| NOVEMBER 3 - BIRTHS | |
| Frederick S. Russell | |
 Born 3
Nov 1897; died 5 Jun 1984.
Frederick Stratten Russell was an English marine biologist who linked the depth distribution of planktonic organisms to the intensity of light in the seas off the British Isles. He used photoelectric cells to measure the light, finding that the plankton moved up and down the water column in a daily cycle. Seasonal variations in light intensity also affected the migrations. His work helped explain the long-term changes in the ecosystem of the English Channel. Russell was fascinated by the larval stages of fishes and the life histories of certain types of jellyfish, which he studied in great detail. He wrote and illustrated several books on his findings. |
|
| Wilfred Trotter | |
(source) |
Born 3
Nov 1872; died 25 Nov 1939.
Wilfred (Batten Lewis) Trotter was an English surgeon, who was an authority on cancers of the neck and head and recognized as a pioneer in neurosurgery. He took an interest in sociology and originated the term "herd instinct" in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914), referring to human behaviour. He was the first to study the psychology of animals, investigating gregariousness as an instinct, in a beehive, a flock of sheep and a wolf pack. He related how herd membership created a homogeneity whereby individuals would instead act together as one. Within humanity, he distinguished two disparate types of people: resistive and sensitive, which came into conflict as the former resisted change, while the latter embraced change.«  Instincts
of the Herd in Peace And War, by Wilfred Trotter |
| Jokichi Takamine | |
(source) |
Born 3
Nov 1854; died 22 Jul 1922
Biochemist and industrial leader who isolated the hormone produced in the adrenal gland that causes the body to respond to emergencies. This chemical was adrenalin (now called epinephrine) from the suprarenal gland (1901). This was the first pure hormone to be isolated from natural sources. He applied for and received a U.S. patent on the substance, and went on to make a fortune with his marketing of Adrenalin. In fact, the product that he marketed was not pure epinephrine, but a mixture of the hormone and its sibling compound, norepinephrine (or noradrenaline). It is now made synthetically. He also found takadastase, and played a key role in the introduction of phosphate fertilizer along with various other manufacturing and chemical industries. to Japan. |
| Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming | |
(source) |
Born 3
Nov 1841; died 2 Apr 1924.
Danish botanist whose is regarded as a founder of plant ecology for demonstrating how interactions between plants, animals and other organisms in a habitat form a community shaped by environmental conditions, such as a meadow ecosystem. Although the term ecology was previously coined by Haeckel in 1866, Warming provided a theoretical basis for research in this new discipline within botany. Warming studied what he called environmental factors, including soil, light, temperature and rainfall. His expedition to Brazil (1863-66) yielded a thorough study of the tropical flora. His other travels included Greenland (1884), Norway (1885), the West Indies and Venezuela (1890-92) to study the full range from artic to temperate to tropical habitats.« |
| John Montagu | |
 |
Born 3
Nov 1718; died 30 Apr 1792
(4th Earl of Sandwich) British politician, inventor and explorer, for whom the sandwich is named, which is said he invented in 1762. A story was offered in Grosley's Tour to London that Sandwich often spent excessive time gambling and he didn't want to get up from the gambling table, so he told his servants to bring him meat between two slices of bread. Although this story is often quoted, it seems without support. Rodger, Sandwich's biographer, describes the original form using salt beef, as more likely to have been invented to eat while working at his desk, where he spent long hours. Captain Cook named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for him. As first lord of the admiralty (1771-82) during the American Revolution, he was held responsible for the navy's disastrous unpreparedness for war.« |
| Daniel Rutherford | |
(source) |
Born 3
Nov 1749; died 15 Nov 1819
Scottish chemist who discovered the portion of air that does not support combustion, now known to be nitrogen. After letting a mouse live in a confined quantity of air until it died, he burned a candle and burned phosphorus in the same air as long as they would burn. He assumed the remaining gas was carbon dioxide, which he dissolved by passing it through a strong alkali. Yet there remained gas that was incapable of supporting respiration or combustion which he knew no longer contained oxygen or carbon dioxide. He called it "phlogisticated air," following the phlogiston theory of Stahl. It was later properly described by Lavoisier. Rutherford also designed the first maximum-minimum thermometer*. |
| Bernardino Ramazzini | |
(source) |
Born 3
Nov 1633; died 5 Nov 1714
Italian physician, born in Capri, Italy, who first recorded relationships between occupational environment and workers' illnesses and is considered a founder of occupational medicine. Educated in philosophy and medicine, he developed his interest in workers' health while a student. He introduced the diagnostic tool of asking a patient his occupation, and classified occupational health hazards accord to causes (noxious vapors, very fine particles, heat, cold, humidity, irregular physical motions, etc). He addressed issues of ventilation and recommended such protections as face masks. He compiled the first systematic treatise on occupational diseases, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (1700). He taught at the University of Padua until his death in 1714. |
|
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| NOVEMBER 3 - DEATHS | |
| Ralph Wyckoff | |
(source) |
 Died
3 Nov 1994 (born 9 Aug 1897)
Ralph (Walter Graystone) Wyckoff was an American scientist, a pioneer in the application of X-ray methods to determine crystal structures and one of the first to use these methods for studying biological substances. He became famous in two areas of structural research: X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy. He developed a new technique of 'metal shadowing' for observation with the electron microscope. A specimen, such as a virus, is placed in a vacuum together with a heated tungsten filament covered with gold. Vaporized gold coated the side of the specimen nearest the filament, leaving a 'shadow' on the far side. This allowing better estimates to be made of their size and shape, as well as revealing details of their structure. |
| E. Cuyler Hammond | |
| Died
3 Nov 1986 (born 14 June 1912)
Scientist who was the first to link smoking with lung cancer. In 1957, while research director of the American Cancer Society, Hammond told congressional investigators that cigarette smoking is a cause of lung cancer and has a severe effect on a number of other diseases. "Evidence that smoking is a serious health hazard has been accumulating slowly since about 1915," he said, and that recent studies have produced "overwhelming" evidence that cigarette smoking "is a causative factor of great importance in the occurrence of lung cancer." He continued that there has been an "alarming trend in the death rates from lung cancer," with the number of deaths rising from 2,500 in 1930 to an estimated 29,000 in 1956. |
|
| Sir Harold Spencer Jones | |
(source) |
Died
3 Nov 1960 (born 29 Mar 1890)
English astronomer who was 10th astronomer royal of England (1933–55). His work was devoted to fundamental positional astronomy. While HM Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, he worked on poper motions and parallaxes. Later he showed that small residuals in the apparent motions of the planets are due to the irregular rotation of the earth. He led in the worldwide effort to determine the distance to the sun by triangulating the distance of the asteroid Eros when it passed near the earth in 1930-31. Spencer Jones also improved timekeeping and knowledge of the Earth’s rotation. After WW II he supervised the move of the Royal Observatory to Herstmonceux, where it was renamed the Royal Greenwich Observatory. |
| Wilhelm Reich | |
(source) |
Died
3 Nov 1957 (born 24 Mar 1897)
Viennese psychologist who developed a system of psychoanalysis that concentrated on overall character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. His early work on psychoanalytic technique was overshadowed by his involvement in the sexual-politics movement and by "orgonomy," a pseudoscientific system he developed. He also built a device he called a cloud buster, with which he claimed he could manipulate the weather by manipulating the orgone in the atmosphere. Reich's claims aroused much controversy, and he was taken to court for fraud by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The court ordered his books and research burned and his equipment destroyed. Reich was given a prison sentence, and he died in prison in 1957. |
| Waldemar Lindgren | |
(source) |
Died
3 Nov 1939 (born 14 Feb 1860)
Swedish-born American economic geologist who was a leader in the science of ore deposition and the use of the petrographic microscope. He helped establish that veins of metal and similar deposits are created by hot solutions derived from molten rock below, not by water seepage from above. His interest in geology began as a youth from reading a book on mineralogy and a visit at the age of 10 to the west coast of Sweden where rocks are beautifully exposed. By the time he was 17 he had seen the mines of central Sweden and the famous old silver workings of Kongsberg in Norway. As a young mining geologist, he emigrated to America in Jun 1883, drawn by the rapidly growing mining industry of the Western United States. |
| Émile Roux | |
(source) |
Died
3 Nov 1933 (born 17 Dec 1853)
(Pierre-Paul-) Émile Roux was a French bacteriologist who began working with Pasteur in 1878. He was noted for his work on diphtheria. In 1888, Roux and Alexandre Yersin isolated a soluble toxin from cultures of diphtheria. The bacterium itself, though only found in the throat, has destructive tissue and organ effects body wide, by producing, they hypothesized, the chemical toxin. They filtered diphtheria cultures to remove the bacteria and then used the remaining fluid filtrate into healthy animals. As expected the animals showed diphtheria lesions but without any obvious presence of bacteria thus demonstrating that a toxin is the active agent causing diphtheria. He became director of Pasteur Institute at Paris in 1904. |
| Eugen Baumann | |
(source) |
Died
3 Nov 1896 (born 12 Dec 1846)
German chemist who discovered that the thyroid gland was rich in iodine, an element not known before that to occur naturally in animal tissue, making the thyroid gland unique in being the only tissue to contain iodine. This led to the discovery of the iodine-containing thyroid hormone and to its treatment in thyroid disorders. This, his most important discovery, he made in the last year of his life, 1896. |
| NOVEMBER 3 - EVENTS | |
| North Sea Oil | |
(source) |
In 1975, Queen Elizabeth II opened the North Sea pipeline, Firth of Forth.
The first oil was piped ashore from the North Sea at Peterhead, Scotland.
From BP's "Forties
Field" the pipe runs 110 miles along the seabed and then 130 miles
to the oil refinery at Grangemouth. The field was discovered by the drilling
rig Sea Quest in October 1970. Now, oil from the Forties reservoir
is produced through some 55 producing wells which deviate by up to 65°
from the vertical and fan out to 3 kilometres from each of several platforms. |
| Sputnik 2 | |
(source) |
In 1957, Sputnik 2 was launched, with the first live animal sent
into space - a Siberian husky dog, Laika ("barker" in Russian). By design,
the craft
was not planned for recovery, and Laika
died in orbit. Biological data, the first data of its kind, was transmitted
back to Earth while she lived. The data showed scientists how Laika was
adapting to space - information important to the imminent planned manned
missions. The 508-kg satellite
remained in orbit 162 days. Laika
was considered a hero in the Soviet Union. The first human to pilot a spacecraft,
Yuri Gagarin, followed on 12
Apr 1961, aboard Vostok 1.«  |
| Frozen food | |
 |
In 1952, Clarence Birdseye
marketed the first frozen peas in Chester, N.Y. While a U.S. field naturalist
near the Arctic, he had learned the technique of flash freezing from Labrador
Inuit. Freshly caught fish, when placed onto the Arctic ice in the frigid
wind, froze solid almost immediately. In Sep 1922, he began a company,
Birdseye Seafoods, Inc., to process chilled fish fillets at a plant near
the Fulton Fish Market in New York City. On 3 Jul 1924, he organized the
General Seafood Corporation, which began the frozen foods industry. Retail
frozen foods began 6 Mar 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts at the "Springfield
Experiment Test Market" which offered 26 different vegetables, fruits,
fish, and meats. |
| British Orthopaedic Society | |
(source) |
In 1894, the British Orthopaedic Society held its first general meeting
at the Holborn Restaurant, London. Of the 31 members, 13 were local to
London. Its formation was led by a group of seven surgeons including Sir
Robert Jones who had met informally on 3 Aug 1894 and chose its name
and chairman. It ceased to exist in 1900, perhaps because the members,
being mostly general surgeons practicing only some orthopaedics, had too
limited interest in the specialty. In 1918, Sir Robert Jones and several
others surgeons again founded a professional organisation, the current
British
Orthopaedic Association. The
American
Orthopaedic Association was the first nationally affiliated group of
orthopaedic surgeons (1887)*« [Image:
Sir Robert Jones.] |
| Automatic telephone exchange | |
(source) |
In 1892, the first automatic telephone exchange, using the switching device
invented
by Almon B. Strowger, (born 1839) opened to the public in LaPorte, Indiana,
with about seventy-five subscribers. A considerable amount of ceremony
was attached to the affair, with a special train run from Chicago and a
brass band on hand to greet the guests. This early
system did not use a dial to enter the desired number. Instead, using three
keys, one for each digit of a three-digit number, a subscriber pressed
each key the appropriate number of times for each digit. The first dial
phones (with projecting vanes instead of holes) was used in Milwaukee's
City Hall (1896).* In the
UK, the very first Strowger exchange opened
at Epsom in Surrey in 1912. |
| First U.S. yeast preparation patent | |
(source) |
In 1863, the first U.S. yeast preparation patent was issued to J.T. Alden
of Cincinnati, Ohio (No. 40,451), for "an improvement in the preparation
of yeast" which reduced concentrated yeast from a plastic or semi-fluid
state to a dry granular form, a convenient way of preservation for future
use. His process was to press the live yeast concentrate through
a fine wire mesh to produce threads of the substance of about 1/8-inch
square. When laid on drying racks, moisture rapidly evaporated because
of the high surface area, leaving the dried yeast
in a finely-divided state. The granular form avoided the grinding and crushing
needed with using cake form dried yeast, which mechanically damaged the
yeast cells, reducing the active yield. |
| First U.S. antifouling paint patent | |
|
In 1863, the first U.S. patent for an antifouling paint for ships' hulls
was issued to J.G. Tarr and A.H. Wonson (No. 40515) for a copper oxide,
tar and naptha mixture. They claimed that a ship's hull thus painted could
have protection against growth of barnacle shells and seaweeds lasting
"for a period of twelve months, while another vessel painted in the common
manner and employed in the same trade became so foul in six weeks as to
require scraping." They took out an anti-corrosion antifouling paint patent
on 13 Jun 1865 (U.S. No.48221). Fouling of a ship's bottom was a serious
problem because it increases drag and greatly reduces a ship's speed. A
British antifouling paint patent was issued on 31
Aug 1625 to William Beale.« |
|
| Micrographia | |
(source) |
In 1664, Robert Hooke showed an advanced copy of his classic bookMicrographia,
or some Physiological Descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying
glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon to the Royal Society
in London. This large volume
contained sketches of practically everything Hooke could view with the
latest invention of the day, the microscope. It was also history's first
treatise on microbiology, and coined the word "cell" in the biological
context. Also included in this volume are many snow crystal drawings, which
for the first time revealed the complexity and intricate symmetry of snow
crystal structure. The book was published in 1665 and became promptly a
best-seller. |
