| DECEMBER 10 - BIRTHS | |
| Howard Martin Temin | |
(source) |
 Born 10
Dec 1934; died 9 Feb 1994.
American virologist who in 1975 shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with his former professor Renato Dulbecco and another of Dulbecco's students, David Baltimore, for his codiscovery of the enzyme reverse transcriptase. In 1961, Temin's formed a provirus hypothesis that cancer cells affect genetic material. The protein coat of certain viruses contains an enzyme that facilitates the copying of viral genes into the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the host cell. In 1970 he and Baltimore both independently isolated the enzyme, now called reverse transcriptase. The viruses that contain the enzyme are known as retroviruses. Temin also investigated how genetic information in the provirus transforms a normal animal cell into a tumor cell. |
| Ross Taylor | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1932; died 24 Oct 2003.
(Robert Murray) Ross Taylor was a Scottish transplant surgeon who pioneered the technique of kidney transplantation in the U.K. and made more than 2,000 kidney transplants since 1967 when he was part of the team that completed the first kidney transplant to be undertaken in the north of England. Acknowledged worldwide as an expert in his field, he trained many of the leading practitioners. At the time of his death, five of the principal transplant centres in Britain were led by surgeons he had mentored. Taylor was active not only in the ethical and moral aspects, but also in fundraising and developing support for transplant recipients. For 15 years he was chairman of the annual Transplant Games, 3-day sports competition for transplant recipients. |
| Walter Henry Zinn | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1906; died 14 Feb 2000.
Canadian-American nuclear physicist who contributed to the U.S. atomic bomb project during World War II and to the development of the nuclear reactor. He collaborated with Leo Szilard, investigating atomic fission. In 1939, they demonstrated that uranium underwent fission when bombarded with neutrons and that part of the mass was converted into energy (given by E = mc2). This work led him into research into the construction of the atomic bomb during WW II. After the war Zinn started the design of an atomic reactor and, in 1951, he built the first breeder reactor. In a breeder reactor, the core is surrounded by a "blanket" of uranium-238 and neutrons from the core convert this into plutonium-239, which can also be used as a fission fuel. |
| Henry Nicholas Ridley | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1855; died 24 Oct 1956.
English botanist who was largely responsible for establishing the rubber industry in the Malay Peninsula. At the turn of century (1888-1912), as the first Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens Ridley conducted experiments with Para rubber trees (Hevea brasiliensis) that convinced him of the enormous economic potential of rubber as a plantation crop. After developing a more efficient tapping method, he began a campaign to establish a rubber industry. Despite considerable initial opposition among planters, he persisted, and by 1896 Malaya's planters were convinced, and the first rubber estates were planted using his seeds. Ridley also carried out an extensive study of plants of the Malay Peninsula, especially monocotyledons. |
| Melvil Dewey | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1851; died 26 Dec 1931.
American librarian who developed library science in the U.S., especially with his system of classification, the Dewey Decimal Classification (1876), for library cataloging. His system of classification (1876) uses numbers from 000 to 999 to cover the general fields of knowledge and designating more specific subjects by the use of decimal points. He was an activist in the spelling reform and metric system movements. Dewey invented the vertical office file, winning a gold medal at the 1893 World's Fair. It was essentially an enlarged version of a card catalogue, where paper documents hung vertically in long drawers.«  Melvil
Dewey: The Man and the Classification, by Stevenson and
Kramer. |
| Countess Augusta Ada King Lovelace | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1815; died 29 Nov 1852.
English mathematician, the legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, was educated privately, studying mathematics and astronomy in addition to the more traditional topics. She seems to have developed an early ambition to be a famous scientist. After she met Charles Babbage in 1833, she began to assist in the development of his analytical engine and published notes on the work. She was one of the first to recognize the potential of computers and has been called the first computer programmer. (The programming language Ada is named after her.) Her other plans, such as a Calculus of the Nervous System, failed to mature - the obstacles in her way were simply too great. As a woman, for example, she was denied access to the Royal Society Library. |
| Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi | |
(source) |
Born 10
Dec 1804; died 18 Feb 1851.
German mathematician who, with the independent work of Niels Henrik Abel of Norway, founded the theory of elliptic functions. He also worked on Abelian functions and discovered the hyperelliptic functions. Jacobi applied his work in elliptic functions to number theory. He also investigated mathematical analysis and geometry. Jacobi carried out important research in partial differential equations of the first order and applied them to the differential equations of dynamics. His work on determinants is important in dynamics and quantum mechanics and he studied the functional determinant now called the Jacobian. |
| Matthias William Baldwin | |
 |
Born 10 Dec 1795; died 7 Sep 1866.
American manufacturer whose significant improvements of the steam locomotive included a steam-tight metal joint that permitted his engines to use steam at double the pressure of others. In 1819 he had established himself as a jeweller and devised a patent gold plating process. He left this trade in 1825 to become a machinist in the manufacture of engravers and book-makers tools; later expanding into hydraulic presses and forms of copper and steel rolls for the calico printing trade. In 1832, he built the locomotive Old Ironsides. He developed tight-fitting steam joints, raising steam pressure from 60 pounds per square inch to 120 psi, which meant far better performance. Baldwin's locomotive works eventually produced over 1,000 locomotives. |
|
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| DECEMBER 10 - DEATHS | |
| Carl Wagner | |
 Died
10 Dec 1977 (born 25 May 1901)
German physical chemist and metallurgist who was helped shape the field of chemical metallurgy as an exact science. In the late 1920's, with Walter Schottky, he coauthored papers published in German journals that first organized the field of defect structures in solid-state materials. Wagner researched in particular the result of lattice defects in the arrangement of atoms in oxides and sulphides.« |
|
| Gustav Waldemar Elmen | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1957 (born 22 Dec 1876)
Swedish-American electrical engineer and metallurgist who created Permalloy (1916) and related alloys with high magnetic permeability used in communications equipment. An alloy with this property can be easily magnetized and demagnetized, especially useful for applications in electrical equipment, telephones and other communications systems. He developed the nickel-iron Permalloy in 1916, for Western Electric Company (later Bell Telephone Laboratories). Later, in 1923, Elmen found that magnetic permeability could be dramatically enhanced if Permalloy was heat treated. Its magnetic permeability exceeded that of silicon steel. His discovery made possible deep-sea telegraph cables of large message- carrying capacity.« |
| T. Russell Wilkins | |
| Died
10 Dec 1940 (born 6 Jun 1891)
T(homas) Russell Wilkins was a Canadian physicist who secured photographic recordings of cosmic rays and the disintegration of radium atoms. He moved to the U.S. in 1926. In Apr 1939 he announced the perfection of a camera that was able to record the "footprints" of invisible atoms after they collide. In October of the same year, he received a medal from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain recognizing his work regarding the use of photographic emulsions in the study of radium. A year later, in Oct 1940, he perfected a camera that could determine the energy levels inside the nuclei of stable chemical elements. Dr. Wilkins died quite suddenly of a heart attack on his way back to his laboratory after a faculty meeting. |
|
| Theobald Smith | |
 |
Died
10 Dec 1934 (born 31 July 1859)
American microbiologist and pathologist who discovered the causes of several infectious and parasitic diseases. He is often considered the greatest American bacteriologist. In 1892 he linked Texas cattle fever with a protozoan parasite spread by blood-sucking ticks. At the time, many scientists were skeptical that disease would be spread by bloodsucking arthropods. However, the precedent was established for other scientists to make links in cases of other diseases spread by insects. In 1909, Theobald Smith used toxin/antitoxin as a vaccine for diphtheria. In 1919, Theobald Smith, investigated infectious abortions of U.S. cattle. |
| Addison Emery Verrill | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1926 (born 9 Feb 1839)
American zoologist and naturalist who, as curator of zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, developed one of the largest, most valuable zoological collections in the United States. From 1871-87, while he was in charge of scientific explorations by the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Verrill found and described hundreds of new marine specimens. He specialized in invertebrates, especially worms, mollusks, corals, sponges, and starfishes, and made important technical improvements in the equipment used for collecting specimens. His expeditions took him to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America and to Hawaii and Central America; many of his more than 300 papers became standard references. |
| Horace E. Dodge | |
 |
Died
10 Dec 1920 (born 17 May 1888)
Horace Elgin Dodge, with his brother John Francis Dodge, were American automobile manufacturers who invented one of the first all-steel cars in America. They built their first Dodge car Nov 1914 in Detroit, Mich. |
| Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker | |
1896 (source) |
Died
10 Dec 1911 (born 30 June 1817)
English botanist who was assistant on Sir James Ross's Antarctic expedition and whose botanical travels to foreign lands included India, Palestine and the U.S., from which he became a leading taxonomists in his time. His Student's Flora of the British Islands became a standard text. He was a great friend of Charles Darwin, and they collaborated in research. With Charles Lyell, Hooker encouraged the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. He served (1855-65) as assistant director to his father, Sir William Jackson Hooker, of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, whom he succeeded as director for another 20 years. He was also a president of the Royal Society. At age 94, he died in his sleep and was buried at Kew.«
Sir
Joseph Dalton Hooker: Traveller and Plant Collector,
by Ray Desmond. |
| Alfred Bernhard Nobel | |
 |
Died
10 Dec 1896 (born 21 Oct 1833)
Alfred Bernhard Nobel a Swedish chemist and inventor of dynamite and other, more powerful explosives, was born in Stockholm. An explosives expert like his father, in 1866 he invented a safe and manageable form of nitroglycerin he called dynamite, and later, smokeless gunpowder and (1875) gelignite. He helped to create an industrial empire manufacturing many of his other inventions. Nobel amassed a huge fortune, much of which he left in a fund to endow the annual prizes that bear his name. First awarded in 1901, these prizes were for achievements in the areas of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. The sixth prize, for economics, was instituted in his honour in 1969.
Alfred
Nobel: A Biography, by Kenne Fant. |
| Eduard Rüppell | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1884 (born 20 Nov 1794)
(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.« |
| Jared Kirtland | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1877 (born 10 Nov 1793)
Jared Potter Kirtland was an American naturalist, horticulturalist and physician. He is credited with originating 26 varieties of cherries and 6 of pears. In 1838, Kirtland published the first list of amphibians collected in Ohio. On 13 May 1851 he made the first discovery of a migrating song bird on his farm near Cleveland, Ohio, which was named Kirtland's Warbler. This yellow-breasted, bluish-gray bird's song can be heard from a quarter of a mile away. It is also one of the rarest birds in the world. The Warbler's finicky nesting requirements also make it extremely unusual. Some still nest in the jack pines of Northern Michigan, but they are on the endangered list. |
| Henry Rowe Schoolcraft | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1864 (born 28 Mar 1793)
American explorer and ethnologist noted for his discovery of the source of the Mississippi River (1832) in a lake in northern Minnesota which he named Lake Itasca, from the Latin words caput (head) and veritas (true). His early interest was rocks and minerals, which led to a geological survey expedition, then employment as a map-maker and government agent on the Northwest Frontier, near Lake Superior. He became interested in Native Americans and from these studies wrote about their history, language, mythology, hieroglyphics, picture writing, maxims, characteristics and potential, religious beliefs, and influence of Christian missionaries. Further, he addressed the past and future roles of the federal government and the Indian. |
| Thomas Johann Seebeck | |
(source) |
Died 10 Dec 1831 (born 9 Apr 1770)
German physicist who discovered (1821) that an electric current flows between different conductive materials that are kept at different temperatures, known as the Seebeck effect. It is the basis of the thermocouple and is considered the most accurate measurement of temperature. It is also a key component of the semi-conductor, the foundation of the modern computer business. Seebeck's work was the basis of German physicist Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854) discoveries in electricity and of French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier (1785-1845), whose Peltier effect became well known as a way to use electricity to freeze water (air conditioning, refrigeration). [Image right: (source)] |
| Edmund Gunter | |
1954 (source) |
Died
10 Dec 1626 (born 1581)
English mathematician who invented many useful measuring devices, including a forerunner of the slide rule. Gunter published seven figure tables of logarithms of sines and tangents in 1620 in Canon Triangulorum, or Table of Artificial Sines and Tangents. The words cosine and cotangent are due to him. He made a mechanical device, Gunter's scale, to multiply numbers based on the logs using a single scale and a pair of dividers. He also invented Gunter's chain which was 22 yards long with 100 links. It was used for surveying and the unit of area called an acre is ten square chains. Gunter also did important work on navigation, publishing New Projection of the Sphere in 1623. He also studied magnetic declination and was the first to observe the secular variation. |
| William Gilbert | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1603 (born 24 May 1544)
English scientist, the "father of electrical studies" and a pioneer researcher into magnetism, who spent years investigating magnetic and electrical attractions. Gilbert coined the names of electric attraction, electric force, and magnetic pole. He became the most distinguished man of science in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Noting that a compass needle not only points north and south, but also dips downward, he thought the Earth acts like a bar magnet. Like Copernicus, he believed the Earth rotates on its axis, and that the fixed stars were not all at the same distance from the earth. Gilbert thought it was a form of magnetism that held planets in their orbits. |
| Ibn Rushd (Averroes) | |
(source) |
Died
10 Dec 1198 (born 1126)
Spanish-Arab philosopher, physician, and astronomer. He is known for his Kulliyat fi ab tb (Generalities on Medicine) produced between 1162-69 on topics ranging from organ anatomy and hygiene to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. In this work, which spread widely in translations, he attempted to logically codify the existing medical knowledge. He critized adherance to tradition and instead stressed the importance of empirical evidence. In astronomy, he believed that the motion of the planets had to be around a physical centre (the Earth) and rejected Ptolemy's system of epicycles. He was also the most famous of the medieval Islamic philosophers and a principal interpreter of Aristotle.« [Image: Ibn Rushd as portrayed in a detail from Raffaello Sanzio's fresco, The School of Athens (1509).] |
| DECEMBER 10 - EVENTS | |
| Hubble Telescope repaired | |
 |
In 1993, the crew of the space shuttle "Endeavour" deployed the repaired
Hubble Space Telescope into Earth orbit. |
| New planet | |
|
In 1984, the National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the
first planet outside our solar system, orbiting a star 21 million light
years from Earth. |
|
| Land speed record | |
(source) |
In 1954, to determine if a pilot could eject from an airplane at supersonic
speed and live, Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp, a flight surgeon, rode a rocket
sled to 632 mph. The Sonic Wind was the rocket powered sled
that Stapp rode at Holloman
Air Force Base, New Mexico. The sled's rocket motors generated 40,000 lbs.
of thrust and he reached a speed of 632 mph in five seconds. At the end
of the ride Stapp was stopped in 1.25 seconds which subjected him to 40
Gs. It was the equivalent of hitting a brick wall in a car traveling at
120 mph. Data from 29 increasingly harsh rocket-sled rides during the 1950s
proved invaluable in the design of improved helmets, arm and leg restraints,
better aircraft seats, and stronger safety harnesses. |
| Nobel Prizes | |
|
In 1901, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. The king of Sweden distributed
the first Nobel Prizes, in accordance with the will of inventor Alfred
Nobel. |
|
| Parker fountain pen patent | |
|
In 1899, George Safford Parker was issued a U.S. patent on the first fountain
pen he developed after experimenting to produce a more reliable design
than those previously available from other manufacturers. Two years later
in Feb 1892, the Parker Pen Company was incorporated, funded with $1,000
from his partner, William Palmer, an insurance broker. Parker continued
making improvements, and filed several more patents. Then, patented on
4 Dec1894, the Lucky Curve design became the foundation for the Parker
Pen Company's first significant success because of its improved ink feed
that avoided spillage in the cap while being carried. |
|
| Traffic lights | |
(source) |
In 1868, gas-lit traffic lights were first placed in operation at the corner
of Bridge Street and New Palace Yard, London, England, atop a 22-ft high
cast-iron pillar. Semaphore arms were used with a revolving lantern
which shone a red signal to indicate the oncoming trafffic should stop,
and green to continue with caution. A constable turned the lantern using
a lever at the base. Richard Mayne, Metro Commissioner of Police ordered
the traffic signal to facilitate access for Members of Parliament to the
Houses of Parliament. When removed in 1872, it had been the only traffic
light in London, and no other traffic control of its kind was made for
half a century.*« |
| Oxyhydrogen blow-pipe | |
|
In 1801, Robert Hare (1781-1858) presented
to the Chemical Society of Philadelphia his paper, Memoir of the Supply
and Application of the Blow-Pipe. It presented the twenty-year-old
scientist's discovery relating to the intense production of heat with his
oxyhydrogen blow-pipe, progenitor of the welding torch. The Society published
the paper the following year, and accounts of the invention also appeared
in Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine and in the Annales de Chemie. In 1839
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the first of its
Rumford Medals. |
|
| Tyres | |
|
In 1845, civil engineer Robert Thompson patented pneumatic tyres in London. |
|
| Metric system | |
|
In 1799, a second legal definition of the metre
was made by the French National Assembly to be 3 feet and 11.296 lines
of the toise of Paris (shorter of 0.144 line than the 1795 measure, and
without the "meridian" form of definition). The metric system was made
compulsory by law in France. |
|
