| NOVEMBER 11 - BIRTHS | |
| Joseph G. Hamilton | |
(source) |
 Born 11
Nov 1907; died 18 Feb 1957.
Joseph G(ilbert) Hamilton was an American medical physicist who pioneered in the medical uses and health effects of radioactive isotopes. On 23 Mar 1936, he injected intraveneously a sodium radioisotope into a leukemia patient. His New York Times obituary stated that he was "believed to be the first ever to inject a radioisotope intravenously in a human being." He became an M.D. in 1936. He identified the usefulness of radioiodine to study and treat thryroid disease. During WW II, he was involved with the Manhattan Project studying the biological effects of the ingestion of plutonium and other fission products. From 1948, Hamilton was Director of the Crocker Laboratory, which had a 60-inch cyclotron for nuclear research.«  |
| Henry Whitehead | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1904
(John) Henry (Constantine) Whitehead was a British mathematician who greatly influenced the development of homotopy theory (a special kind of mapping of topological spaces). Whitehead's work in differential geometry culminated in the paper "On the Covering of a Complete Space by the Geodesics Through a Point" (1935), containing pioneering contributions to this area of mathematics. He always retained his interest in geometry but soon focused on topology. He made substantial contributions to combinatorial homotopy and Stiefel manifolds and set up a school of topology at Oxford. |
| Thomas Edward Allibone | |
| Born 11
Nov 1903; died 9 Sep 2003
English physicist who was a leading authority on high-voltage physics, a member of the Anglo-American team that worked on the atomic bomb, and the last surviving direct collegue of Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics. Allibone proposed to Rutherford that he could build a powerful generator to provide the huge voltages needed artificially to accelerate electrons in a vacuum tube. By 1927, Allibone had built the Voltage Doubler, a device in which electrons and atoms could be accelerated at high speeds, which was used by Rutherford and his team in their subsequent researches on particle acceleration. In 1944 he joined the British team working on the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb in Berkeley, Cal., and Oak Ridge, Tenn. |
|
| Gordon Allport | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1897; died 9 Oct 1967.
Gordon (Willard) Allport was a humanistic psychologist and educator who developed trait theory in an original theory of personality. Allport thought the uniqueness of each personality was one of the most important things to understand. Part of this uniqueness is due to the many, many parts of our personality. He and many other psychologists considered reflexes, habits, drives or needs, beliefs, our particular view of our environment, goals or intentions, values, attitudes, and traits as being the kind of factors that determine what we do. Thus, "personality" becomes very complex. Unlike Freud, he did not see us as slavishly controlled by innate or external factors because humans have the ability to make conscious choices about how to behave. |
| Vesto Melvin Slipher | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1875; died 8 Nov 1969.
American astronomer whose systematic observations (1912-25) of the extraordinary radial velocities of spiral galaxies provided the first evidence supporting the expanding-universe theory. Slipher spectroscopically measured the displacement of their spectral lines by the Doppler effect by which the wavelength of light from an object moving away from an observer will shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Earlier, Slipher had determined the rotation periods of some of the planets by spectroscopic means. With Lowell (1912), he found Uranus had a rotation period of 10.8 hours. He also produced comparable data for Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and showed that Venus's period was much longer than expected. |
| George Washington Crile | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1864; died 7 Jan 1943.
American surgeon who was one of the first to study the significance of surgical shock. His interest began when a close friend was injured in a streetcar accident and died in profound shock after the amputation of both legs. Crile conducted research experiments on animals and noted the relationship between shock, blood pressure, and the onset of death. He saw that striving to prevent shock was of great importance. He recognized the importance of monitoring blood pressure in surgical patients and helped popularize the use of the sphygmomanometer. In 1906 he performed the first successful human to human blood transfusion at St. Alexis Hospital in Cleveland. He was the principal founder of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.«  George
Crile, an Autobiography, by George Washington Crile. |
| Louis de Bougainville | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1729; died 31 Aug 1811.
Navigator and scientist, born in Paris. A friend of the philosophe Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Bougainville was elected to the British Royal Society in 1754 in recognition of a work on calculus that he wrote at age 25. An accomplished scholar, he was also a man of action who fought in the Seven Years War and explored the Pacific Ocean. Accompanied by naturalists and astronomers, he made a voyage around the world (1767–69). He visited many of the islands of the South Pacific and compiling a scientific record of his findings. The largest of the Solomon Islands is named after him, as is the colourful tropical climbing plant bougainvillaea. At end of his navy career, he was elected to the Academy of Sciences and to the Board of Longitude. |
| Paracelsus | |
(source) |
Born 11
Nov 1493; died 24 Sep 1541.
(born Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim) German-Swiss physician and alchemist who condemned medical teaching that was not based on observation and experience. He introduced chemical remedies to replace traditional herbal ones, influenced the development of medicine during the Renaissance and gave alchemy a wider perspective. Paracelsus saw illness as having a specific external cause rather than being caused by an imbalance of the humours in the body (though he had an overall occultist perspective). He disputed that mental illness was caused by demons, and linked goitre with minerals in drinking water. He gave a clinical description of syphilis in 1530. He published Der grossen Wundartzney ("Great Surgery Book") in 1536. |
|
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| NOVEMBER 11 - DEATHS | |
| Alexander Calder | |
(source) |
 
Died 11 Nov 1976 (born 22 Jul 1898)
Alexander (Stirling) Calder, born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, a U.S. sculptor and painter best known as the originator of mobiles. He is best known as the originator of the mobile, a kinetic sculpture constructed with delicately balanced or suspended components. The sculpture will respond to air currents, or sometimes powered with a motor. He began to make mobiles when he spent time abroad, living in Paris (1931-33). By contrast, Calder's stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus. Image (right): mobile of 1934. |
| Artturi Ilmari Virtanen | |
(source) |
Died
11 Nov 1973 (born 15 Jan 1895)
Finnish biochemist whose investigations directed toward improving the production and storage of protein-rich green fodder, vitally important to regions characterized by long, severe winters, brought him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1945. The AIV method, named for his initials, was storing green fodder in an acid medium to prevent spoilage and retain nutritious nitrogenous material. He found that a mixture of hydrochloric and sulfuric acid was adequate as long as its strength was kept within certain precise limits (a pH of about four). In 1929, he found that cows fed such silage gave milk indistinguishable in taste from that of cows fed on normal fodder, while as rich in vitamins A and C. |
| Typhoid Mary | |
(source) |
Died
11 Nov 1938 (born 23 Sep 1869)
byname of Mary Mallon, famous typhoid carrier in the New York City area in the early 20th century. Fifty-one original cases of typhoid and three deaths were directly attributed to her (countless more were indirectly attributed), although she herself was immune to the typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhi). The outbreak of Typhus in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1904 puzzled the scientists of the time because they thought they had wiped out the deadly disease. Mallon's case showed that a person could be a carrier without showing any outward signs of being sick, and it led to most of the Health Code laws on the books today. She died not from typhoid but from the effects of a paralytic stroke dating back to 25 Dec 1932. Typhoid
Mary, by Judith Walzer Leavitt |
| Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen | |
| Died
11 Nov 1927 (born 3 Feb 1857)
Danish botanist and geneticist whose experiments in plant heredity offered strong support to the mutation theory of the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries (that changes in heredity come about through sudden, discrete changes of the heredity units in germ cells). Many geneticists thought Johannsen's ideas dealt a severe blow to Charles Darwin's theory that new species were produced by the slow process of natural selection. In 1909, Johannsen proposed that each portion of a chromosome that controls a phenotype be called a "gene" (Greek: "to give birth to"). |
|
| Paul Bert | |
| Died
11 Nov 1886 (born 17 Oct 1833)
French physiologist, politician, and diplomat, founder of modern aerospace medicine, whose research into the effects of air pressure on the body helped make possible the exploration of space and the ocean depths. While professor of physiology at the Sorbonne (1869-86), he found that the illness suffered by animals at high altitudes is caused mainly by the low oxygen content of the sparse atmosphere. |
|
| William Lonsdale | |
(source) |
Died
11 Nov 1871 (born 9 Sep 1794)
English geologist and paleontologist whose study of coral fossils found in Devon, suggested (1837) certain of them were intermediate between those typical of the older Silurian System (408 to 438 million years old) and those of the later Carboniferous System (286 to 360 million years old). Geologists Roderick Murchison and Adam Sedgwick agreed. They named (1839) this new geologic system after its locale - the Devonian System. Lonsdale's early career was as an army officer (1812-15) and later he became curator and librarian of the Geological Society of London (1829-42). He recognised that fossils showed how species changed over time, and more primitive organisms are found in lower strata. Darwin used this to support his evolution theory.« |
| Julien Offroy de La Mettrie | |
| Died
11 Nov 1752 (born 25 Dec 1709)
French physician and philosopher whose Materialistic interpretation of psychic phenomena laid the groundwork for future developments of behaviourism and played an important part in the history of modern Materialism. |
|
| Thomas Willis | |
(source) |
Died
11 Nov 1675 (born 27 Jan 1621)
English physician who made important contributions to anatomy, particularly of the brain and nervous system. In De febribus (1659) he significantly advanced epidemiology with an examination of epidemics of smallpox, influenza, plague, war-typhus, measles, and the first medical description of the typhoid fever. As part of his investigation of the brain's circulation, he injected wax into the blood vessels, which enabled him to see a ring of vessels still known as the "circle of Willis." He identified a type of diabetes (diabetes mellitus). A club of scientists including Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren and John Wilkins met in his rooms (1648-9) in Oxford. A number of them became founding members of the Royal Society of London.« |
| NOVEMBER 11 - EVENTS | |
| Oldest insect fossils | |
In 1988, the oldest known insect fossils (390 million yrs) were reported
in Science. |
|
| Balloon record height | |
Stevens (source) |
In 1935, a record 72,395 feet was reached
by Lt. Col. Albert William Stevens
and Capt. Orvil Anderson, by helium balloon in a sealed gondola, Explorer
II. This set a substratosphere record that stood for 21 years. They
left from Rapid City, S.D. and spent 8 hrs in the air taking still and
motion pictures in black and white and colour. They measured electrical
conductivity and took samples of the stratosphere air, with an interest
in the ozone layer, and captured spores floating miles-high in the atmosphere.
They also carried fruit flies to study the effect of the rare stratosphere.
Stevens was a skilled aerial photographer who took the first photograph
(1930) showing the Earth's curvature, and the first pictures (1932) showing
the moon's shadow on the Earth during a total lunar eclipse.« |
| Cosmic rays | |
|
In 1925, the discovery of cosmic rays was announced in Madison, Wisconsin
by Robert A. Millikan who coined
their name. |
|
| Manchester Ship Canal | |
1890 (source) |
In 1887, construction began on the Manchester Ship Canal in north-west
England, supervised by chief engineer and designer, Edward Leader Williams.
The 40-mile waterway (60-km) was promoted by local manufacturer Daniel
Adamson to establish Manchester as an inland port for ocean-going ships,
to be less costly than transport via railway, and the port at Liverpool.
Local businessmen met on 27 Jun 1882. Enabling legislation from Parliament
was sought in Nov 1882, but strongly opposed by Liverpool and railway companies.
An Act of Parliament was eventually passed on 6 Aug 1885, followed by two
years raising £5 million for initial costs. The canal opened
to traffic on 1 Jan 1894.«
100
Years of the Manchester Ship Canal, by T. Gray. |
| Bessemer patent | |
(USPTO) |
In 1856, English inventor,
Henry
Bessemer was issued US Patent No. 16,082 for his "Manufacture of Iron
and Steel" process, having previously
taken out British patent
for his "decarbonization process, utilizing a blast of air" that revolutionised
steel manufacturing (No. 66/1855, 10 Jan 1855). However, the U.S. patent
was shortly challenged in a dispute
over priority. The American William
Kelly - though filing
after Bessemer - was recognized as the first to actually use a blast of
air into molten pig iron to make steel. Nevertheless, Bessemer benefitted
from his patent on the tilting converter in which he processed the iron
and then could pour out the molten steel.« [Image:
Figure from Bessemer's patent showing end elevation of the tilting mechanism.
The circular end of the refining chamber is seen in the lower half of the
diagram.]
Sir
Henry Bessemer: An Autobiography, by Henry Bessemer. |
| Telescope | |
|
In 1851, the first U.S. patent for a telescope design was issued
to Alvan Clark of Cambridge, Mass. (No. 8,509)*.
Clark was a portrait painter who was interested in astronomy as were so
many others at that time. He had made
several small lenses and mirrors as a hobby. The fact that he could detect
the small residual errors in one of the the best lenses Europe could offer
convinced him that he could do as well. After he gained a reputation in
Europe the American orders started to come in. The Alvin Clark Company
became one of the foremost producers of some of the largest lenses for
telescopes in the 1800's. |
|
| Chrysanthemums | |
|
In 1790, chrysanthemums were introduced into England from China. These
hardy plants have since been found native in Japan, northern Africa, and
southern Europe. Their flowers come in every color except blue. Their blooms
come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Some are spherical in shape
and have incurved petals at the center. Some have tubular-shaped petals
of unequal length with little hooks at the end. Spoon Chrysanthemums have
rather flat petals that are spoon-shaped at the end. Anemone Chrysanthemums
have fairly flat, thin petals with shorter tubular petals in the center. |
|
| Tycho's Supernova | |
 |
In 1572, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe
began his meticulous observations of the supernova discovered
in the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia. (Brahe was at the beginning
of his career in 1572, and it was this supernova
that inspired him to devote his lifetime to making accurate measurements
of the positions of the stars and planets.) 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
but it remained visible to the naked eye for about 16 months until Mar
1574. Thus 16th-century astronomers learned that the heavens were not immutable,
as had been believed. Brahe's book
on his observations, De Nova Stella, originated the word "nova."« |
