| DECEMBER 7 - BIRTHS | |
| Richard Brooke Roberts | |
 |
 Born 7
Dec 1910; died 4 Apr 1980.
American biophysicist who contributed most to the discovery of "delayed neutrons" - that uranium fission does not release all the neutrons it produces at one time, but some come off at measurably later times. Some are emitted seconds to minutes later. This is crucial in the operation of a fission reactor. In uranium-235 fission in a thermal reactor, the proportion of delayed neutrons is about 0.65 percent. If the reactivity stays below the proportion of delayed neutrons, the reactor can be controlled. The delayed neutrons modify the rate of fission sufficiently to give time for the insertion of control rods. Without the margin of safety provided by the delayed neutrons, nuclear reactors might not be practical at all.* |
| Eleanor Gibson | |
(source) |
Born 6
Dec 1910; died 30 Dec 2002.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who studied learning processes in children. She is remembered for her “visual cliff” experiment which showed how an infant's depth perception helps prevent injuries and falls. In 1960, she placed 6-14 month old infants on a table covered with a sheet of plate glass that extended beyond the table's edge. When enticed with a favorite toy or coaxed by their mothers to crawl out beyond the table's edge onto the clear glass extension, nearly all of the babies withdrew. Thus she demonstrated that babies can distinguish depth. In 1992, Gibson was awarded the National Medal of Science, becoming one of only ten psychologists among 304 recipients of the award since 1962.«  An
Odyssey in Learning and Perception, by Eleanor Gibson |
| Gerard Peter Kuiper | |
(source) |
Born 7
Dec 1905; died 23 Dec 1973.
Dutch-born American astronomer, who discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of Neptune. The Kuiper Belt is so-named after his original suggestion of its existence outside the orbit of Neptune before it was confirmed as a belt of small bodies. He measured the diameter of Pluto. In the Martian atmosphere Kuiper detected carbon dioxide, but the absence of oxygen (1947). In the 1960s, Kuiper pioneered airborne infrared observing using a Convair 990 aircraft and served as chief scientist for the Ranger spacecraft crash-landing probes of the moon. By analyzing Ranger photographs, he identified landing sites on the lunar surface most suitable for safe manned landings.« |
| Charles Lavelle Broley | |
(source) |
Born 7 Dec 1879; died 4 May 1959.
Canadian naturalist, ornithologist, bander and banker whose investigations were among the first to implicate DDT in raptor declines and thus pesticides as environmental threats. Upon retirement from a career in banking (1938) he expanded his interest in nature, and at age 58, he began his study of Florida's bald eagles. In the early 1940s, Broley followed 125 active nests along the peninsula's west coast from Tampa to Fort Myers and banded some 150 young eaglets each year. After 1947, he found the eagle population was declining precipitously. He noted this coincided with the start of DDT spraying in the area. Having concluded that DDT was the culprit, he wrote and lectured on the topic. Later, the early 1960’s, others confirmed his suspicions. [Image left: Broley banding young eagles in 1946, using a rope ladder to climb a tree. Image right: Bald eagle (source)] |
| Louis Dollo | |
(source) |
Born 7
Dec 1857; died 19 Apr 1931.
Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo was a French vertebrate paleontologist who stated Dollo's Law of Irreversibility whereby in evolution an organism never returns exactly to its former state such that complex structures, once lost, are not regained in their original form. (While generally true, some exceptions are known.) He began as an assistant (1882), became keeper of mammals (1891) at the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels where he stayed most of his life. He was a specialist in fossil fishes, reptiles, birds, and their palaeoecology. He supervised the excavation of the famous, multiple Iguanodons found in 1878 by miners deep underground, at Bernissart, Belgium.« |
| Luigi Cremona | |
(source) |
Born 7
Dec 1830; died 10 Jun 1903.
(Antonio) Luigi (Gaudenzio Giuseppe) Cremona was an Italian mathematician who was an originator of graphical statics (the use of graphical methods to study forces in equilibrium) and work in projective geometry. Cremona's work in statics is of great importance and he gave, in a clearer form, some theorems due to Maxwell. In a paper of 1872 Cremona took an idea of Maxwell's on forces in frame structures that had appeared in an engineering journal in 1867 and interpreted Maxwell's notion of reciprocal figures as duality in projective 3-space. These reciprocal figures, for example, have three forces in equilibrium in one figure represented by a triangle while in the reciprocal figure they are represented by three concurrent lines. |
| Leopold Kronecker | |
(source) |
Born 7
Dec 1823; died 29 Dec 1891.
German mathematician who worked to unify arithmetic, algebra and analysis, with a particular interest in elliptic functions, algebraic equations, theory of numbers, theory of determinants and theory of simple and multiple integrals. However the topics he studied were restricted by the fact that he believed in the reduction of all mathematics to arguments involving only the integers and a finite number of steps. He believed that mathematics should deal only with finite numbers and with a finite number of operations. He was the first to doubt the significance of non-constructive existence proofs, and believed that transcendental numbers did not exist. The Kronecker delta function is named in his honour.« |
| Theodor Schwann | |
 |
Born 7
Dec 1810; died 11 Jan 1882.
German physiologist who founded modern histology by defining the cell in Mikroskopische Untersuchungen (1839) as the basic unit of animal structure that makes elementary parts (such as teeth, bone, muscle, cartilage, nerve tissue) by cell differentiation. This laid the foundations for the cell theory. Schwann also worked on fermentation and discovered the enzyme pepsin. Schwann cells are named after him. He also investigated muscular contraction and nerve structure; discovered the striated muscle in the upper esophagus and the Schwann sheath; identified the role of microorganisms in putrefaction; formulated basic principles of embryology (that the egg is a single cell that develops into a complete organism); and coined the term metabolism. |
|
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| DECEMBER 7 - DEATHS | |
| Martin Rodbell | |
(source) |
 Died
7 Dec 1998 (born 1 Dec 1925)
American biochemist who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery in the 1960s of natural signal transducers called G-proteins that help cells in the body communicate with each other. He shared the prize with Alfred G. Gilman, who later proved Rodbell's hypothesis, by isolating the G-protein, which is so named because it binds to nucleotides called guanosine diphosphate and guanosine triphosphate, or GDP and GTP. Prior to Rodbell's research, scientists believed that only two substances--a hormone receptor and an interior cell enzyme--were responsible for cellular communication. Rodbell, however, discovered that the G-protein acted as an intermediate signal transducer between the two. |
| George B. Kistiakowsky | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1982 (born 18 Nov 1900)
George Bogdan Kistiakowsky was a Russian American chemist who worked on developing the first atomic bomb but later advocated banning nuclear weapons. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, and taught chemistry at Princeton University then Harvard (1930-71). He served as special assistant to President Eisenhower for science and technology (1959-61). As head of the explosives division of the Los Alamos Laboratory during WW II (1944-46), he oversaw 600 people developing explosives for the first atom bomb. The conventional explosives are used for its detonation to uniformly compress the plutonium sphere and achieve critical mass. In 1977, he became chairman of the Council for a Livable World, which opposes nuclear war. |
| Alexander Wetmore | |
(credit) |
Died
7 Dec 1978 (born 18 Jun 1886)
American Frank Alexander Wetmore, whose first name was never used, became a prominent ornithologist and avian paleontologist, noted for his research on birds of the Western Hemisphere. Between 1910 and 1924, he worked for with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, Department of Agriculture. In 1925, he was appointed Assistant Secretary, head of the Smithsonian's U.S. National Museum. From 1945 to 1952, he served as the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Upon retiring, he continued his research at the Smithsonian Institution for another quarter century.  |
| Peter Carl Goldmark | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1977 (born 2 Dec 1906)
American engineer (naturalized 1937). While working for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), he developed the first commercial color television system (1936), which used a rotating three-color disk. Although initially approved by the Federal Communications Commission, it was later superseded by an all-electronic color system that was compatible with black-and-white sets. Goldmark also developed the 33-1/3 LP phonograph that greatly increased the playing time of records, which revolutionized the recording industry. He also pioneered in video cassette recording, and developed a scanning system used by the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in 1966 to transmit photographs to the earth from the moon. |
| Cecilia Payne | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1979 (born 10 May 1900)
Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin was an English-born American astronomer who was the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies, and the first to conclude that hydrogen and helium are the two most common elements in the universe. During the 1920s, the accepted explanation of the Sun's composition was a calculation of around 65% iron and 35% hydrogen. At Harvard University, in her doctoral thesis (1925), Payne claimed that the sun's spectrum was consistent with another solution: 99% hydrogen with helium, and just 1% iron. She had difficulty persuading her superiors to take her work seriously. It was another 20 years before Payne's original claim was confirmed, by Fred Hoyle. Cecilia
Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, by
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin |
| Rube Goldberg | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1970 (born 4 Jul 1883)
American cartoonist who satirized the American preoccupation with technology. His name became synonymous with any simple process made outlandishly complicated because of his series of "Invention" cartoons which use a string of outlandish tools, people, plants and steps to accomplish everyday simple tasks in the most complicated way. Goldberg applied his training as a graduate engineer and used his engineering, story-telling, and drawing skills to make sure that the "Inventions" could work, even though dozens of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups, and rods were put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles, and even live animals for simple tasks like squeezing an orange for juice or closing a window in case it should start to rain. Rube
Goldberg: Inventions! by Maynard Frank Wolfe |
| Otto Eisenschiml | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1963 (born 16 June 1880)
Austrian-American chemist and historian. After obtaining a university degree in Vienna he emigrated to the U.S. (1901). He worked as a chemist with the American Linseed Co. In 1910, with Norman Copthorne, he developed a method of determining the presence of fish oils in vegetable oils, and the method was adopted by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture in 1925. Earlier, he had developed the first one-piece window envelope for the Window Envelope Company. Partly to supply the Window Envelope Company with a special varnish for its envelopes, Eisenschiml established the Scientific Oil Company (now Scientific Chemicals, Inc.) He also wrote over a dozen books on the Civil War; the best known is Why Was Lincoln Murdered? (1937). |
| Walter Noddack | |
 |
Died
7 Dec 1960 (born 17 Aug 1893)
Walter Karl Friedrich Noddack was a German chemist who discovered the element rhenium (Jun 1925) in collaboration with his wife Ida Tacke. In 1922, he began a long search for undiscovered elements. After three years, the careful fractionation of certain ores yielded element 75, a rare heavy metallic element that resembles manganese. Named rhenium after the Rhine River, it was the last stable element to be discovered. Noddack is also remembered for arguing for a concept he called allgegenwartskonzentration or, literally, omnipresent concentration. This idea, reminiscent of Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, assumed that every mineral actually contained every element. The reason they could not all be detected was they existed in too small quantities. |
| Forest Ray Moulton | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1952 (born 29 Apr 1872)
American astronomer who collaborated with Thomas Chamberlin in advancing the planetesimal theory of the origin of the solar system (1904). They suggested filaments of matter were ejected when a star passed close to the Sun, which cooled into tiny solid fragments, "planetesimals". Over a very long period, grains collided and stuck together. Continued accretion created pebbles, boulders, and eventually larger bodies whose gravitational force of attraction accelerated the formation of protoplanets. (This formation by accretion is still accepted, but not the stellar origin of the planetesimals.) Moulton was first to suggest that the smaller satellites of Jupiter discovered by Nicholson and others in the early 20th century were captured asteroids - now widely accepted. |
| Sir George Darwin | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1912 (born 9 Jul 1845)
Sir George (Howard) Darwin, the second son of the famous biologist Charles Darwin, was an English astronomer who championed a theory (no longer accepted) that the Moon was once part of the Earth, in what is now the Pacific Ocean. His was the first mathematical analysis of the evolution of Earth's Moon. He suggested that since the effect of the tides has been to slow the Earth's rotation and to cause the Moon to recede from the Earth, then by extrapolating back 4.5 billion years ago the Moon and the Earth would have been very close, with a day being less than five hours. Before this time the two bodies would actually have been one, until the Moon was torn away from the Earth by powerful solar tides that would have deformed the Earth every 2.5 hours. |
| Sir William Jenner | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1898 (born 30 Jan 1815)
Sir William Bart Jenner was an English physician who distinguished between typhus and typhoid. Beginning in 1847 at the London Fever Hospital, by clinical and post mortem examination of thirty-six patients, he recognised that under the name of "continued fever" doctors had confused the two different diseases. He published the results in 1849. His reputation as a pathologist principally rests on making this distinction. In 1861 he was appointed physician extraordinary, and in 1862 physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1862, and to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) in 1863. He attended both the prince consort during the attack of typhoid fever which caused his death, and the prince of Wales in his attack of typhoid fever.« [Image: caricature from Vanity Fair 26 Apr 1863] |
| Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps | |
(source) |
Died
7 Dec 1894 (born 19 Nov 1805)
French diplomat, who supervised the construction of the Suez Canal. While in the consular service in Egypt he became aware of plans to link the Mediterranean and the Red Sea by means of a canal, and from 1854 onwards devoted himself to the project. Work began in 1859 and the Suez Canal was opened ten years later (1869). In 1881, he embarked on the building of the Panama Canal, but had not anticipated the difficulties of this very different enterprise. The climate, with its torrential rains, incessant heat and fatal disease, took its toll. Financial mismanagement, stock failure and bad publicity eventually forced the failure of the company. The project was abandoned in 1889. It was eventually completed by the United States. |
| DECEMBER 7 - EVENTS | |
| Galileo spacecraft orbits Jupiter | |
(NASA) |
In 1995, the Galileo
spacecraft arrived at Jupiter and entered orbit after 6 years years of
travel
including a flyby of Venus and two asteroids, Gaspra
and Ida. The orbiter had also carried an
atmospheric probe with scientific instruments, which it had released from
the main spacecraft in Jul 1995, five months before reaching Jupiter Galileo
then spent a further 8 years examining Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa.
In 1994, the Galileo orbiter was present to watch the fragments
of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter. Its mission was concluded
21
Sep 2003 by sending the orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere at a speed
of nearly 50 km/sec, destroying it to avoid any chance of it contaminating
local moons with bacteria from Earth.« |
| Execution by lethal injection | |
|
In 1982, the first person executed by lethal injection in the U.S. was
Charles Brooks in Texas. In this form of execution,
the condemned person is usually bound to a gurney, attached to heart monitors
and two needles (one is a back-up) are then inserted into suitable veins.
Long tubes connect the needle through a hole in a cement block wall to
several intravenous drips. The first is a harmless saline solution followed
by an anesthetic, which puts the inmate to sleep. Next flows a chemical
which paralyzes the entire muscle system and stops the inmate's breathing.
Finally, the flow of another chemical stops the heart. Death results from
anesthetic overdose and respiratory and cardiac arrest while the condemned
person is unconscious. |
|
| Last moon mission | |
(source) |
In
1972, Apollo 17, the sixth and last U.S. moon mission, blasted off from
Cape Canaveral. Flight Commander Eugene
Cernan was the last man on the moon. With him on the voyage of the
command module America and the lunar module Challenger were Ronald
Evans (command module pilot) and Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt (lunar module
pilot). In maneuvering Challenger to a landing at Taurus-Littrow, located
on the southeast edge of Mare Serenitatis, Cernan and Schmitt activated
a base of operations from which they completed three highly successful
excursions to the nearby craters and the Taurus mountains, making the Moon
their home for over three days. The mission returned on 19 Dec. |
| Jet stream | |
(source) |
In 1934, Wiley Post is credited with discovering the jet stream when he
flew into the stratosphere over Bartlesville, Oklahoma. With the financial
backing of Oklahoma oil pioneer Frank Phillips, Post planned flights to
test the "thin air" in the stratosphere above 50,000 feet. The Winnie
Mae, made of plywood, could not be pressurized so Post developed the
pressurized
flying suit, forerunner of the modern space suit. Made by B.F. Goodrich,
it was of double ply rubberized parachute fabric, with pigskin gloves,
rubber boots, and aluminium helmet, pressurized to 0.5 bar. In Mar 1935,
Post flew from Burbank California to Cleveland Ohio in the stratosphere
using the jet stream. At times, his ground speed exceeded 550 kph in a
290 kph aircraft. |
| Gyrostabilized ship | |
(source) |
In 1932, the first gyro-stabilized
vessel to cross the Atlantic, the Conte
di Savoia of the Italian Line, arrived in New York City. The ship
had 48,502 gross tons, overall length 814.6ft x beam 96.1ft, two funnels,
two masts, four screws and a speed of 27 knots. As one of the first ships
to be fitted with gyro-stabilizers, it was claimed that rolling was limited
to a maximum of three degrees. The maiden voyage began from Genoa
to Villefranche and New York on 30 Nov 1932. Early gyro-stabilizer experiments
were carried out by Herr Otto Schlick on the Sea-bar
torpedo-boat on 17 Jul 1906. The first Sperry gyro-stabilizer to stop roll
on ships was installed on a ship in 1915 by the Sperry Company (Elmer A.
Sperry). Image right (source) |
| Refrigerator | |
(source) |
In 1926, the first U.S. patent for a household refrigerator, operating
on gas, was issued to The Electrolux
Servel Corporation. The gas-heat driven absorption refrigerator was
invented by Swedish engineering students Carl G. Munters and Baltzar von
Platen. The new concept avoided the use of toxic gases such as sulphur
dioxide, methyl chloride, and ammonia gases, used in earlier mechanical
compressor home refrigerators since 1918. The new Electrolux-Servel refrigerator
entered the US market in 1926, and after 1927 became the sole gas refrigerator
on the US market until the 1950s. A tiny gas flame and a tiny flow of water
in the refrigerator took the place of all moving parts, circulating a liquid
refrigerant which was hermetically sealed in rigid steel. |
| Bakelite | |
(source) |
In 1909, Leo
Baekeland of Yonkers, New York, received the first U.S. patents for
a thermosetting artificial plastic which he called Bakelite. The patent
(No. 942,699) for "an improvement in methods of making insoluble condensation
products of phenol-formaldehyde" is commonly referred to as the "heat and
pressure" patent. (Related patents Nos. 942,700 and -809). Bakelite
gave birth to the modern plastics industry. Using money from his first
invention, Velox photographic paper, he established a laboratory, where
he synthesized Bakelite, a nonflammable material that was cheaper and more
versatile than other known plastics. Bakelite has since been used in everything
from engine parts to jewelry to electronics. Image
(left): The original Bakelizer, used by Baekeland and his coworkers from
1907 to 1910 to form Bakelite. Image (right) source. |
| Pneumatic tyre | |
(source) |
In 1889, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish inventor, was issued a patent for
his pnematic tyre. In 1887, when his 9-yr-old son complained of the rough
ride he experienced on his tricycle over the cobbled streets of Belfast.
Dunlop devised and fitted rubber air tubes held on to a wooden ring by
tacking a linen covering fixed around the wheels. Due to the major improvement
in riding comfort, Dunlop continued development, until he patented the
idea. * [p.223] [Image:
John Boyd Dunlop] |
| Pasteur quotation | |
(source) |
In
1884, during a lecture presented at the University of Lille, Louis
Pasteur made his much-quoted remark,
"In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind" (Dans
les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés).
Earlier in the same year, Pasteur had announced a vaccine against rabies
in dogs. His work on rabies had begun in 1880, but progress was slow because
he was dealing with a virus and that would not grow on artificial media.
But eventually he applied his passaging
technique with great success. With the universal application of this vaccine,
he thought that the threat of rabies could surely be reduced if not eliminated. |
| HMS Challenger | |
(source) |
In 1872, the H.M.S.
Challenger embarked from Portsmouth, England on the world's first
scientific voyage
around the world. Physicists, chemists, and biologists collaborated with
expert navigators to map the sea. The Challenger was a corvette
class ship, a military vessel that traveled under sail but had auxiliary
steam power. The ship was fitted with a natural history laboratory where
specimens were examined, identified, dissected and drawn; a chemistry laboratory;
and scientific equipment. During the 4 year journey, ending on 24 May 1876,
the voyage zig-zagged around the globe to visit every continent, sounded
the ocean bottom to a depth of 26,850-ft, found many new species, and provided
collections for scores of biologists. [Image:
Instrument and Sampling Platform on HMS Challenger]
"The
Silent Landscape: The Scientific Voyage of HMS Challenger" by
Richard Corfield |
| East London railway tunnel | |
 |
In 1869, the Thames Tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping in London, the
world's first tunnel under a navigable river, was re-opened with the East
London Railway line. Work had started
on 2 Mar 1825. Excavation was engineered by Marc
Brunel, for which he invented the tunneling shield to reduce the danger
of collapse while digging through soft sediments. Beginning his own engineering
career, his son Isambad Brunel
assisted. They persevered through 18 years, including floods, human disasters,
and delays caused by financing difficulties. Planned ramps for use by carts
and freight traffic were never added due to cost, but it was opened
for pedestrian use on 25 Mar 1843. It remains in use as the oldest part
of the London Underground.« |
