| NOVEMBER 20 - BIRTHS | |
| James Bertram Collip | |
(source) |
 Born 20
Nov 1892; died 19 Jun 1965.
Canadian biochemist who co-discovered insulin. He worked with Frederick Banting and Charles Best to refine a method of removing and purifying insulin. Working with the bovine pancreas, Collip produced insulin in a form which permitted clinical use. Together with his other contributions in endocrinology, including his isolation of the parathyroid hormone and establishing a bioassay for measuring serum calcium., he stands as a major figure in Canadian medical history.  The
Discovery of Insulin, by Michael Bliss. |
| Edwin Powell Hubble | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1889; died 28 Sep 1953
American astronomer, born in Marshfield, Mo., who is considered the founder of extragalactic astronomy and who provided the first evidence of the expansion of the universe. In 1923-5 he identified Cepheid variables in "spiral nebulae" M31 and M33 and proved conclusively that they are outside the Galaxy. His investigation of these objects, which he called extragalactic nebulae and which astronomers today call galaxies, led to his now-standard classification system of elliptical, spiral, and irregular galaxies, and to proof that they are distributed uniformly out to great distances. Hubble measured distances to galaxies and their redshifts, and in 1929 he published the velocity-distance relation which is the basis of modern cosmology. |
| Earnest A. Hooton | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1887; died 3 May 1954.
Earnest A(lbert) Hooton was an American physical anthropologist who investigated human evolution and racial differentiation, classified and described human populations, and examined the relationship between personality and physical type, particularly with respect to criminal behaviour. He established Harvard University as a principal U.S. centre for physical anthropology. In the 1930s, he studied American criminals, and in his controversial books, The American Criminal (1939) and Crime and the Man (1939), he sought to to connect criminal behaviour with physical or racial factors. His books written for the layperson include: Up from the Ape; Apes, Men and Morons; and Twilight of Man, Why We Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa. |
| Karl von Frisch | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1886
Zoologist whose studies of communication among bees added significantly to the knowledge of the chemical and visual sensors of insects. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with animal behaviourists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, "for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns" |
| William Coblentz | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1873; died 15 Sep 1962.
William W(eber) Coblentz was an American physicist and astronomer whose work lay primarily in infrared spectroscopy. In 1905 he founded the radiometry section of the National Bureau of Standards, which he headed for 40 years. Coblentz measured the infrared radiation from stars, planets, and nebulae and was the first to determine accurately the constants of blackbody radiation, thus confirming Planck's law. |
| Edward Westermarck | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1862; died 3 Sep 1939.
Finnish sociologist, philosopher, and anthropologist who denied the widely held view that early humans had lived in a state of promiscuity and instead theorized that the original form of human sexual attachment had been monogamy. He asserted that primitive marriage was rooted in the needs of the nuclear family, which he considered to be the fundamental and universal unit of society. |
| Eduard Rüppell | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1794; died 10 Dec 1877.
(Wilhelm Peter) Eduard (Simon) Rüppell was a German naturalist and explorer who made zoological and ethnographical collections in northeastern Africa. He was assisted on his first expedition (1821-27) by surgeon Michael Hey. After travelling through the Sinai desert, in 1822 they were the first European explorers to reach the Gulf of Aqaba, and the following year, they travelled up the Nile. On another African expedition, in 1830 Rüppell became the first naturalist to traverse Ethiopia. Rüppell is remembered in the names of Rüppell's Warbler and Rüppell's Vulture.« |
| Otto von Guericke | |
(source) |
Born 20
Nov 1602; died 11 May 1686.
German physicist who investigated the properties of a vacuum invented (1654) the first piston air pump to produce a vacuum. While mayor of Madgeburg, in 1663, he demonstrated that two 51 cm diameter copper hemispheres with air pumped out of their interior would be so strongly held together by the force of air pressure that teams of horses harnessed to each hemisphere were not able to pull the hemispheres apart. He studied the role of air in combustion and respiration. With his invention of the first electrostatic machine - a rotating ball of sulphur electrified by friction against his hand - he produced sizeable sparks and showed that like charges repel each other.« |
|
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| NOVEMBER 20 - DEATHS | |
| Ancel Keys | |
(source) |
 
Died 20 Nov 2004 (born 26 Jan 1904)
American nutritionist and epidemiologist who was the first to identify the role of saturated fats in causing heart disease. In 1935, he studied the physiological effects of altitude, which he conducted in the Andes. At the onset of WW II, he designed the lightweight yet nutritious K ration used by American paratroops. The hard biscuits, dry sausage, hard candy and chocolate it contained were items he originally selected at a Minneapolis grocery store, and the ration was named with his initial. In 1947, he began a decade of study of 283 local businessmen. From its results, he determined that saturated fat chiefly determined blood cholesterol levels, and linked smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol with heart attacks.«[Image right: K-ration Supper] The
Benevolent Bean, by Ancel Keys, Margaret Keys |
| Trofim Denisovich Lysenko | |
1938 (source) |
Died
20 Nov 1976 (born 29 Sep 1898)
Soviet biologist and agronomist who not only believed the Mendelian theory of heredity to be wrong, but with Stalin's support for two decades actively obstructed the course of Soviet biology. He caused the imprisonment and death of many of the country's eminent biologists. He followed I. V. Michurin's fanciful idea that plants could be forced to adapt to any environmental conditions, for example converting summer wheat to winter wheat by storing the seeds in ice. As director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1940-65) his interference contributed to the disastrous decline of Soviet agriculture. After Stalin's death in 1956, he lost support and eventually in 1965 was exiled to an experimental farm.« The
Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, by Zhores A Medvedev. |
| Clyde Vernon Cessna | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1954 (born 5 Dec 1879)
Aviator, aircraft manufacturer who invented the cantilever wing and a V-shaped tail configuration and a simple, flexible monoplane design. |
| Francis William Aston | |
(EB) |
Died
20 Nov 1945 (born 1 Sep 1877)
British physicist who was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his development of the mass spectrograph, a device that separates atoms or molecular fragments of different mass and measures those masses with remarkable accuracy. In 1910 he became an assistant to Sir J.J. Thomson at Cambridge, who was investigating positively charged rays emanating from gaseous discharges. Aston invented his mass spectrograph (a new type of positive-ray apparatus) after WWI, with which he showed that many elements are mixtures of isotopes. In fact, he discovered 212 of the 287 naturally occurring nuclides. The mass spectrograph is now widely used in geology, chemistry, biology, and nuclear physics. |
| Charles Schuchert | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1942 (born 3 Jul 1858)
American invertebrate paleontologist who was a leader in the development of paleogeography, the study of the distribution of lands and seas in the geological past. During the 1880s he made a living drawing fossil illustrations for state geological surveys, while continuing to search for specimens for his own growing collection. After serving as curator of the U.S. National Museum (1894-1904) Charles Schuchert joined the Yale University faculty following their first invertebrate paleontologist, Charles E. Beecher. |
| Willem de Sitter | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1934 (born 6 May 1872)
Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and cosmologist who developed theoretical models of the universe based on Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. He worked extensively on the motions of the satellites of Jupiter, determining their masses and orbits from decades of observations. He redetermined the fundamental constants of astronomy and determined the variation of the rotation of the earth. He also performed statistical studies of the distribution and motions of stars, but today he is best known for his contributions to cosmology. His 1917 solution to Albert Einstein's field equations showed that a near-empty universe would expand. Later, he and Einstein found an expanding universe solution without space curvature. |
| Sir John William Dawson | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1899 (born 30 Oct 1820)
Canadian geologist who made numerous contributions to Canada's paleobotany and geology, though he opposed Darwin's evolutionary theories. In his day, schoolboys often found fossil leaves while gathering shale to make slate pencils. Thus, as a boy, he developed an incurable interest in geology and was an avid collector of local fossils. His working life began with mining companies and doing field work. He studied the geology of Nova Scotia, with a particular interest in the fossil forests of the coal-bearing strata. Dawson discovered the oldest land plant known at the time, Psilophyton (1859), from Devonian rocks (dating from 408 - 360 million years ago). In Air Breathers of the Coal Period (1863) he described newly discovered fossil animals. |
| Sir John Fowler | |
(EB) |
Died
20 Nov 1898 (born 15 Jul 1817)
(1st Baronet) English civil engineer who helped design and build the London Metropolitan Railway, thus pioneering the original London underground. He was a railway consultant from 1844, and later was engaged in river improvement and dock construction. He designed the Pimlico Railway Bridge which carried the first railway across the Thames (1860) and was consulting engineer to Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt (1871-79). He was joint designer (with Sir Benjamin Baker) of the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland (1882-90), for which work he was knighted (1890).  |
| Henry Draper | |
(EB) |
Died
20 Nov 1882 (born 7 Mar 1837)
American physician and amateur astronomer who made the first photograph of the spectrum of a star (Vega), in 1872. He was also the first to photograph a nebula, the Orion Nebula, in 1880. For his photography of the transit of Venus in 1874, Congress ordered a gold medal struck in his honour. His father, John William Draper, in 1840 had made the first photograph of the Moon. |
| Farkas Bolyai | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1856 (9 Feb 1775)
Hungarian mathematician, poet, and dramatist who spent a lifetime trying to prove Euclid's (fifth) postulate that parallel lines do not meet. While studying at the University of Göttingen, he met as a fellow student, the noted German mathematician Carl F. Gauss, with whom he corresponded as a life-long friend. Bolyai taught mathematics, physics and chemistry at Marosvásárhely all his life. He discouraged his son, János Bolyai, from studying the parallel axiom as he had, writing in a letter to him: "For God's sake, please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life." |
| Christian Goldbach | |
(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1764 (born 18 Mar 1690)
Russian mathematician whose contributions to number theory include Goldbach's conjecture, formulated in a letter to Leonhard Euler dated 7 Jul 1742. Stated in modern terms it proposes that: "Every even natural number greater than 2 is equal to the sum of two prime numbers." It has been checked by computer for vast numbers - up to at least 4 x 1014 - but still remains unproved. Goldbach made another conjecture that every odd number is the sum of three primes, on which Vinogradov made progress in 1937. (It has been checked by computer for vast numbers, but remains unproved.) Goldbach also studied infinite sums, the theory of curves and the theory of equations.« [Image: Letter to Euler, in which Goldbach presented his conjecture.] |
| George Graham | |
c. 1735.(source) |
Died
20 Nov 1751 (born c. 1674)
Eminent English watchmaker who was first a partner with, then successor to Tompion's business. Graham improved Tompion's cylinder escapement. In addition, he invented (c. 1715) the dead-beat escapement (in which the escape wheel remains stationary when not moving forward.) Using these two developments together, Graham's timepieces ran with an accuracy unsurpassed for more than a century and a half. He also made astronomical devices for Edmund Halley, James Bradley, the French Academy of Sciences, and Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery. For the latter, he designed a clockwork model showing the motions of the planets around the Sun, thereafter known as an orrery. He invented a beam caliper with a micrometer screw. |
| Thomas Tompion | |
(EB) |
Died
20 Nov 1713 (baptised 25 Jul 1639)
Most famous English clockmaker of his time, especially known for watchmaking improvements. He worked closely with experimental physicist Robert Hooke, and in 1675, following Hooke's design, Tompion made one of the first English watches regulated by a balance spring. In 1695, with Edward Barlow and William Houghton, he patented the cylinder escapement (a controlling device) that allowed use of a horizontal wheel, enabling Tompion to make the first of the flat and more compact watches. [Image: Bracket clock with oak case ebony veneer, and gilt bronze mounts by Tompion, c. 1690.] |
| NOVEMBER 20 - EVENTS | |
| International Space Station | |
(source) |
In 1998, the first module of the International Space Station was launched
on a Russian Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. This $240
million Zarya functional cargo block was followed two weeks later by the
Unity connecting module from the U.S. After 16 years of planning and design,
the orbiting station was taking shape, the beginning of what some called
"a city in space." The project, initiated by NASA in 1983, also involved
Canada, Japan and the 11 members of the European Space Agency. After the
Cold War, the Russians had been invited to participate, not merely as an
exercise in international cooperation, but also to employ Russian scientists
who might have otherwise sold their expertise to renegade countries. |
| Infant heart transplant | |
(source) |
In 1985, a successful heart transplant to a 4-day-old infant, Eddie Anguiano
known then as Baby Moses, was performed by Dr. Leonard Lee Bailey of the
Loma Linda University Medical Center. Eddie had been born with the fatal
heart defect hypoplastic left heart syndrome, and had only days to live.
Luckily, the heart of a brain-dead baby became available. His was the third
such transplant attempted. The previous two were unsuccessful, but Eddie
thrived.
By his 10th birthday, almost 300 other children at Loma Linda, 203 of them
under six months old, had their faulty hearts replaced. Eddie celebrated
his 21st birthday in 2006*.
In earlier work, Dr Bailey had transplanted a young baboon's heart into
Baby
Fae (26 Oct 1984).« |
| Solar-powered flight | |
(source) |
In 1980, Steve Ptacek in Solar Challenger piloted its first solar-powered
flight. The aircraft was designed
and built by AeroVironment, Inc. (founded in 1971 by ultra-light airplane
innovator, Dr. Paul MacCready). An earlier, 71-ft wingspan, solar-powered
design, the Gossamer Penguin, after test flights, flew about 1.95 miles
at a public demonstration on 7 Aug 1980. Solar Challenger built upon this
experience to be a piloted, solar-powered aircraft strong enough to handle
both long and high flights when encountering normal turbulence. With only
a 46.5-ft wingspan, it had a huge horizontal stabilizer and had enough
wing area for 16,128 solar cells. After design modifications, Ptacek flew
across the English Channel flight on 7 July 1981. |
| Artificial blood transfusion | |
(source) |
In 1979, artificial
blood was first used in a patient by transfusion at the University
of Minnesota Hospital.
The patient was a
Jehovah's Witness, who had refused
a transfusion of real blood because of his religious beliefs. |
| Traffic signal | |
(source) |
In 1923, African-American Garrett Morgan (1877-1963) patented an automatic
traffic
signal. He later sold the technology for the Morgan traffic signal
to General Electric Corporation for $40,000. His invention came after he
had seen an automobile crash into a horse-drawn carriage. Morgan was distressed
by that traffic accident, and so he developed a new way to make streets
safer for motorists and pedestrians. |
| Crystal Detector | |
(source) |
In 1906, a U.S. patent was issued for the crystal
detector, which was one of the first devices widely used
for receiving radio broadcasts (until superseded by the triode vacuum tube).
It was invented by Greenleaf Whittier Pickard,
a U.S. electrical engineer.
His patent described it as "a means for receiving intelligence communicated
by electric waves." |
| Rolls-Royce | |
 |
In 1906, Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce formed Rolls-Royce. |
| Timecard clock | |
(source) |
In 1888, Willard LeGrand Bundy, a jeweller,
was issued the first U.S. patent for a time
recording clock (No. 393,205).
A workman inserted a key which actuating his number by engaging corresponding
catches on a type-wheel mechanism. This printed his identification number
and time on a paper tape. In this way, a company could save the expense
of watchmen or time-keepers usually employed for the purpose of recording
the time of arrival and departure of the employees. With his brother, Bundy
formed the Bundy Manufacturing Company (1889), which later was consolidated
into one of IBM's forerunners in 1902. Bundy clocks were also sold in England,
where they were also used
for time recording to regulate schedules on routes
of trams and buses. |
| Bicycle | |
 |
In 1866, the first U.S. patent on a rotary crank bicycle was issued to
Pierre Lallemont of Paris, France (No. 59,915).
With pedals applied directly to the front wheel, this so called velocipede("fast
foot") was a major advance on the old hobby horse bicycle that had to be
pushed with the feet. It soon came to be known as "the bone shaker" because
being made of stiff materials, straight angles and steel wheels, it gave
a stiff ride over the cobblestone roads of the day. Soon indoor riding
academies, similar to roller rinks, could be found in large cities. He
rode
on it from Ansonia, Conn. to the green at New Haven, Conn. |
| Yoyo | |
(source) |
In 1866, the first U.S. patent
for a yoyo was issued to James L. Haven and Charles Hittrick of Cincinnati,
Ohio. Although termed a "Whirligig" or a "Bandalore" in the patent title,
it had the familiar construction of a yoyo with two disks "coupled together
at their centers by means of a clutch". It was also the first time
rim-weighting to maintain momentum was mentioned in a patent. "It will
be observed that the marginal swell ... exercises the function of a flywheel".
This patent is important since it shows the first use of patents to protect
design improvements in the manufacture of a yoyo. Messrs. Haven and Hettrick
were in the business of mass-producing yoyos over a half century before
the better known Flores brand.« |
