| OCTOBER 27 - BIRTHS | |
| Alain Bombard | |
(source) |
 Born 27
Oct 1924; died 19 Jul 2005.
French biologist and physician who made a single-handed voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in a small boat to test his theory that a shipwrecked person could survive without provisions. He was age 27 when he left the Canary Islands on 19 Oct 1952 with almost no provisions and only a sextant for navigation. He ate raw fish he speared with a home-made harpoon, netted surface plankton. and drank seawater, limited to occasional sips. His Zodiac inflatable boat, l'Hérétique, was just 4.5 m (15-ft) long and fitted with a sail. Bombard reached Barbados 65 days later on 23 Dec 1952, having lost about 25-kg (55-lb) in weight.« [Image right: l'Hérétique boat.]  The
Voyage of the Heretique, by Alain Bombard. |
| Roscoe Pound | |
(EB) |
Born 27
Oct 1870; died 1 Jul 1964.
American jurist and chief advocate of "sociological jurisprudence" who was first active as a botanist and educator. He followed his B.A. in botany with studies in law. Meanwhile, he served as director of the Nebraska state botanical survey (1892-1903), during which time he discovered a rare fungus, subsequently named Roscopoundia. Having been admitted to the Nebraska bar, Pound turned to the practice of law, and eventually became a leader in the reform of court administration in the United States. |
| Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin | |
(source) |
Born 27 Oct 1855; died 7 Jun 1935.
Russian horticulturist, of little education, who crossbred over 300 new types of fruit trees and berries, some able to survive the winters of Central Russia, and was praised by Soviet officials. His theory of hybridization held the fanciful the idea that acquired characteristics were inheritable. His private orchard at Koslov, became a state institution, and in 1932 the city known as Kozlov for four centuries became Michurinsk. When Mendelian genetics came under attack in the Soviet Union, Michurin's controversial theory became state doctrine. It was elaborated by Trofim D. Lysenko, a Bolshevik bureaucrat, as a uniquely communist approach to agriculture, despite the nearly universal rejection of this doctrine by the world's scientists.« [Image right: noodle squash crossbred by Michurin from bush squash and an early-ripening melon.] |
| (Pierre-Eugène-) Marcellin Berthelot | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1827; died 18 Mar 1907.
French organic and physical chemist, science historian, and government official whose creative thought and work significantly influenced the development of chemistry in the late 19th century. He helped to found the study of thermochemistry, introduced a standard method for determining the latent heat of steam, measured hundreds of heats of reactions and coined the words exothermic and endothermic. Berthelot systematically synthesized organic compounds, including some not found in nature. His syntheses of many fundamental organic compounds helped to destroy the classical division between organic and inorganic compounds. |
| Albert Fink | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1827; died 3 Apr 1897
German-born American railroad engineer and executive who was the first to investigate the economics of railroad operation on a systematic basis. He was also inventor of the Fink truss, used to support the roofs of buildings and for bridges. Instead of being supported with an arch or cables, a truss bridge is held up with a latticework of rods that reinforce its stiffness, as shown (left) on the Louisville-Nashville Railroad Bridge constructed in 1857-1859 to span the Green River, Ky. (until destroyed in October 1861 during the Civil war.) His truss, patented in 1850, was one of the first intended to be built from iron instead of wood. He was involved in the construction of roundhouses for locomotives, and a courthouse in Louisville, Ky. |
| Isaac Singer | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1811; died 23 Jul 1875.
Isaac Merrit Singer, born in Pittstown, New York, was the English inventor of the continuous-stitch sewing machine in 1851. Singer was an itinerant machinist until 1851 when he designed an effective sewing machine using the basic features found on modern machines. A patent infringement settled with Elias Howe, another sewing machine inventor, did nothing to deter Singer. The company he founded was, within the decade, the world's largest sewing machine manufacturer. Singer gained 20 additional patents, but his biggest invention was the new way of marketing to consumers. He spent millions of dollars on advertising, made purchase affordable by offering installment credit, and provided after-sale service. He died in Torquay, Devon, at age 63. |
| Alphonse Pyrame de Candolle | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1806; died 4 Apr 1893.
Alphonse(-Louis-Pierre) Pyrame de Candolle was a Swiss botanist who began new methods of investigation and analysis in phytogeography (the geographic distribution of plants). His father, Augustin Pyrame de Candolle had developed a general scheme of plant classification, for which he coined the word taxonomy (1813). This was to dominate plant classification for 50 years. Augustin used his scheme in a major series of volumes on botany. Alphonse de Candolle, completed this series, and is mainly responsible for continuing the great work Prodromus Systematis Naturalis regni vegetablis, published over a number of years, following the original lines laid down by his father. His own Origin of Cultivated Plants was published in 1882.« Origin
Of Cultivated Plants, by Alphonse De Candolle. |
| Andrew Combe | |
 |
Born 27
Oct 1797; died 9 Aug 1847.
Scottish physiologist. Andrew was the younger brother of George Combe (1788-1858) who was the author of some of the most popular works on phrenology. Andrew published The Principles of Physiology describing the "structure and functions of the skin, muscles, bones, lungs, and nervous system, the laws or conditions of their healthy action, and the unsuspected origin of many of their diseases." He continued with The Principles of Digestion, "considered with relation to the principles of dietetics." |
| William Maclure | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1763; died 23 Mar 1840.
Scottish-American, born to wealth in Ayr, Scotland, William Maclure moved to the U.S. in 1778. He was an educational reformer and a geologist who is known for his geological map - the first true geological map of any part of North America and one of the earliest such maps compiled. Before 1800, he had owned businesses in the new country, traveled extensively in Europe, and joined the American Philosophical Society. Through a number of years, Maclure traveled and resided in France, Italy, Paris, Switzerland, and Spain. When Benjamin Silliman organized the American Geological Society in 1819, Maclure was elected president. |
| Matthew Baillie | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1761; died 23 Sep 1823.
Scottish pathologist whose Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body (1793) was the first publication in English on pathology as a separate subject and the first systematic study of pathology ever made. It established morbid anatomy as an independent science. Baillie gave the first clinical descriptions of gastric ulcer and chronic obstructive pulmonary emphysema and presented one of the clearest descriptions ever written on the pulmonary lesions of tuberculosis. The first American edition was published in Albany in 1795. |
| James Cook | |
(source) |
Born 27
Oct 1728; died 14 Feb 1779
English seaman who was the first of the really scientific navigators. Captain Cook spent several years surveying the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He observed a solar eclipse on 5 Aug 1766 near Cape Ray, Newfoundland. On the first of three expeditions into the Pacific (1768) he took Joseph Banks as the ship's botanist to study the flora and fauna discovered. (This practice of carrying a naturalist took place some 75 years before Charles Darwin's famous voyage.) Cook observed the transit of Venus on this voyage from the island of Tahiti on 3 Jun 1769. This would help scientists plot the distance between the sun to the earth. His geographical discoveries made him the most famous navigator since Magellan. He was killed by cannibal natives in Hawaii. |
|
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| OCTOBER 27 - DEATHS | |
| Robert L. Mills | |
(source) |
 Died
27 Oct 1999 (born 15 Apr 1927)
American physicist who shared the 1980 Rumford Premium Prize with his colleague Chen Ning Yang for their "development of a generalized gauge invariant field theory" in 1954. They proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang-Mills fields. Their mathematical work was aimed at understanding the strong interaction holding together nucleons in atomic nuclei. They constructed a more generalized view of electromagnetism, thus Maxwell's Equations can be derived as a special case from their tensor equation. Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now the foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories.« 50
Years Of Yang-Mills Theory, by Gerardus 't Hooft |
| John H. Van Vleck | |
(source) |
Died
27 Oct 1980 (born 13 Mar 1899)
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck was an American physicist and mathematician who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill F. Mott. The prize honoured Van Vleck's contributions to the understanding of the behaviour of electrons in magnetic, noncrystalline solid materials. |
| Lise Meitner | |
 |
Died
27 Oct 1968 (born 7 Nov 1878)
Austrian physicist who shared the Enrico Fermi Award (1966) with the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research beginning in 1934 that led to the discovery of uranium fission. She refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1917, with Hahn, she had discovered the new radioactive element protactinium. She was the first to describe the emission of Auger electrons. In 1935, she found evidence of four other radioactive elements corresponding to atomic numbers 93-96. In 1938, she was forced to leave Nazi Germany, and went to a post in Sweden. Her other work in the field of nuclear physics includes study of beta rays, and study of the three main disintegration series. Later, she used the cyclotron as a tool. |
| Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier | |
(source) |
Died
27 Oct 1845 (born 22 Feb 1785)
French physicist who discovered the Peltier effect (1834), that at the junction of two dissimilar metals an electric current will produce heat or cold, depending on the direction of current flow. In 1812, Peltier received an inheritance sufficient to retire from clockmaking and pursue a diverse interest in phrenology, anatomy, microscopy and meteorology. Peltier made a thermoelectric thermoscope to measure temperature distribution along a series of thermocouple circuits, from which he discovered the Peltier effect. Lenz succeeded in freezing water by this method. Its importance was not fully recognized until the later thermodynamic work of Kelvin. The effect is now used in devices for measuring temperature and non-compressor cooling units.« [Image: Peltier's atmospheric electricity gauge.] |
| Isidor Traube | |
| Died
27 Oct 1943 (born 31 Mar 1860)
German physical chemist who founded capillary chemistry and whose research on liquids advanced knowledge of critical temperature (the point at which liquid and gas states of a substance are identical), osmosis, surface tension and colloids (suspensions of nanometer-sized particles). He studied liquids including gastric juice, urine, blood, and milk. He designed a viscometer to measure viscosity and a capillarimeter to measure capillary action, the rise of a liquid in a narrow tube. In 1891 he made what could be the first systematic observation of what is now commonly known as the hydrophobic effect. (A single molecular layer of a surfactant adsorbed to a planar liquid-vapour interface does so with hydrocarbon “tails” protruding.) |
|
| Ernest Everett Just | |
(source) |
Died
27 Oct 1941 (born 14 Aug 1883)
African-American embryologist who pioneered understanding of cell division, researching fertilized egg cells, experimental parthenogenesis, hydration, cell division, dehydration in living cells, and the effect of ultra violet rays on egg cells. In 1915, he was awarded the first Spingarn Medal, the highest honor given by the NAACP. His research during summers 1909-30, at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Mass, included thousands of experiments on marine mammal cell fertilization. Outside MBL, he experienced discrimination. Seeking more opportunities, he spent most of the 1930s in various European countries. WW II hostilities caused him to return to the U.S. in late 1940, but he died of pancreatic cancer the next year.« Black
Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just, by
Kenneth R. Manning. |
| John Wrottesley | |
| Died
27 Oct 1867 (born 5 Aug 1798)
(2nd Baron) English astronomer who published the Catalogue Of The RA Of 1318 Stars. John (later Lord) Wrottesley became a founder member of the Royal Astronomical Society. He recorded over 12,000 observations at his first Observatory in Blackheath, London. In 1841, his father died and John inherited the title and the family estate. He built an observatory there to again to take up serious astronomy. Wrottesley Hall is outside of Wolverhampton, but the borough decreed (1855) if any steam engine, furnace chimney or other apparatus generating, producing or transmitting smoke was built ... within 3 miles of the observatory, it shall be constructed on the best and approved principles... to protect the observatory from smoke pollution. |
|
| Gilles Personne de Roberval | |
 |
Died
27 Oct 1675 (born 8 Aug 1602)
French mathematician who developed powerful methods in the early study of integration, writing Traité des indivisibles. He computed the definite integral of sin x, worked on the cycloid and computed the arc length of a spiral. Roberval is important for his discoveries on plane curves and for his method for drawing the tangent to a curve, already suggested by Torricelli. This method of drawing tangents makes Roberval the founder of kinematic geometry. In 1669 he invented the Roberval balance with an articulated parallelogram is now almost universally used for weighing scales of the balance type. He studied the vacuum and designed apparatus which was used by Pascal in his experiments and also worked in cartography |
| Michael Servetus | |
(source) |
Died
27 Oct 1553 (born 29 Sep 1511)
Spanish physician who lectured on astrology (in which he firmly believed) and defended the botanical views of his friend Leonhard Fuchs. He went to Paris in 1536 to study medicine. At a time of the Protestant Reformation, he also held radical theological views which he published in anonymously in a book (1553) in which he also described the circulation of blood through the lungs. Servetus indicated that the blood came from the heart through the pulmonary artery and back through the pulmonary vein; it did not go through the heart muscle itself. Galen's description was still accepted, and the insight of Servetus was ignored for decades (until extended by Harvey). For his heretical theology, Servetus was burned at the stake by Calvin. |
| Ulugh Beg | |
(source) |
Died
27 Oct 1449 (born 22 Mar 1394)
The only important Mongol scientist, mathematician, and the greatest astronomer of his time. His greatest interest was astronomy, and he built an observatory (begun in 1428) at Samarkand. In his observations he discovered a number of errors in the computations of the 2nd-century Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, whose figures were still being used. His star map of 994 stars was the first new one since Hipparchus. After Ulugh Beg was assassinated by his son, the observatory fell to ruins by 1500, rediscovered only in 1908. Written in Arabic, his work went unread by the world's next generation of astronomers. When his tables were translated into Latin in 1665, telescopic observations had surpassed them. |
| OCTOBER 27 - EVENTS | |
| Nylon | |
In 1938, Du Pont announced a name for its new synthetic fiber yarn: "nylon". |
|
| NY Subway | |
(source) |
In 1904, the first underground and underwater rail system in the world,
the New York City Subway, began operating. Even with elevated train lines
springing up around the city, the need for an underground rapid transit
railroad was obvious to clear street congestion and spread city development
into the outlying areas. Almost 8,000 men participated in building the
21-mile (33.6 km) route, under chief engineer, William Barclay Parsons.
Building the subway was a complex and dangerous task; at least 44 people
died in the effort: This first rapid transit subway, the IRT
(Interborough Rapid Transit), was opened in New York City by Mayor McLellan.
The subway and bus fare was set at one nickel. The cars operated between
the Brooklyn Bridge and 145 and Broadway. [Image:
City Hall Station platform, showing natural lighting.] |
| Letter box | |
(source) |
In 1891, Philip B. Downing, inventor, was awarded a U.S. patent for an
improvement to the street letter (mail) box. This improvement in the covering
and opening of outdoor mailboxes protected mail from both intruders and
weather. It is relatively unchanged to this day. (No. 462,093) |
| Barbed wire | |
 |
In
1873, farmer Joseph
F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. The barbs were cut
from sheet metal and were inserted between two wires which were twisted
considerably more than with today's common design. This product would transform
the West. Before this innovation,
settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away
from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming
far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming,
and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up
to an end. Glidden eventually received five patents and is generally considered
the inventor of barbed wire. Image:
detail from patent application diagram. |
| First U.S. astronomy expedition | |
 |
In 1780, the first U.S. astronomical expedition
to record an eclipse of the sun observed the event which lasted from 11:11
am to 1:50 pm. The observers left about three weeks earlier, on 9 Oct from
Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass., for Penobscot Bay, led by Samuel Williams.
A boat was supplied by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the four professors
and six students. Although the U.S. was at war with Britain, the British
officer in charge of Penobscot Bay permitted the expedition to land and
set up equipment to observe the predicted total eclipse of the sun. The
expedition was
shocked
to find itself outside the path of totality. They saw a thin arc of the
sun instead of its complete obscuration by the moon. |
