| NOVEMBER 6 - BIRTHS | |
| Roland B. Dixon | |
(source) |
 Born 6
Nov 1875; died 19 Dec 1934.
Roland B(urrage) Dixon was a U.S. cultural anthropologist who built Harvard's reputation for training anthropologists. After graduating from Harvard (1897) while an assistant at its Peabody Museum, he made archaeological excavations of the burial mounds in Madisonville, Ohio. He first visited the Indians of California in 1899, and with subsequent studies there through 1907 became a recognized authority on their ethnography, folklore, and linguistics. He travelled widely in his field work, making studies in Siberia, Mongolia, the Himalayas, and Oceania. He published work on the geographical distributions of cultural traits of diverse populations around the world in The Racial History of Man (1923).« [Image: Frontispiece, Oceanic Mythology, by Roland Dixon (1916). Image of Kuila-moku, one of the Hawaiian patron deities of medicine.]  The
Buildings of Cultures, by Roland B. Dixon. |
| Richard Jefferies | |
(source) |
Born 6
Nov 1848; died 14 Aug 1887.
(John) Richard Jefferies, born near Swindon was a naturalist, novelist, and essayist. He began his literary career as a local reporter in Wiltshire, and from then on he wrote many works of natural history and country life, and essays in journals and magazines. Jefferies relied greatly on 'field notebooks', where he entered his meticulous observations on the life of the countryside. Wild Life in a Southern Country, in which the author, sitting on a Wiltshire down, observes in ever widening circles the fields, woods, animals, and human inhabitants below him, was published with success in 1879. He wrote his autobiography, Story of My Heart (1883). His vision was unappreciated in his own Victorian age but has been increasingly recognized and admired since his death. |
| Adolphe Sax | |
(source) |
Born 6
Nov 1814; died 7 Feb 1894
Sax, who took the name Adolphe, was a Belgian-French musical instrument designer from age 15, and inventor of the saxophone (mid 1840's, patented 1846), saxtromba, and sax horn (mid to late 1830's). Sax created the distinctive saxophone sound by combining the clarinet's single reed and mouthpiece with a widened oboe's conical bore. His first saxophones were of wood. Although he soon switched to brass, they remain classified as a woodwind instrument. Sax patented many new instruments, but although they were adopted by French army bands, he had no factory production and made little profit, yet he spent ten years in court protecting his patents. In the last years of his life, Sax was living in poverty.« |
| Cesare Lombroso | |
(source) |
Born 6
Nov 1835; died 19 Oct 1909.
Italian physician, psychiatrist and pioneer criminologist, who employed Darwinian ideas of evolution to account for criminal behaviour. Measuring heads of criminals against skulls of apes and prehistoric humans, he concluded that criminals were in fact hereditary victims of atavism - a reversion to evolutionarily primitive traits including those related to survival. In prehistoric times, a strong desire to kill, for example, would have made them good hunters and desirable mates, but criminals in urban environments. Lombroso believed this theory of atavistic criminality should influence punishment of crime. In many circles, his ideas met withconcerted opposition. Later, Lombroso gradually included social factors as significant in disposing people to criminal behaviour. |
| Alois Senefelder | |
(source) |
Born 6
Nov 1771; died 26 Feb 1834.
German, (Johann Nepomuk Franz) Alois Senefelder was the inventor of lithography. To publish his own work, he needed a less expensive and more efficient printing alternative to relief printed hand set type or etched plates. His invention was the biggest revolution in the printing industry since Gutenberg's movable type. Today photo lithography is used to print magazines and books, but the original process of drawing by hand on litho stones still exists in the fine art world. The traditional surface for lithography is Bavarian limestone, regrained by hand for each use. The principle is simple: oil based printing ink and water repel each other. The image is drawn with greasy crayon and chemically treated. The image areas of the stone accept ink and undrawn areas will reject it. |
| James Gregory | |
(source) |
Born 6
Nov 1638; died Oct 1675.
Scottish mathematician, astronomer and inventor of the reflecting telescope, born in Aberdeen. He was the first to investigate converging number series, which have an infinite number of terms but a finite sum. He made important contributions to the development of the calculus, although some of his best work remained virtually unknown until long after his death. In 1660 he published his Optica Promota, in which he described the first practical reflecting ("Gregorian") telescope. Light reflected from a concave elliptical secondary mirror is brought to a focus just behind a hole in the primary mirror. It was superceded by the Newtonian and Cassegrain telescopes. Gregory also introduced estimation of stellar distances by photometric methods. |
|
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| NOVEMBER 6 - DEATHS | |
| David Marine | |
(source) |
 Died
6 Nov 1976 (born 20 Sep 1888)
American pathologist whose substantial research on the treatment of goiter with iodine led to the iodizing of table salt. During 1917-22 he ran a trial on a large group of schoolgirls to show that an iodine supplement dramatically reduced the incident of goiter (a major swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck). His results clearly showed the important of iodine in the diet. Dr. David.M. Cowie promoted the production of iodized table salt, first sold on 1 May 1924, and later throughout the U.S., greatly reducing the incidence of goiter. Marine worked on salt iodization for the World Health Organization, further spreading its benefits. (As early as 1821 French chemist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault had observed that iodine-rich salt could treat goiter.)« |
| Henry Fairfield Osborn | |
(source) |
Died
6 Nov 1935 (born 8 Aug 1857)
American paleontologist and museum administrator who greatly influenced the art of museum display and the education of paleontologists in the United States and Great Britain. In 1891, the American Museum of Natural History hired Osborn as the first curator of the new Department of Vertebrate Paleontology because the trustees had realized that the Museum was falling behind other institutions in developing a collection of dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates. Within a decade, Osborn assembled a talented staff of curators and collectors, and fossils were soon streaming into the Museum from all over the world. One of Osborn's favorite groups for study was the brontotheres, and he was the first to carry out comprehensive research on them. |
| David George Hogarth | |
(source) |
Died
6 Nov 1927 (born 23 May 1862)
English archaeologist who explored and excavated (1887–1907) in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Syria, and Melos. From 1908 until his death in 1927, he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. When Hogarth reopened the British Museum’s excavation at Carchemish in northern Syria, he arranged for T. E. Lawrence to join the expedition. Later, Lawrence supported the Ashmolean as a buyer of antiquities in Syria. During WW I, Hogarth prepared reference works on the Middle East for the Geographical Section of Naval Intelligence, and also spent some time organizing the Arab Bureau in Cairo. After the war Hogarth and Lawrence were both involved in official deliberations about the political settlement of the Middle East.« 
Philip
and Alexander of Macedon: Two Essays in biography, by
David George Hogarth. |
| Sir William Henry Preece | |
(source) |
Died
6 Nov 1913 (born 15 Feb 1834)
Welsh electrical engineer who was a major figure in the development and introduction of wireless telegraphy and the telephone in Great Britain. Preece's interest in applied electricity and telegraphic engineering was developed as a graduate student under Michael Faraday. For 29 years, from 1870, he was an engineer with the Post Office telegraphic system and contributed many inventions and improvements, including a railroad signaling system that increased railway safety. An early pioneer in wireless telegraphy, he originated his own system in 1892. He encouraged Guglielmo Marconi by obtaining assistance from the Post Office for his work. Preece also introduced into Great Britain the first Bell telephones. Preece was knighted in 1899. Telegraphy,
by William Henry Preece. |
| James Bowdoin | |
 |
Died
6 Nov 1790 (born 7 Aug 1726)
American founder and first president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780). He was a scientist prominent in physics and astronomy, and wrote several papers including one on electricity with Benjamin Franklin, a close friend. In one of his letters to Franklin, Bowdoin suggested the theory, since generally accepted, that the phosphorescence of the sea, under certain conditions, is due to the presence of minute animals. Bowdoin was also a political leader in Massachusetts during the American revolution (1775-83), and governor of Massachusetts (1785-87). His remarkable library of 1,200 volumes, ranged from science and math to philosophy, religion, poetry, and fiction. He left it in his will to the Academy. |
| Bernard de Jussieu | |
(source) |
Died
6 Nov 1777 (born 17 Aug 1699)
French botanist whose method of plant classification was based on anatomical characteristics of the plant embryo. Although he first studied medicine, in 1722 he became subdemonstrator of plants in the Jardin du Roi, Paris. In 1758, Louis XV made him superintendent of his royal garden at Trianon near Paris, which was to contain specimens of all plants cultivated in France. It was here that he devised his system to arrange and catalogued the plants of Trianon. He did not arrange the genera systematically in groups according to a single characteristic, but after consideration of all the characteristics, which, however, are not regarded as of equal value. His brothers, Antoine and Joseph, and nephew Antoine-Laurent, were also botanists.« |
| Claude Louis Berthollet | |
(source) |
Died
6 Nov 1822 (born 9 Dec 1748)
(Count) French chemist who was the first to note that the completeness of chemical reactions depends in part upon the masses of the reacting substances (1803); he thus came close to formulating the law of mass action. Though he incorrectly concluded that elements unite in all proportions, his resulting controversy with the chemist Joseph-Louis Proust led to the establishment of the law of definite proportions. He continued Scheele's research on chlorine, showing in 1785 how it could be used for bleaching. He continued Priestley's investigation of ammonia, and was the first to show it was a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen. He discovered potassium chlorate. |
| NOVEMBER 6 - EVENTS | |
| Black-footed ferret | |
(source) |
In 1981, a black-footed ferret was found in Wyoming, previously thought
extinct. An animal
of North America’s arid, shortgrass prairies, it lived primarily with,
and on, prairie dogs. Wide-scale poisoning programs to eradicate prairie
dogs and the destruction of grassland habitat also killed off the ferret.
It now survives in a few places in the western United States where ranchers
are compensated for not molesting prairie dog towns and where management
programs for the prairie dog and the ferret are being developed. It takes
about 100 acres of prairie dog colony
to support one ferret family (a female and her young). Predators such as
owls, eagles, hawks, coyotes, badgers, foxes, and bobcats are the main
cause of death for wild ferrets. |
| Motorway M1 | |
(source) |
In 1959, the first two deaths occurred on England's first motorway, the
M1. It had been opened only four days earlier
on 2 Nov 1959. Two lorry drivers died when they crashed into the back of
vehicles halted by a minor crash. In the multiple-vehicle crash which occurred
in thick fog, five persons were injured. The new superhighway without a
speed limit had traffic jams in both directions for several hours. It was
the first part of a planned 400-mile motorway network that was the greatest
road transport improvement project since the famous straight roads the
Romans built. It was a quarter-century late by international standards,
but its design benefitted from knowledge gained from expressways already
built in the U.S. and Europe.* |
| Kariba High Dam | |
(source) |
In 1956, the British colonial government in Rhodesia began the construction
of the Kariba High Dam across the Zambesi river between North and South
Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). Completed in Jun 1959, it was the largest
dam of its time and provides electricity
to the region. A year later, Britain's Queen Elizabeth officially started
the
Kariba generators and one of Africa's most ambitious
projects came to life. The dam
rises 128-m (420-ft) from the river bed. Behind it Lake Kariba stretches
back for 290-km (180-mi), covers 6,000 sq km (3,750 sq mi) and is 42-km
(26 mi) across at its widest. During construction
"Operation Noah" ensured the rescue of over 5,000 animals comprising 35
different mammal species and thousands of reptiles. |
| NY-SF telegraph | |
|
In 1862, a direct telegraphic link between New York and San Francisco was
established. |
|
| Tycho's Supernova | |
 |
In 1572, a supernova
was first noted by Wolfgang Schuler*of
Wittenberg (?-1575) in the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia but was
seen by many observers throughout Europe and in the Far East. It appeared
as a new star, adjacent to the fainter star seen just northwest of the
middle of the "W." Tycho Brahe
first noticed this new star on 11 Nov
1572, and he began to meticulously record its appearance. Although he was
not the first to see it, he gained fame from his book Stella Nova (Latin:
"new star"). For two weeks it was brighter than any other star in the sky
and visible in daytime. By month's end, it began to fade and change colour,
from bright white to yellow and orange to faint reddish light. It was visible
to the naked eye for about 16 months until Mar 1574. [Brahe's
drawing of Cassipeia, with the position of the stars. Nova Stella,
the brightest is marked as "I"] « |
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Note: entry for 1923 concerning Schick electric razor has been removed as invalid. |
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