| FEBRUARY 24 - BIRTHS | |
| Gregori Aleksandrovich Margulis | |
(source) |
 Born 24
Feb 1946
Russian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 for his contributions to the theory of Lie groups, though he was not allowed by the Soviet government to travel to Finland to receive the award. In 1990 Margulis immigrated to the United States. Margulis' work was largely involved in solving a number of problems in the theory of Lie groups. In particular, Margulis proved a long-standing conjecture by Atle Selberg concerning discrete subgroups of semisimple Lie groups. The techniques he used in his work were drawn from combinatorics, ergodic theory, dynamical systems, and differential geometry. |
| Henri Frankfort | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1897; died 16 Jul 1954.
Dutch-American archaeologist who established the relationship between Egypt and Mesopotamia and completed a thoroughly documented reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian culture and art. The excavations he directed in Egypt (1922, 1925-29) and Iraq (1929-37) were conducted with exemplary archaeological scholarship. In 1925, Frankfort resumed work which had been started by Naville at Abydos excavating the Osireion, discovered by Petrie (1902) who named it from his interpretation as a symbolic tomb of Osiris. Frankfort's initial project site was situated to the West of Seti's Temple but expanded to record the fine reliefs of the temple of Seti itself.«  The
Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient, by Henri
Frankfort. |
| John Henry Comstock | |
(source) |
Born 24 Feb 1849; died 20 Mar 1931.
American entomologist who did pioneering work in the systematic classification of scale insects, moths and butterflies. His wife, Anna Botsford, illustrated these subjects in his earlier books. He published works for both the layman and the scientist. After he graduated from Cornell University, he taught there. He spent a summer in Alabama (1878) studying the cotton-leaf worm, Alabama argillacea, and shortly afterwards became the chief entomologist of the United States Department of Agriculture (1879-82), after which he returned to a university position. Over a number of years his research included studing the wing venation of insects, making notable new contributions to the field. Later in life, he turned his interest to morphology.« [Image right: Illustration by Anna Botsford Comstock from A Manual for the Study of Insects (source)] A
manual for the study of insects, by John Henry Comstock. |
| Carl Graebe | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1841; died 19 Jan 1927.
German organic chemist who, assisted by Carl Liebermann, synthesized (1868) the orange-red dye alizarin, which in the textile industry quickly supplanted the natural source of the dye from the madder plant root. Alizarin (dihydroscyanthraquinone) was recognized by Graebe and Liebermann, as a derivative of anthracene, a hydrocarbon contained in coal-tar. Also in 1868, they elaborated a method for preparing it commercially from anthracene. Upon this, one of the early German dyestuff products, arose rapidly a great chemical industry. Graebe also introduced the chemical terms "ortho," "meta," and "para," well known to organic chemistry students, which indicate the position of groups attached to a benzene ring. |
| John Philip Holland | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1840; died 12 Aug 1914.
Irish inventor, "father of the modern submarine," who designed and built the first underwater vessel accepted by the U.S. Navy. In 1873, he emigrated to the U.S. where, with financial support from the Irish Fenian Society (who hoped to use submarines against England), he built the Fenian Ram, a small sub that proved a limited success in a test run. In 1895, his J.P. Holland Torpedo Boat Company received a contract from the U.S. Navy to build a submarine, and in 1898 a successful Holland, the first truly practical submarine, was launched. The U.S. government ordered six more; similar orders came from England, Japan, and Russia. Holland's final years were marked by litigation with his financial backers. |
| Heinrich Lenz | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1804; died 10 Feb 1865.
Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz was the Russian physicist who framed Lenz's Law to describe the direction of flow of electric current generated by a wire moving through a magnetic field. Lenz worked on electrical conduction and electromagnetism. In 1833 he reported investigations into the way electrical resistance changes with temperature, showing that an increase in temperature increases the resistance (for a metal). He is best-known for Lenz's law, which he discovered in 1834 while investigating magnetic induction. It states that the current induced by a change flows so as to oppose the effect producing the change. Lenz's law is a consequence of the, more general, law of conservation of energy. |
| Jacques de Vaucanson | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1709; died 21 Nov 1782.
French inventor of automata - robot devices of later significance for modern industry. In 1737-38, he produced a transverse flute player, a pipe and tabor player, and a mechanical duck, which was especially noteworthy, not only imitating the motions of a live duck, but also the motions of drinking, eating, and "digesting." He made improvements in the mechanization of silk weaving, but his most important invention was ignored for several decades - that of automating the loom by means of perforated cards that guided hooks connected to the warp yarns. (Later reconstructed and improved by J.-M. Jacquard, it became one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution.) He also invented many machine tools of permanent importance. |
| Bernard Siegfried Albinus | |
(source) |
Born 24 Feb 1697; died 9 Sep 1770.
German anatomist who was the first to show the connection of the vascular systems of the mother and the fetus. He is best known for the excellent drawings in his Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1747; "Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body"). Together with Hermann Boerhaave, he edited the works of the physicians Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey. (source) |
| Thomas Newcomen | |
(source) |
Born 24
Feb 1663; died 5 Aug 1729.
English inventor of the the world's first successful atmospheric steam engine. His invention of c.1711 came into use by 1725 to pump water out of coal mines or raise water to power water-wheels. On each stroke, steam filled a cylinder closed by a piston, then a spray of water chilled and condensed the steam in the cylinder creating a vacuum, then atmospheric pressure pushed the piston down. A crossbeam transferred the motion of the piston to operating the pump. This was wasteful of fuel needed to reheat the cylinder for the next stroke. Despite being slow and inefficient, Newcomen's engine was relied on for the first 60 years of the new steam age it began, perhaps the single most important invention of the Industrial Revolution. Thomas
Newcomen; the prehistory of the steam engine, by L. T.
C Rolt. |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| FEBRUARY 24 - DEATHS | |
| Andrew Sherratt | |
(source) |
 Died
24 Feb 2006 (born 8 May 1945)
English archaeologist who was expert on the prehistory of Europe and the origins of agriculture. He proposed (1980) a theory of a "Secondary Products Revolution" whereby farmers spurred profound advances by trading milk, wool and textiles. Starting a few thousand years after the initial domestication of animals in the Near East for meat, this revolution in approach made farming possible even on agriculturally marginal land not previously used. A profound global effect on human development resulted in a social division between those deriving benefits from using animals to haul ploughs (as in Europe), and leaving those that did not much poorer. He also studied large-scale aspects of global colonization, development of metallurgy and urbanism.« Economy
and Society in Prehistoric Europe, by Andrew Sherratt. |
| John Bachman | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1874 (born 4 Feb 1790)
Naturalist and Lutheran minister who published studies of southern animals and works on botany and agriculture. He met John James Audubon in 1831 and helped him write the text of The Birds of America (1840-44). After visiting the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt at the University of Berlin in 1838, Bachman did much of the writing and edited all of Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, 3 vol. (1845-49). He also published The Unity of the Human Race (1850), in which he theorized that all humans are of one species. Audubon named the Bachman's Sparrow in honor of his friend. Bachman discovered and named the Bachman's Warbler (a bird probably extinct today). |
| Douglas Houghton Campbell | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1953 (born 16 Dec 1859)
American botanist who was an expert on the anatomical structure and life cycles of mosses, ferns and liverworts. He was interested in establishing the evolution of vascular plants, which he believed occurred on land from primitive mosses. He also studied the geographic distribution of plants. At a time before it was generally accepted, he thought Wegener's theory of Continental Drift (1912) was plausible. Campbell recognized that a primordial supercontinent, Gondwana, splitting into smaller land masses that drifted apart would resolve many of the puzzling facts in geographical distribution, both of animals and plants.« [Image: moss life cycle.] |
| Edward Williams Morley | |
c. 1887 |
Died
24 Feb 1923 (born 29 Jan 1838)
American chemist who is best known for his collaboration with the physicist A.A. Michelson in an attempt to measure the relative motion of the Earth through a hypothetical ether (1887). He also studied the variations of atmospheric oxygen content. He specialized in accurate quantitative measurements, such as those of the vapour tension of mercury, thermal expansion of gases, or the combining weights of hydrogen and oxygen. Morley assisted Michelson in the latter's persuit of measurements of the greatest possible accuracy to detect a difference in the speed of light through an omnipresent ether. Yet the ether could not be detected and the physicists had seriously to consider that the ether did not exist, even questioning much orthodox physical theory. |
| Pierre(-Marie-Félix) Janet | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1947 (born 30 May 1859)
French psychopathologist and neurologist influential in bringing about in France and the United States a connection between academic psychology and the clinical treatment of mental illnesses. He stressed psychological factors in hypnosis and contributed to the modern concept of mental and emotional disorders involving anxiety, phobias, and other abnormal behaviour. Janet is remembered for his dissociation theory of hysteria and hypnosis. His first case study, that of a hypnotic subject named Léonie, was published in 1886. He introduced the words dissociation and subconscious into psychological terminology and attributed hysteria and hypnotic susceptibility to inherited dispositions toward imbalances in psychic energy and psychic tension. |
| Marc Séguin, the Elder | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1875 (born 20 Apr 1786)
French engineer and inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge and the tubular steam-engine boiler. Séguin (a nephew of Joseph Montgolfier, the pioneer balloonist) developed an early interest in machinery. By 1822, he was studying the strength of wire cables. With his brother Camille he studied the principles of the suspension bridge, at that time built with chain cables. In 1824, they built a bridge suspended from cables of parallel wire strands over the Rhône River at Tournon, the first such bridge, then copied around the world. Séguin also improved locomotive efficiency with his invention of the multiple fire-tube boiler, in place of the water-tube boiler used by the earlier steam engines. The brothers collaborated in the construction of the first French railroad (1824-33). |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1799 (born 1 Jul 1742)
German physicist and satirical writer, best known for his aphorisms and his ridicule of metaphysical and romantic excesses. At Göttingen University, Lichtenberg did research in a wide variety of fields, including geophysics, volcanology, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics. His most important were his investigations into physics. Notably, he constructed a huge electrophorus and, in the course of experimentations, discovered in 1777 the basic principle of modern xerographic copying; the images that he reproduced are still called "Lichtenberg figures." These are radial patterns formed when sharp, pointed conducting bodies at high voltage get near enough to insulators to discharge electrically, or seen on persons struck by lightning. |
| Henry Cavendish | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1810 (born 10 Oct 1731)
English physicist and chemist. Researching in his own private laboratory, Cavendish identified hydrogen as a separate gas, studied carbon dioxide, and determined their densities relative to atmospheric air. He also established that water was a compound, measured the specific heat of certain substances, and determined the density of the earth. The full extent of his discoveries in electrostatics was not known until his manuscripts were published in 1879: he had anticipated Coulomb, Ohm, and Faraday, deduced the inverse square law of electrical attraction and repulsion, and discovered specific inductive capacity. The Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England, was named after him. |
| Nikolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky | |
(source) |
Died
24 Feb 1856 (born 1 Dec 1792)
Russian mathematician who, with János Bolyai of Hungary, is considered the founder of non-Euclidean geometry. Lobachevsky constructed and studied a type of geometry in which Euclid's parallel postulate is false (the postulate states that through a point not on a certain line only one line can be drawn not meeting the first line). This was not well received at first, but his greatest vindication came with the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity when it was demonstrated experimentally that the geometry of space is not described by Euclid's geometry. Apart from geometry, Lobachevsky also did important work in the theory of infinite series, algebraic equations, integral calculus, and probabilty. |
| Robert Fulton | |
 |
Died
24 Feb 1815 (born 14 Nov 1765)
American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He did not invent the steamboat, which had been built in the early 1700's, but rather applied his engineering skills to their design. He changed the proportions, arrangements, and velocities of already proposed ideas. In 1807, work was completed on the Clermont, the first steamboat that was truly successful, and the culmination of many years of work. It's maiden voyage was on 17 Aug from New York City to Albany, a distance of 150 miles completed in 32 hours. A mechanical genius with many talents, he also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine (Nautilus, 1801), and a steam warship.  |
| FEBRUARY 24 - EVENTS | |
| Dinosaur embryo | |
In 1989, a 150-million-year-old fossil egg discovered in Utah was found
by CAT scan to contain the oldest dinosaur embryo. The egg was still inside
the mother, supposedly. Ref: Hirsch, K.F.; Stadtman, K.L.;
Miller, W.E. & Madsen, J.H.Jr. (1989) Upper Jurassic dinosaur egg
from Utah. Science, 243: 1711-1713. |
|
| Pulsar | |
(source) |
In 1968, Nature carried the announcement of the discovery of pulsars
(pulsating radio sources). The first pulsar
was discovered
by a graduate student, Jocelyn
Bell, on 28 Nov 1967, then working under the direction of Prof. A.
Hewish. This extraterrestrial pulsating radio source was observed at the
Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Cambridge University, England. They
were using a special radio
telescope, a large array of 2,048 aerials covering an area of 4.4 acres.
The discovery of these fascinating objects opened new horizons in studies
as diverse as quantum- degenerate fluids, relativistic gravity and interstellar
magnetic fields. Under extraordinary physical conditions, radiation is
generated and appears pulsed with a clock-like precision. |
| Rocket landmark | |
|
In 1949, a two-stage rocket was launched from the White Sands Proving Grounds,
NM. It was the first to reach outer space. |
|
| Nylon | |
(source) |
In 1938, DuPont began commercial production of nylon toothbrush bristles
for the so-called "Miracle Tuft Toothbrush." Before 1938, the world relied
on toothbrush bristles of neck hairs from wild swine from Siberia, Poland
and China. When DuPont created nylon it was the toothbrush which was the
first item to benefit from the use of nylon. There were many advantages
in this new brush including a dramatic reduction in production costs and
the ability to control bristle texture. Wheareas, whereas bristles made
with wild boar hairs fell out, wouldn’t dry very well or became full of
bacteria. At first, the consumers were not entirely satisfied
because the early nylon bristles were very stiff and hurt the gums. By
1950, Du Pont produced softer nylon bristles. |
| Fields Medal | |
(source) |
In 1931, the Fields Medal was established
to recognize outstanding contributions to mathematics. It was conceived
since there was no Nobel Prize for mathematicians. Although John Charles
Fields probably thought of the medal at some earlier time, the first recorded
mention of it was made on 24 Feb 1931 in minutes of a committee meeting.
He was chairman of the Committee of the International Congress which had
been set up by the University of Toronto to organize the 1924 Congress
in Toronto. After the event, Fields proposed that income of $2,500 remaining
from that convention would be designated for two medals to be awarded
at future International Mathematical Congresses. In 1936, the first awards
were made in Oslo.« [Image:
Obverse of the Fields Medal, showing a picture of Archimedes] |
| Thermit | |
|
In 1925, an ice jam was removed using a thermit for the first time in the
U.S. It was a 250,000-ton ice jam that had clogged the St. Lawrence River
near Waddington, NY. and was broken up a few hours after the reaction of
three thermit charges of 90-lb each. Thermit is a mixture of finely divided
magnesium and red iron oxide. When properly ignited, a vigorous reaction
produces hot molten iron. The method was first applied by Howard Turner
Barnes, of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, who studied of the properties
of ice and especially the engineering problems associated with ice in the
intake of hydroelectric stations on the St. Lawrence River. (In 1908, he
had succeeded
Ernest Rutherford as Macdonald Professor of Physics) |
|
| Berliner helicopter No.5 flight | |
|
In 1924, U.S. Navy officials and the media witnessed the 95-sec flight
of the latest design of a helicopter - designated No. 5 - built by Henry
Berliner. It reached a height of 15-ft and could maneuver in a radius of
150-ft, at a speed up to about 40 mph. The 641-lb aircraft had rigid wings
spanning 38-ft with a 13-ft diameter rotor mounted on each winf that provided
the power for the flight. Although in the past two decades there had been
trials of helicopters designed by others (including Berliner's father Emile
on 11 Jul 1908), this day's
test is claimed to be the first controlled helicopter flight. The aircraft
- the oldest intact helicopter in the world - is now loaned by the Smithsonian
Institution for display
at Berliner's testing site in College Park Aviation Museum, Maryland.« |
|
| Radioactivity | |
 |
In 1896, Henri Becquerel told the
French Academy of Sciences of his investigation
of the phosphorescent rays of some "double sulfate of uranium and potassium"
crystals. He reported that he placed the crystals on the outside of a photographic
plate wrapped in sheets of very thick black paper and exposed the whole
to the sun for several hours. When he developed the photographic plate,
he saw a black silhouette of the substance exposed on the negative. When
he placed a coin or metal screen between the uranium crystals and the wrapped
plate, he saw images of those objects on the negative. He did not yet know
yet that he has accidentally discovered radioactivity, or that the sun
is not necessary to initiate the rays. |
| Descent of Man | |
(source) |
In 1871, Charles Darwin's Descent
of Man was published in London. In it, Darwin wrote, "The sole object
of this work is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species,
is descended from some pre-existing form; secondly, the manner of his development;
and thirdly, the value of the differences between the so-called races of
man... During many years it has seemed to me highly probable that sexual
selection has played an important part in differentiating the races of
man; but in my Origin of Species I contented myself by merely alluding
to this belief. When I came to apply this view to man, I found it indispensable
to treat the whole subject in full detail." [Image:
titles on the two-volume first edition of Descent of Man.] |
| Steam shovel | |
(source) |
In 1839, Mr. William Smith Otis, civil engineer of Philadelphia, Penn.,
was issued a U.S. patent for the steam shovel (No. 1,089) for excavating
and removing earth from railroads
or canals. The patent drawing showed the crane mounted on a carriage or
railroad car. A load of earth could be taken up by the scraper, raised
by the crane and turned to be dumped, such as in railcars, and released.
The patent described how a steam engine of a kind already in ordinary use,
was installed with a power control mechanism for the crane, and a system
of pulleys to move its arms and bucket. It could move about 380 cubic metres
of earth a day, with its 1.1 cubic metre capacity shovel and 180° slewing
wooden jib. It was first used on the Western Railroad in Mass. [Image:
Steam shovel built by John Souther in his Globe Locomotive Works in South
Boston, Mass. shown behind railcars it is loading with gravel (1857).] |
