| FEBRUARY 26 - BIRTHS | |
| Giulio Natta | |
(source) |
 Born 26
Feb 1903; died 2 May 1979.
Italian chemist who contributed to the development of high polymers useful in the manufacture of films, plastics, fibres, and synthetic rubber. Along with Karl Ziegler of Germany, he was honoured in 1963 with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the development of Ziegler-Natta catalysts. Natta found that certain types of Ziegler catalysts lead to macromolecules with a spatially uniform structure, called isotactic chains. Whereas ordinary hydrocarbon chains are zigzaged, isotactic chains form helices with the side groups pointing outwards. Such polymers give rise to novel synthetic products. Examples are light but strong fabrics, and ropes which float on the water. |
| Herbert Henry Dow | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1866; died 15 Oct 1930.
Pioneer in the American chemical industry and founder of the Dow Chemical Company (1896). He developed and patented electrolytic methods for extracting bromine from brine and in 1890 organized the Midland Chemical Company. The Dow process was remarkable in that it did not result in a salt by-product, that it operated on comparatively little fuel and it was the first commercially successful use of the direct-current generator in the American chemical industry. He next developed the electrolysis of sodium chloride in order to yield sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) and chlorine for bleaching powder. In 1916, Dow extracted magnesium, a very lightweight metal from brine, and quickly saw its importance as a structural metal.  Herbert
H. Dow: Pioneer in creative chemistry, by Murray Campbell. |
| John Evershed | |
Sunspots(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1864; died 17 Nov 1956.
English astronomer who discovered (1909) the Evershed effect - the horizontal motion of gases outward from the centres of sunspots. While photographing solar prominences and sunspot spectra, he noticed that many of the Fraunhofer lines in the sunspot spectra were shifted to the red. By showing that these were Doppler shifts, he proved the motion of the source gases. This discovery came to be known as the Evershed effect. He also gave his name to a spectroheliograph, the Evershed spectroscope. |
| Émile Coué | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1857; died 2 Jul 1926.
French pharmacist and advocate of optimistic autosuggestion. He was not trained in medicine or psychology, but in 1920 at his clinic in Nancy, Coué introduced a method of psychotherapy characterized by frequent repetition of the formula, je vais de mieux en mieux, "Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better." He counseled people to repeat this 15 to 20 times, morning and evening. This method of autosuggestion came to be called Couéism, and was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Rev. Charles Inge (1868-1957) expressed this simplistic method in this limerick (1928): "This very remarkable man / Commends a most practical plan: / You can do what you want / If you don't think you can't, / So don't think you can't think you can." |
| John Harvey Kellogg | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1852; died 14 Dec 1943.
American physician and health-food pioneer whose development of dry breakfast cereals was largely responsible for the creation of the flaked-cereal industry. In 1876, at age 24, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg became the staff physician at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a position he would hold for 62 years. His surgical skill was admired by the Doctors Mayo. A vegetarian, he advocated low calorie diets and developed peanut butter, granola, and toasted flakes. He warned that smoking caused lung cancer decades before this link was studied. Kellogg was an early advocate of exercise. It was his brother, William K. Kellogg sweetened the flakes with malt, and began commercial production as the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company (1906). |
| Camille Flammarion | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1842; died 3 Jun 1925.
(Nicolas) Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer who studied double and multiple stars, the moon and Mars. He is best known as the author of popular, lavishly illustrated, books on astronomy, including Popular Astronomy (1880) and The Atmosphere (1871). In 1873, Flammarion attributed the red color of Mars (wrongly) to vegetation. In Pop. Sci. Mo. v. IV p.190, he wrote "May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet..." He supported the idea of canals on Mars, and intelligent life, perhaps more advanced than earth's. Flammarion reported changes in one of the craters of the moon, which he attributed to growth of vegetation. Late in life he turned to psychic research. |
| Levi Strauss | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1829; died 26 Sep 1902
Inventor and manufacturer of jeans, Levi Strauss was one of the best-known beneficiaries of California's gold rush economic boom. He was born in Bavaria and trained as a tailor. One of thousands, he travelled to San Francisco in 1850, hoping to make his fortune. His original plan was to manufacture tents and wagon covers, but instead found a market using the stout canvas he had brought with him to make very durable pants for the Forty-niners. Finding that these pants sold as fast as he could make them, Strauss opened a factory, improved the design by adding copper rivets at the stress points in his pants, and adopted a heavy blue denim material called genes in France, that originated the now familiar name of "jeans". |
| Joseph LeConte | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1823; died 6 Jul 1901
American geologist who was a universalist in the scope of his scientific writings. As a founding member of John Muir's Sierra Club, he spoke fervently for broad preservation of California forests by government and wise use of timberlands in private enterprise. He was one of the earliest advocates of contractional theory of mountain formation. LeConte accepted the theory of evolution about 1874, becoming one of its leading proponents and a writer able to reconciler the idea with religious thought. His Sight: An Exposition of the Principles of Monocular and Binocular Vision (1881) was the first treatise on physiological optics written in the U.S. He was an ardent camper, and his death occurred during a trip in the Yosemite Valley. |
| Benoit Clapeyron | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1799; died 28 Jan 1864.
French engineer who expressed Sadi Carnot's ideas on heat analytically, with the help of graphical representations. While investigating the operation of steam engines, Clapeyron found there was a relationship (1834) between the heat of vaporization of a fluid, its temperature and the increase in its volume upon vaporization. Made more general by Clausius, it is now known as the Clausius-Clapeyron formula. It provided the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. In engineering, Clayeyron designed and built locomotives and metal bridges. He also served on a committee investigating the construction of the Suez Canal and on a committee which considered how steam engines could be used in the navy. |
| François Arago | |
(source) |
Born 26
Feb 1786; died 2 Oct 1853.
Dominique François Jean Arago was a French physicist and astronomer who discovered the chromosphere of the sun (the lower atmosphere, primarily composed of hydrogen gas), and for his accurate estimates of the diameters of the planets. Arago found that a rotating copper disk deflects a magnetic needle held above it showing the production of magnetism by rotation of a nonmagnetic conductor. He devised an experiment that proved the wave theory of light, showed that light waves move more slowly through a dense medium than through air and contributed to the discovery of the laws of light polarization. Arago entered politics in 1848 as Minister of War and Marine and was responsible for abolishing slavery in the French colonies. |
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| FEBRUARY 26 - DEATHS | |
| Max Sterne | |
B. anthracis (source) |
 Died
26 Feb 1997 (born 1 Jun 1905)
Italian research veterinarian who developed an effective, safe, and reproducible vaccine against anthrax that succeeded in virtually eliminating the disease. Bacillus anthracis is a very large, Gram positive, sporeforming rod. The Sterne Strain of Bacillus anthracis produces sublethal amounts of the toxin that induce formation of protective antibody. |
| Anthony John Arkell | |
 |
Died
26 Feb 1980 (born 29 July 1898)
English historian and Egyptologist, an outstanding colonial administrator who combined a passion for the past with a humanitarian concern for the peoples of modern Africa. In Sudan, appointed commissioner for archaeology and anthropology (1938) he undertook several digs discovering the previously unknown Sudanese prehistory. Upon returning to England (1948), he began writing A History of the Sudan From the Earliest Times to 1821. Published in 1955, it gives a comprehensive history of the Sudan running from the Stone Age to the advent of the Turks in 1821, based upon his archeological and anthropological findings. He also wrote The Prehistory of the Nile Valley. A
History of the Sudan, by Anthony John Arkell |
| Otto Wallach | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1931 (born 27 Mar 1847)
German chemist awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for identifying terpene compounds. His interest began began by analyzing fragrant essential oils - oils removed from plants by steam distillation, with industrial uses - and started research into determining their molecular structure. Wallach succeeded in determining the structure of several terpenes, including limonene, in 1894. He showed that terpenes were derived from isoprene, C5H8 - his isoprene rule (1887) - and therefore had the general formula (C5H8)n. Limonene is thus C10H16. Terpenes were of importance not only in the medicine and perfume industries, but also as a source of camphors. It was also later established that vitamins A and D are related to the terpenes. |
| Mary Whiton Calkins | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1930 (born 30 Mar 1863)
As an educator and psychologist, she was the first American woman to attain distinction in these fields of study. Calkins studied psychology at Harvard as a "guest," since women could not officially register. After completing all requirements for a doctorate at Harvard, and with the strong support of William James and her other professors, Harvard still refused to grant a degree to a woman. She established the first psychology laboratory at a women's college (Wellesley). She developed the paired-associate procedure for studying verbal memories. One of her main findings was that repeated pairings of words increased memory. Calkins was interested in a wide variety of research topics, including perception, personality, emotion, and dreaming. |
| Hermann Ebbinghaus | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1909 (born 24 Jan 1850)
German psychologist who pioneered in the development of experimental methods for the measurement of rote learning and memory. Ebbinghaus's contributions to psychology are numerous. In addition to establishing two psychology laboratories in Germany, he also founded and edited a major journal that did much to advance psychology in its early days. His famous work, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) set a precedent for experimental psychology with clear and precise experimental techniques. Ebbinghaus discovered that people forget 90% of what they learn in a class within thirty days, and that there occurs a very rapid forgetting in the first hour. He died in 1909 from pneumonia. |
| Richard Jordan Gatling | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1903 (born 12 Sep 1818)
U.S. inventor, whose Gatling gun (1861) was first successful machine gun, a crank-operated, rapid-fire multibarrel design combining reliability, high firing rate and ease of loading into a single device. His father was also an inventor, and while young, Richard helped him create machines for sowing cotton seeds and thinning cotton plants. In 1839, he designed a screw propeller for steamboats, but found a similar one had been previously patented. From 1844, he continued to invent improved agricultural machines, including one to plant grains, like rice and wheat (adapted from the cotton-sowing machine); a hemp-breaking machine (1850); and a steam plow (1857). The outbreak of the American Civil War spurred him to design firearms (1861).« Gatling:
A Photographic Remembrance, by E. Frank Jr. Stephenson. |
| Pietro Angelo Secchi | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1878 (born 29 June 1818)
Italian Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, who made the first survey of the spectra of over 4000 stars and suggested that stars be classified according to their spectral type. He studied the planets, especially Jupiter, which he discovered was composed of gasses. Secchi studied the dark lines which join the two hemispheres of Mars; he called them canals as if they where the works of living beings. (These studies were later continued by Schiaparelli.) Beyond astronomy, his interests ranged from archaeology to geodesy, from geophysics to meteorology. He also invented a meteorograph, an automated device for recording barometric pressure, temperature, wind direction and velocity, and rainfall. |
| Eli Terry | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1852 (born 13 April 1772)
American clockmaker who was an innovator in mass production. In 1793, Eli Terry began making clocks in Plymouth, Conn. On 17 Nov 1797, he received the first U.S. clock patent In 1802, Terry introduced wooden geared clocks using the ideas of Eli Whitney's new armory practice to produce interchangeable gears that allowed mass production of very inexpensive household clocks. When the clocks didn't sell, he proved an innovator by becoming the first retailer to offer merchandise on a free-trial, no-money-down basis. Over the following years, Terry developed ways to produce wooden clock works by machine rather than by hand. He is to clocks in the United States as Henry Ford is to automobiles. Eli
Terry: Clockmaker of Connecticut, by Leslie Allen Jones. |
| Alois Senefelder | |
(source) |
Died
26 Feb 1834 (born 6 Nov 1771)
A German, (Johann Nepomuk Franz) Alois Senefelder was the inventor of lithography. To publish his own work, he needed a less expensive and more efficient printing alternative to hand set type or etched plates. His invention was the biggest revolution in the printing industry since Gutenberg's type. Today photo lithography is used to print magazines and books, but the original process of drawing by hand on litho stones still exists in the fine art world. The traditional surface for lithography is Bavarian limestone, regrained by hand for each use. The principle is simple: oil based printing ink and water repel each other. The image is drawn with greasy crayon and chemically treated. The image areas of the stone accept ink and undrawn areas will reject it. |
| FEBRUARY 26 - EVENTS | |
| Atomic energy reactor shut down | |
(source) |
In 1992, the Yankee Atomic Electric Company's nuclear reactor was permanently
shut down due to reactor vessel embrittlement, after more than 31 years
of service. When built, it was the third atomic reactor in the U.S., and
the first for commercial production of electricity. The $57 million plant,
located at Rowe, Mass., on the Deerfield River, began distributing electric
power on 10 Nov 1960.
The reactor achieved self-sustaining nuclear reaction on 19
Aug 1960. The pressurized light-water reactor produced 125,000 kilowatts
of electricity. The company was formed by twelve New England utility companies.
Decommissioning began in 1993.« |
| First Saturn rocket flight | |
(source) |
In 1966, the first Saturn 1B rocket was launched
from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on an unmanned suborbital test flight in
the Apollo moon program.
The AS-201 mission demonstrated the structural integrity of the Saturn
1B rocket and the compatibility of the launch vehicle to carry Apollo loads.
It successfully tested the separation of the first and second stages of
the rocket and tested the operations of Saturn's propulsion, guidance and
control, and electrical subsystems. There were several malfunctions, but
it did fly for about 37-min travelling 5264 miles (8472 km) and reaching
a sub-orbital altitude of 303 miles (488 km). The massive Saturn rocket
combined five F-1 rocket engines to yield more than 7.5 million pounds
of thrust. |
| Radar | |
(source) |
In 1935, the feasibility of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) was demonstrated
to Air Ministry officials at Daventry, England, by Robert
Watson-Watt, a Scottish physicist.
Earlier, while working on methods of using radio-wave detection to locate
thunderstorms in order to provide warnings to airmen, he realized that
it could be used to track enemy aircraft for air defense. The test showed
that a RAF Heyford bomber flying in the main beam of a BBC short-wave radio
transmitter gave back reflected signals to the ground on three occasions
that the aircraft passed overhead. By 1939, the outbreak of WW II, the
military installed
a chain of radar stations along the east and south coasts of England to
prevent a German invasion. |
| Radioactivity | |
(source) |
In 1896, Henri Becquerel stored a phosphorescent uranium compound in a
closed desk drawer on top of a photographic plate awaiting a sunnier day
to test his idea that sunlight would make the phosphorescent uranium emit
rays. It remained there several days. Thus by accident, he created a new
experiment, for when he developed the photographic plate, he found a fogged
image in the shape of the rocks. The material was spontaneously generating
and
emitting the energetic rays totally without the external sunlight source.
This was a landmark
event. The new form of penetrating radiation was the discovery of
the effect of radioactivity. |
| Glass blowing machine | |
1903 (source) |
In 1895, Michael Joseph Owens (1859-1923)
of Toledo, Ohio patented a glass-blowing machine (No. 534,840)
that was capable of producing five pieces at a time by placing five molds
surrounding molten glass in front of a blowing pipe. Each piece was made
"without seams or roughness." Owens was a co-founder
of the glass industry in Toledo.
In 1903, he organized the Owens Bottle Machine Co. and continued making
improvements culminating with the patent of 10 May 1904 (No. 759,742)
for his essentially perfected machine.
Eventually, he held 45 patents. The world's first fully automatic machine
he invented was a revolution
in glass bottle
making. [Image (top R):
from patent
759,742]  |
| Microbe named | |
 |
In 1878, the French scientist, Sédillot corresponded with Littré
concerning certain micro-organisms, and a suitable word to name them. Littré
replies in a letter on this date that he chooses the word "microbe," rather
than "microbia," even though it was coined from two Greek words that together
would mean "short-lived" rather than "small life." (Gr. bios = life,
as also seen in the word "biology".) |
| Pneumatic subway | |
(source) |
In 1870, New York City's first pneumatic-powered subway
line was opened to the public. It was built by Alfred
Ely Beach who included a waiting room 120 feet long (the entire tunnel
measured 312 feet) and embellished it with a grand piano, a fountain, ornate
paintings, and candelabra so customers would not feel they were entering
a dank, dreary
tunnel.
The twenty-two-seat subway car impressed observers with its rich upholstery
and spaciousness, and comfortable ride. It fitted snugly into the nine
foot diameter, cylindrical tube.
Propulsion was provided by a giant fan that the workers nicknamed "the
Western Tornado." It was operated by a steam engine, drawing air in through
a valve and blowing it forcefully into the tunnel. [Image:
Tunnel entrance.] |
| Galileo warning | |
(source) |
In 1616, Cardinal Bellarmine warnedGalileo
not to hold, teach, or defend the
Copernican
theory, that the Earth revolved around the Sun. A transcript filed by the
1633 Inquisition indicates he was also enjoined from either speaking or
writing about his theory. Yet Galileo remained in conflict with the Church.
He was eventually interrogated by the Inquisition in Apr 1633. On 22
Jun 1633, Galileo was sentenced to prison indefinitely, with seven
of ten cardinals presiding at his trial affirming the sentencing order.
Upon signing a formal recantation, the Pope allowed him to live instead
under house-arrest. From Dec 1633 to the end of his life on 8 Jan 1641,
he remained in his villa at Florence.«
Galileo:
A Life, by James Reston. |
