| FEBRUARY 14 - BIRTHS | |
| Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld | |
 Born 14
Feb 1954
Soviet mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990 for his work in algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. |
|
| Herbert A. Hauptman | |
| Born 14
Feb 1917
American mathematician and crystallographer who, along with Jerome Karle, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1985. They developed mathematical methods for deducing the molecular structure of chemical compounds from the patterns formed when X rays are diffracted by their crystals. |
|
| Willem J. Kolff | |
| Born 14
Feb 1911
Dutch-American physician, and biomedical engineer who pioneered artificial organs. He invented the artificial kidney machine (1943) then he emigrated to the U.S. (1950), and headed a team which invented and tested an artificial heart. In Dec1957, the implantation of a totally artificial heart in the chest of an animal, a dog, was accomplished for the first time. It was a pneumatic pump which kept the dog alive for 90 minutes. By 2 Dec 1982, under his supervision, the first fully artificial heart was implanted in a human patient. It was designed by Robert K. Jarvik, one of Kolff's students, that implanted the artificial heart which kept the patient, Barney Clark, alive for 112 days, thus proving the viability of such a procedure. |
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| Fritz Zwicky | |
| Born 14
Feb 1898; died 8 Feb 1974.
Swiss astronomer and physicist, who made valuable contributions to the theory and understanding of supernovas (stars that for a short time are far brighter than normal). |
|
| Edward Arthur Milne | |
| Born 14
Feb 1896; died 21 Sep 1950.
English astrophysicist and cosmologist best known for his development of kinematic relativity. |
|
| Julius Arthur Nieuwland | |
(source) |
Born 14
Feb 1878; died 11 Jun 1936.
Belgian-born American organic chemist who studied reactions of acetylene and invented neoprene. He was ordained as a priest (1903) before earning his Ph.D. (1904). He did not pursue his own discovery of the reaction between acetylene and arsenic trichloride, but it led to the development of the chemical-warfare agent lewisite dubbed "the dew of death", a poison gas and vesicant used in WW I. He collaborated with DuPont chemists in thepolymerization of acetylene and development of chloroprene, which in turn could be polymerized to the first really successful synthetic rubber, neoprene. This was superior to rubber in many ways such as in its resistance to sunlight, abrasion, and temperature extremes. |
| Greenleaf Whittier Pickard | |
| Born 14
Feb 1877; died 8 Jan 1956.
U.S. electrical engineer who invented the crystal detector (one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts), a key component in early radio and a forerunner of the transistor. Also, Pickard was one of the first scientists to demonstrate the wireless electromagnetic transmission of speech when, in 1899, he transmitted a spoken message over a distance of ten miles. |
|
| C.T.R. Wilson | |
(EB) |
Born 14
Feb 1869; died 15 Nov 1959.
Scottish physicist who, with Arthur H. Compton, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for his invention of the Wilson cloud chamber, which became widely used in the study of radioactivity, X rays, cosmic rays, and other nuclear phenomena. His discovery was a method of rendering visible the tracks of such electrically charged particles. It is based upon the formation of clouds, which develop when sufficiently moist air is suddenly expanded, thus dropping the temperature below the dew-point. Thereafter, vapour condenses into small drops, and form around dust particles, or even, an electrically charged atomic particle. The formation of droplets is so dense that photographs show continuous tracks of particles travelling through the chamber as white lines. |
| Waldemar Lindgren | |
(source) |
Born 14
Feb 1860; died 3 Nov 1939.
Swedish-born American economic geologist who was a leader in the science of ore deposition and the use of the petrographic microscope. He helped establish that veins of metal and similar deposits are created by hot solutions derived from molten rock below, not by water seepage from above. His interest in geology began as a youth from reading a book on mineralogy and a visit at the age of 10 to the west coast of Sweden where rocks are beautifully exposed. By the time he was 17 he had seen the mines of central Sweden and the famous old silver workings of Kongsberg in Norway. As a young mining geologist, he emigrated to America in Jun 1883, drawn by the rapidly growing mining industry of the Western United States. |
| Joseph Thomson | |
| Born 14
Feb 1858; died 2 Aug 1895.
Scottish geologist, naturalist and explorer who was the first European to enter several regions of eastern Africa and whose writings are outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge, exceptional for their careful records and surveys. Thomson's gazelle (Gazella thomsoni), the most common gazelle of eastern Africa, was named for him. |
|
| Margaret E. Knight | |
| Born 14
Feb 1838; died 12 Oct 1914.
Prolific American inventor of machines and mechanisms for a variety of industrial and everyday purposes. She created, but did not patent, her first invention at age 12, a cutoff device that shut down a power loom automatically when a steel-tipped shuttle fell out. Her first patent came in 1870 when she invented an improved machine to make paper bags with flat bottoms instead of the usual V-shaped ones. The 27 patents she eventually held for inventions included shoe-cutting machines and even a new valve sleeve for an auto engine. She never married, and her creative genius never made her rich. As a self-supporting working-class woman, she had rarely been able to wait for royalties but sold the rights to her inventions outright.* |
|
| George Bassett Clark | |
(source) |
Born 14 Feb 1827; died 20 Dec 1891.
Elder son in the American family of telescope makers and astronomers, Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridge, Mass., who figured importantly in the great expansion of astronomical facilities which occurred during the second half of the 19th century. Before the family business began, George made a telescope in 1844 out of the melted-down brass of his school's broken dinner bell. His father, Alvan Clark, was at the time an established portrait painter, but his son's interest also spurred his father to begin making refractor telescopes. (Refractor telescopes use paired lenses to focus light.) The father taught himself to be a master optician, and eventually in business with his sons made the finest refractor telescopes of their time including five of the world's largest.« Images (left) Dearborn Telescope, circa 1864; (right): George Bassett Clark  Alvan
Clark & Sons, Artists in Optics, by Warner and Ariail. |
| Christopher Latham Sholes | |
| Born 14
Feb 1819; died 17 Feb 1890.
U.S. inventor who developed the typewriter. A printer and newspaper editor by trade, he developed a page numbering machine in the mid-1800s. A friend suggested he modify the machine into a letter-printing device. Sholes patented the typewriter in 1868 and sold the rights to Remington in 1873. |
|
| Sir Goldsworthy Gurney | |
(source) |
Born 14
Feb 1793; died 28 Feb 1875.
Prolific English inventor who built technically successful steam carriages a half century before the advent of the gasoline-powered automobile. His carriage successfully travelled between London and Bath at an average speed 15 mph. He built several more and opened a passenger service. However, powerful opposition from horse-coach companies ensured that they were soon taxed out of existence. Another of his inventions was the "Bude Light" which lit the House of Commons for 60 years. It was a standard oil lamp with oxygen gas introduced into the middle of the flame. The unburned carbon in the oil flame burned with an intense, white light instead of the weak yellow flame of the oil lamp. He introduced the use of limelight to lighthouses. |
| Thomas Robert Malthus | |
| Born 14
Feb 1766; died 23 Dec 1834
English economist and demographer, best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of the lot of mankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. eb |
|
| Georg Christian Füchsel | |
| Born 14
Feb 1722; died 20 Jun 1773.
German geologist, a pioneer in the development of stratigraphy, the study of rock strata. The originator of the idea of stratigraphic formations, he was one of the first actually to make recorded measurements of sections of stratified rock. His major work, Historia terrae et maris, ex historia Thuringiae, per montium descriptionem, eruta (1861) is unusual for its purely geological orientation. It contains the general principles of historical geology, the extensive description of the Thüringen Wald, and explantions of the causes of dynamic changes in the earth's crust and the origin of veins and their minerals. He also made the first published geological map of Germany and adjacent areas. |
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Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| FEBRUARY 14 - DEATHS | |
| Walter Henry Zinn | |
(source) |
 Died
14 Feb 2000 (born 10 Dec 1906)
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. |
| Sir Julian Huxley | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1975 (born 22 Jun 1887)
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley was an English biologist, philosopher, educator, and author who greatly influenced the modern development of embryology, systematics, and studies of behaviour and evolution. He studied the differential growth of different body parts, Problems of Relative Growth (1932). He wrote many popular articles and essays, especially on ornithology and evolution, and co-produced several history films, including the Private Life of the Gannet (1934). No stranger to controversy, Huxley supported the contentious view that the human race could benefit from planned parenthood using artificial insemination by donors of "superior characteristics". (He was the grandson of biologist T. H. Huxley and brother of Aldous Huxley.) |
| Karl (Guthe) Jansky | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1950 (born 22 Oct 1905)
Karl Guthe Jansky was an American electrical engineer who discovered cosmic radio emissions in 1932. At Bell Laboratories in NJ, Jansky was tracking down the crackling static noises that plagued overseas telephone reception. He found certain radio waves came from a specific region on the sky every 23 hours and 56 minutes, from the direction of Sagittarius toward the center of the Milky Way. In the publication of his results, he suggested that the radio emission was somehow connected to the Milky Way and that it originated not from stars but from ionized interstellar gas. At the age of 26, Jansky had made a historic discovery - that celestial bodies could emit radio waves as well as light waves. |
| David Hilbert | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1943 (born 23 Jan 1862)
German mathematician who reduced geometry to a series of axioms and contributed substantially to the establishment of the formalistic foundations of mathematics. In his book, Foundations of Geometry, he presented the first complete set of xioms since Euclid. His work in 1909 on integral equations led to 20th-century research in functional analysis (in which functions are studied as groups.) Today Hilbert's name is often best remembered through the concept of Hilbert space in quantum physics, a space of infinite dimensions. |
| Carl Erich Correns | |
| Died
14 Feb 1933 (born 19 Sep 1864)
German botanist and geneticist who in 1900, independent of, but simultaneously with, the biologists Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg and Hugo de Vries, rediscovered Gregor Mendel's historic paper outlining the principles of heredity. In attempting to ascertain the extent to which Mendel's laws are valid, he undertook a classic study of non-Mendelian heredity in variegated plants, such as the four-o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa) which he established (1909) as the first conclusive example of extrachromosomal, or cytoplasmic, inheritance (cases in which certain characteristics of the progeny are determined by factors in the cytoplasm of the female sex cell). |
|
| Joseph Lakanal | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1845 (born 14 Jul 1762)
Educator who reformed the French educational system during the French Revolution. He was a respected scientist of the time, and observed the development of the telegraph by Ignace Chappe. On 2 Jul 1793 Joseph Lakanal filed a report to the legislature on Chappe's behalf, requesting officially that the mayors of the three communities where the first telegraphs were being erected would be ordered to take measures for the protection of the telegraphs. On 25 Feb 1795, Joseph Lakanal defined on behalf of the French Revolution an "educational utopia" which would "put an end to inequalities of development that affected a citizen's capacities for judgment." |
| Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhof | |
Glucose |
Died
14 Feb 1833 (born 19 Feb 1764)
German-Russian chemist who applied the first controlled catalytic reaction to produce glucose, developed a method for refining vegetable oil, and also experimented with brewing and fermentation. He formed the smaller molecule of glucose (the commonest simple sugar) by the catalytic enzyme hydrolysis of the large starch molecule (1811). The method he discovered for the industrial refining of vegetable oil enabled him to established a factory in St. Petersburg capable of producing two tons per day. In other investigations, he provided the groundwork for scientific study of the brewing and fermentation processes.« |
| Henry Maudslay | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1831 (born 22 Aug 1771)
British engineer and inventor of the metal lathe and other devices. Maudslay was apprenticed to locksmith Joseph Bramah, and soon became his foreman. When he left to go into business for himself, Maudslay's first job was construction of machinery for the ship block (pulley) factory of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. Through three decades during the Industrial Revolution, Maudslay invented various important machines, but of these the metal lathe particularly noteworthy. He also invented methods for printing calico cloth and for desalting seawater for ships' boilers. He perfected a measuring machine that was accurate to 0.0001 inch, and produced for his workshop accurate standard planes. |
| James Cook | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1779 (born 28 Oct 1728)
English seaman who was the first of the really scientific navigators. Captain Cook spent several years surveying the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He observed a solar eclipse on 5 Aug 1766 near Cape Ray, Newfoundland. On the first of three expeditions into the Pacific (1768) he took Joseph Banks as the ship's botanist to study the flora and fauna discovered. (This practice of carrying a naturalist took place some 75 years before Charles Darwin's famous voyage.) Cook observed the transit of Venus on this voyage from the island of Tahiti on 3 Jun 1769. This would help scientists plot the distance between the sun to the earth. His geographical discoveries made him the most famous navigator since Magellan. He was killed by cannibal natives in Hawaii. |
| John Hadley | |
(source) |
Died
14 Feb 1744 (born 16 Apr 1682)
British mathematician and inventor who perfected methods for grinding and polishing telescope lenses. Hadley improved the reflecting telescope (first introduced by Newton in 1668) and produced the first of its kind having sufficient accuracy and power to be useful in astronomy. It had a 6 inch mirror. He is also known for the reflecting octant (1730) used at sea to measure the altitude of the Sun or a celestial body above the horizon to within one second of arc. It was the ancestor of the modern nautical sextant. He was a prominent member of the Royal Society, of which he was vice-president from 21 Feb 1728. John Hadley was the older brother of George Hadley.« |
| FEBRUARY 14 - EVENTS | |
| Dolly | |
(source) |
In 2003, Dolly, the world's most famous cloned
sheep, was put down. She had been suffering from a progressive lung disease.
Dolly had been born at the Roslin Institute,
Edinburgh, Scotland on 5 Jul 1996. The accomplishment of the first mammal
cloned from an adult sheep cell was announced
on 23 Feb 1997. Using microscopic needles, scientists had replaced
the nucleus of an egg cell with the nucleus from a parent cell - in Dolly's
case, an udder cell. The resulting embryo
was implanted into the womb of a third, surrogate sheep. Somehow, the egg
cell reprogrammed the donated DNA contained within its new nucleus. Dolly's
early death, like her birth,
raised new controversy about the wisdom of cloning.«
The
Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control,
by Ian Wilmut, et al. |
| Voyager 1 | |
(source) |
In 1990, the U.S. space probe Voyager
1 looked back into the Solar System and took a photograph of the
entire solar system. It had been travelling toward the outer reaches of
the solar system since it was launched
on 5 Sep 1977. |
| Heart-liver transplant | |
|
In 1984, six-year-old Stormie Jones from Texas became the world's first
heart-liver double transplant recipient. She had a heart attack at age
6. She had inherited a receptor deficiency
from both parents. Having virtually no way to rid her body of cholesterol,
she had blood levels of cholesterol almost five times the safe level. The
operation
transplanted a heart to replace her damaged one, and a liver which possessed
the normal number of cholesterol receptors. Drs. Thomas E. Starzl and Henry
T. Bahnson performed the operation
at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. Followed by drug treatment, her cholesterol
level dropped to the normal range. She lived until age 13. On 11 Nov 1990,
she died of a possible heart infection. |
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| Sun observatory | |
|
In 1980, the U.S. launched the Solar Maximum Mission Observatory to study
solar flares. |
|
| Microprocessor | |
|
In 1978, the first "micro on a chip" was patented (Texas Instruments). |
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| Lawrencium | |
|
In 1961, element 103, lawrencium, was first produced in Berkeley California. |
|
| Telephone speaking clock | |
|
In 1933, the first telephone speaking clock came into operation in the
Paris area. |
|
| Edison patent | |
|
In 1888, Thomas A. Edison was issued a patent for a "Telephone-Transmitter"
(No. 278,044). |
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| Telephone patented | |
|
In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied
separately for patents related to the telephone. The U.S. Supreme Court
eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor. |
|
| Patent | |
|
In 1803, an apple parer by Moses Coats was issued a U.S. patent. |
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| Textile patent | |
|
In 1794, the first US patent for textile (carding & spinning) machinery
was granted to James Davenport of Philadelphia. |
|
| Earth's wobble | |
 |
In 1747, a paper on the discovery of Earth's wobbling motion on its axis
by British astronomer, James Bradley
was read at the Royal Society. For this variation, he coined the name nutation
(from Latin "nutare" to nod). Bradley first noticed
the fluctuation during his studies of parallax at Molyneux's observatory.
Attributing it to the moon's gravitational influence, he withheld any announcement
until he had observed a full cycle of the motion of the moon's nodes, taking
about 18.6 years. In 1748, he was honored with the Copley Medal of the
Royal Society.« |
