule*. In 1899, he and Albert Ladenburg demonstrated, independently of each other, when an inactive separable substance will be a racemic compound or mixture of the inactive compounds. [Image: a Roozeboom diagram] |
| Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | |
 |
Born 24
Oct 1632; died 26 Aug 1723.
Dutch microscopist who was the first to observe bacteria and protozoa. His researches on lower animals refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and his observations helped lay the foundations for the sciences of bacteriology and protozoology. |
|
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| OCTOBER 24 - DEATHS | |
| Ross Taylor | |
(source) |
 Died
24 Oct 2003 (born 10 Dec 1932)
(Robert Murray) Ross Taylor was a Scottish transplant surgeon who pioneered the technique of kidney transplantation in the U.K. and made more than 2,000 kidney transplants since 1967 when he was part of the team that completed the first kidney transplant to be undertaken in the north of England. Acknowledged worldwide as an expert in his field, he trained many of the leading practitioners. At the time of his death, five of the principal transplant centres in Britain were led by surgeons he had mentored. Taylor was active not only in the ethical and moral aspects, but also in fundraising and developing support for transplant recipients. For 15 years he was chairman of the annual Transplant Games, 3-day sports competition for transplant recipients. |
| Karl Bühler | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1963 (born 27 May 1879)
German psychiatrist and psychologist who was known chiefly for his studies of the thought process. While a professor at the University of Vienna (1922-38), his views were influenced by the thinking of Trubetzkoy and other members of the Prague School. His Sprachtheorie (1934) presented a sign theory with particular emphasis on the functions of language, and a distinction between two "fields" which form the context in which a sign is used. The "symbolic field" (Symbolfeld) is formed by the other signs that make up an utterance; the "deictic field" (Zeigfeld) is formed by the context in which it is uttered and is the origin of modern conceptions of deixis. Bühler emigrated to the USA in 1939, practising as a clinical psychologist from 1945. |
| Henry Nicholas Ridley | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1956 (born 10 Dec 1855)
English botanist who was largely responsible for establishing the rubber industry in the Malay Peninsula. At the turn of century (1888-1912), as the first Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens Ridley conducted experiments with Para rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) that convinced him of the enormous economic potential of rubber as a plantation crop. After developing a more efficient tapping method, he began a campaign to establish a rubber industry. Despite considerable initial opposition among planters, he persisted, and by 1896 Malaya's planters were convinced, and the first rubber estates were planted using his seeds. Ridley also carried out an extensive study of plants of the Malay Peninsula, especially monocotyledons. |
| A.R. Radcliffe-Brown | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1955 (born 17 Jan 1881)
A(lfred) R(eginald) Radcliffe-Brown was an English social anthropologist of the 20th century who developed a systematic framework of concepts and generalizations relating to the social structures of relatively simple societies. Radcliffe-Brown did much of his early work among traditional people. His first trip to Australia was in 1910; he joined Grant-Watson and D. Bates on an expedition to study Aboriginal tribes. He believed scientific methods should be applied to the study of a society and its common values, this is also known as "collective consciousness." He also contributed to the study of kinship. (Kinship is a relationship between persons by blood or marriage.) His functional analysis advanced social anthropology as a science. |
| Pierre-Ernest Weiss | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1940 (born 25 Mar 1865)
French physicist who investigated magnetism and determined the Weiss magneton unit of magnetic moment. Weiss's chief work was on ferromagnetism. Hypothesizing a molecular magnetic field acting on individual atomic magnetic moments, he was able to construct mathematical descriptions of ferromagnetic behaviour, including an explanation of such magnetocaloric phenomena as the Curie point. His theory succeeded also in predicting a discontinuity in the specific heat of a ferromagnetic substance at the Curie point and suggested that spontaneous magnetization could occur in such materials; the latter phenomenon was later found to occur in very small regions known as Weiss domains. His major published work was Le magnetisme ( 1926). |
| Claude-Joseph-Désiré Charnay | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1915 (born 2 May 1828)
French explorer and archaeologist, noted for his pioneering investigations of prehistoric Mexico and Central America. He travelled with his government's support to tour the entire world in order to record and investigate in a "scientific" manner the different cultures and customs. He became expert in photography soon after its invention. With Le Plongeon, Charnay was among the first to publish photographs of Mesoamerican sites. Using the wet collodion process and large plates, his photography was something of a technical feat in the circumstances. He made early plaster molds of Maya sculptures. In Mexico, much of his work was concentrated in the archeological sites of Chichén-Itza, Uxmal, Palenque and Mitla. [Image: Madagascar Women, 1863, from wet collodion-on-glass] |
| Charles Joseph Minard | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1870 (born 27 Mar 1781)
French civil engineer who made significant contributions to the graphical representations of data. His best-known work, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armee Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-1813, dramatically displays the number of Napoleon's soldiers by the width of an ever-reducing band drawn across a map from France to Moscow. At its origin, a wide band shows 442,000 soldiers left France, narrowing across several hundred miles to100,000 men reaching Moscow. With a parallel temperature graph displaying deadly frigid Russian winter temperatures along the way, the band shrinks during the retreat to a pathetic thin trickle of 10,000 survivors returning to their homeland.« |
| Joseph Jackson Lister | |
c. 1830s (source) |
Died 24 Oct 1869 (born 11 Jan 1786)
English wine merchant and amateur microscopist who carried out research into the nature of red corpuscles in mammalian blood. In 1826, he designed possibly the most important optical microscope ever made. It used an achromatic objective lens corrected for chromatic and spherical aberrations, the resulting image was at the time the clearest produced by any microscope. In 1834, for instance, he succeeded in seeing the true biconcave form of red blood corpuscles for the first time. He was a founder member of the Microscopical Society. In 1832, Lister became a fellow of the Royal Society. His son, Sir Joseph Lister (1827-1912) is remembered for pioneering the use of antiseptics, improving the survival rates from surgery. |
| Pierre Gassendi | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1655 (born 22 Jan 1592)
French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher who revived Epicureanism as a substitute for Aristotelianism, attempting in the process to reconcile Atomism's mechanistic explanation of nature with Christian belief in immortality, free will, an infinite God, and creation. Johannes Kepler had predicted a transit of Mercury would occur in 1631. Gassendi used a Galilean telescope to observed the transit, by projecting the sun's image on a screen of paper. He wrote on astronomy, his own astronomical observations and on falling bodies. |
| Tycho Brahe | |
(source) |
Died
24 Oct 1601 (born 14 Dec 1546)
Danish astronomer whose work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries. He studied the nova of 1572 ("Tycho's star") showed that it was a fixed star. His report, De nova...stella (1573), was taken by many as proof of the inadequacy of the traditional Aristotelian cosmology. In 1577, he moved to his own observatory on Hven Island (financed by King Frederick II). Before the invention of the telescope, using his nine-foot armillary sphere and his fourteen-foot mural quadrant, he charted the positions of 777 stars with an unparallelled accuracy. In 1599 he moved to Prague, with Johannes Kepler as his assistant. |
| OCTOBER 24 - EVENTS | |
| Nylon stockings | |
(source) |
In 1939, nylon stockings went on sale in the U.S. for the first time to
employees at DuPont's Wilmington, Delaware nylon factory. The modern materials
revolution began in 1938 with DuPont's commercialization of their nylon
product, which was the first man-made fibre to be made exclusively from
mineral sources. The company specifically intended
to compete with silk in the women's hosiery market. The fibre was strong,
elastic, moth-proof and did not absorb moisture. Years of research
led to enormous success. "Nylons," as they were soon called, eventually
replaced silk stockings. Covering only about two-thirds of a woman's leg,
from the feet to mid-thigh, stockings were fastened with garters and a
belt. Nationwide sales began on 15 May 1940. |
| Tuberculosis | |
(source) |
In 1882, (Heinrich Hermann) Robert Koch discovered the tuberculosis germ.
He was a German physician,
one of the founders of the science of bacteriology, who discovered
the tubercle bacillus (1882) and the cholera bacillus (1883). He won the
1905 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his investigations and
discoveries in relation to tuberculosis. In addition Koch made important
investigations concerning plague in humans, malaria, tropical dysentery,
and the Egyptian eye disease (trachoma), and typhus recurrens in
tropical Africa. He also carried out work of exceptional importance concerning
destructive tropical cattle diseases, such as rinderpest, Surra disease,
Texas fever, coast fever in cattle and the trypanosome disease carried
by the tsetse fly. |
| Alarm clock | |
(source) |
In 1876, a U.S. patent was issued for the metal case of a one-day back-winding
alarm clock to the Seth E. Thomas of New York City, NY (No. 183,725),
being the first American patent for an alarm clock of this familiar type.
It was manufactured from that that year by the Seth
Thomas Clock Company of Thomaston, Connecticut. Seth was born in 1816
and died in 1888 in Conneticut. His father Seth Thomas was also a clock
maker in Plymouth Hollow, Connecticut, which was renamed Thomaston in his
honor in about 1860. (The first alarm clock made in the U.S. appeared in
Concord, NH, in 1787. That clock was made by Levi Hutchins with a pine
case, 29-in high and 14-in wide, but the alarm was for a preset time that
could not be altered.) |
| Transcontinental telegraph | |
(source) |
In 1861, the first transcontinental
telegraph message was sent by Justice Stephen J. Field of California
to President Abraham Lincoln, on the same day the first transcontinental
telegraph
system was completed. The section, built during 1861 by the Western Union
Telegraph Co. and its associates, connected St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento,
California. The Civil War had made obtaining labor and supplies difficult.
Nature's obstacles had included the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada,
and the Great Plains where timber for telephone poles was in short supply.
Now it had become possible to transmit messages so rapidly from coast to
coast, the Pony
Express, previously the fastest communication between the East and
the West, closed two days later. |
| Uranus moons | |
(source) |
In 1851, William Lassell discovered Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus.
Like most of the other Uranian moons Ariel
is named after a Shakespearean character (Ariel is the captive spirit in
The
Tempest, also featured in Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock).
Ariel has an approx. diameter of 1160-km, an orbital period of 2.52 days,
and orbital radius of 191,240-km from Uranus. The name Umbriel
comes from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Umbriel has a
diameter of 1170-km, an orbital period of about 4 days and orbit radius
of 266,000-km. Lassell, a British astronomer,
had previously also discovered Neptune's largest satellite, Triton and
(with Bond) discovered Saturn's moon Hyperion. He was a successful brewer
before turning to astronomy. [Image:
The brightest object in this image is Uranus. The three star-like objects
very near Uranus are three of its moons. From L to R, they are Titania,
Umbriel and Ariel.] |
| Safety match | |
 |
In 1836, Alonzo Dwight Phillips of Springfield, Massachusetts, received
the first U.S. patent for the phosphorous friction safety match (No. 68).
The first friction matches, using a mixture of chemicals for their heads,
were made and sold in England in 1827. Phillips' match, which could
be struck on any rough surface, was the first genuine friction match made
in America. Known as "loco focos," and later as "lucifers," these matches
were made entirely by hand from a mixture of chalk, phosphorus, glue and
brimstone (sulphur). The introduction of gas for lighting and cooking,
and the spread of cigar smoking, made the lucifer almost a necessity. By
the time of the Civil War, about a million matches a day were being manufactured.  |
