| MARCH 4 - BIRTHS | |
| Shing-Tung Yau | |
(source) |
 Born 4
Mar 1949
Chinese-born American mathematician who was awarded the 1982 Fields Medal for his contributions in the area of geometric partial differential equations, including his solution (1976) of the Calabi Conjecture in algebraic geometry, his solution of the Positive Mass Conjecture in general relativity, and his work on real and complex Monge-Ampere equations. Yau is widely regarded as the creator of modern geometric analysis. He has constructed minimal surfaces, studied their stability, and analysed their behaviour in space-time. This work has implications for the formation of black holes. His study of minimal surfaces also yielded an important result on the Plateau problem. His revolutionary use of the methods of partial differential equations in the area of differential geometry has had a lasting impact on geometry.« |
| Patrick Moore | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1923
Patrick (Alfred Caldwell) Moore, English amateur astronomer, writer and broadcaster. He was educated at home due to childhood illness, from which time he acquired his interest in observational astronomy. Moore is best known as the enthusiastic and knowledgeable presenter of the BBC TV programme The Sky at Night, which he began in 1957. With a half-century of broadcasts, this is the world's longest-running television series, and it remains so with the original presenter. Moore has written over 60 books, including The Amateur Astronomer (1970), The A-Z of Astronomy (1986), and Mission to the Planets (1990). As an accomplished xylophone player, his interest in astronomy also shows in the title of one of his musical compositions: Perseus and Andromeda (1975).« |
| Allan Beckett | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1914; died 19 Jun 2005.
English engineer who designed the Mulberry Harbours - the floating roadways and their anchors - which enabled landing of vehicles and equipment on the Normandy beaches following D-Day in WW II. Various prototypes designs from different engineers were tested in a howling gale at Cairn Head, Scotland. Whereas the rival designs failed, his lozenge-shaped bridge spans connected by spherical bearings survived days of stormy weather without breaking apart or washing away. The "Kite" style of anchors he devised used the force of currents to bury themselves more securely in the seafloor. After the war, he designed major port developments and projects for flood protection, around the world, from Aden to New Zealand.« |
| George Gamow | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1904; died 19 Aug 1968.
Russian-born American nuclear physicist, cosmologist and writer who was one of the foremost advocates of the big-bang theory, which describes the origin of the universe as a colossal explosion that took place billions of years ago. In 1954, he expanded his interests into biochemistry and his work on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) made a basic contribution to modern genetic theory. |
| William Clouser Boyd | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1903; died 19 Feb 1983.
American immunochemist, who with his wife Lyle, during the 1930's, made a worldwide survey of the distribution of blood types. He discovered that blood groups are inherited and not influenced by environment. By genetic analysis of the blood groups that human races are populations that differ in the difference of their alleles. On this basis, he divided the world population into 13 geographically distinct races with different blood group gene profiles. Later, Boyd discovered lectins, which are antibody-like proteins, in plants. He also studied the blood groups of mummies. |
| Richard C. Tolman | |
| Born 4
Mar 1881; died 5 Sep 1948.
Richard C(hace) Tolman was an American physicist and chemist who demonstrated that electrons are the charge-carrying entities in the flow of electricity, and also made a measurement of its mass. During the Manhattan Project of WW II, he was the chief scientific adviser to Brig. General Leslie Groves, the head of military affairs overseeing the development of the atomic bomb. After the war he was adviser to the U.S. representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. |
|
| Garrett Augustus Morgan | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1877; died 27 Jul 1963.
African American inventor and businessman who established the Cleveland Call newspaper (1920), invented a hair straightening cream, woman's hat fastener, an automobile clutch, a safety hood breathing device (1912) which he improved as a gas mask used by some soldiers in WW I, and a traffic signal. By age 30, he had spent time working as a handyman and taught himself enough about repairing sewing machines to start a repair business. Two years later, he started a tailoring shop with 32 employees. He developed and was successful selling G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Cream to straighten hair. When he invented a traffic signal in 1922 (not the red-yellow-green lights type), several other traffic signals had already been previously patented by other inventors. He was nearly blind from 1943 due to glaucoma.« |
| David Watson Taylor | |
| Born 4
Mar 1864; died 28 July 1940.
American marine engineer who used the first ship-model testing facility in the U.S. to evaluate basic principles in the design of ships. The Experimental Model Basin built at the Washington (D.C.) Navy Yard (1899) enabled experimentation on the shape of a ship's hull that affect its motion against the resistance of the water. He developed the internationally known Taylor Standard Series Method (1910) that enabled an estimation of water resistance from the planned dimensions before a ship was built. |
|
| Robert Emden | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1862; died 8 Oct 1940.
Swiss astrophysicist and mathematician who wrote Gaskugeln (Gas Spheres, 1907), giving a mathematical model of stellar structure as the expansion and compression of gas spheres, wherein the forces of gravity and gas pressure are in equilibrium. He expanded on earlier work by J. H. Lane (1869) and A. Ritter (1878-83) who first derived equations describing stars as gaseous chemical, spherical bodies held together by their own gravity and obeying the known gas laws of thermodynamics. For four decades, the Lane-Emden equation was the foundation of theoretical work on the structure of stars: their central temperatures and pressures, masses, and equilibria. Emden also devised a hypothesis, no longer taken seriously, to explain sunspots.« |
| Sir Napier Shaw | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1854; died 23 Mar 1945.
Sir (William) Napier Shaw was an English meteorologist who applied his training in mathematics. He studied the upper atmosphere, using instruments carried by kites and high-altitude balloons. He measured (1906) the movement of air in two anti-cyclones, finding descent rates of 350 and 450 metres per day. He calculated the reduction in pressure due to a certain depression to correspond to the removal of two million million tons of air. He introduced the millibar unit for measurement of air pressure (1000 millibar = 1 bar = 1 standard atmosphere) and the tephigram to illustrate the temperature of a vertical profile of the atmosphere. He also co-authored an early work on atmospheric polluiton, The Smoke Problem of Great Cities (1925).« |
| John Hughlings Jackson | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1835; died 7 Oct 1911.
English neurologist whose studies of epilepsy, speech defects, and nervous-system disorders arising from injury to the brain and spinal cord remain among the most useful and highly documented in the field. He was one of the first to state that abnormal mental states may result from structural brain damage. Jackson's epilepsy studies initiated the development of modern methods of clinical localization of brain lesions and the investigation of localized brain functions. His definition (1873) of epilepsy as "a sudden, excessive, and rapid discharge" of brain cells has been confirmed by electroencephalography, a method of recording electric currents generated in the brain. |
| Sir William Siemens | |
(source) |
Born 4
Mar 1823; died 19 Nov 1883.
German-born English engineer and inventor, pioneer in undersea cable, important in the development of the steel and telegraph industries. Originally his name was Carl Wilhelm Siemens. After visiting England to introduce an electroplating device (which he had devised with his brother Ernst) he returned in 1844 and became (1859) a naturalized British subject. He developed the "regenerative system" which used waste gases to preheat fuel gases. This became part of the open-hearth furnace which he used to purify steel. In 1869, he helped and design and build the London-Calcutta telegraph line, which was a milestone in the history of communications engineering. |
| Samuel Slocum | |
Born 4 Mar 1792; died 26 Jan 1861.
American inventor and manufacturer of pins. After 20 years as a carpenter, he moved to England where he perfected and patented in London a machine to make wrought-iron nails (1835), and the same year devised and patented a machine for making pins with solid heads. Shortly thereafter, he returned to the U.S. and sought a partner. By 1840, the pin-making firm of Slocum and Jillson was manufacturing at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Meanwhile the question of packaging pins held Slocum's attention, and on 30 Sept 1841, he obtained patent No. 2,275 for a machine for sticking pins in paper. Until he retired, Slocum continued in the pin manufacturing business and improved his pin sticking machine. [Image: original patent diagram of pin sticking machine] |
|
| Benjamin Waterhouse | |
Age 79 (source) |
Born 4
Mar 1754; died 2 Oct 1846.
American physician and scientist who pioneered smallpox vaccination and fostered an aggressive campaign to inoculate Americans against smallpox. He studied the researches of English physician Edward Jenner and followed with his own experiments. On 8 Jul 1800, Waterhouse introduced Jenner's method of vaccination into America by inoculating his five-year-old son, Daniel Oliver, and a household servant with vaccine obtained from England. Vaccinations of three more Waterhouse children and another servant soon followed. Whereas Dr. Zabdiel Boylston and others had previously used inoculation in the U.S., Waterhouse was the American physician who established it as a general practice.« 
 The
Life and scientific and medical career of Benjamin Waterhouse, (Three
centuries of science in America) |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| MARCH 4 - DEATHS | |
| Gerhard Herzberg | |
(source) |
 Died
4 Mar 1999 (born 25 Dec 1904)
German-Canadian physicist who was awarded the 1971 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals." He published his first work in molecular spectroscopy at the end of the 1920's. His measurement of how molecules absorb ultraviolet and infrared energy yield information on energy states in molecules, leading to knowledge of their size, shape and other properties. For example, he showed that radicals can drastically change their shape with increasing energy, such as methylene which is linear in its ground state but bent in higher energy states. He also applied spectroscopy in astronomy, identifying molecules in space, planetary atmospheres and comets.« Gerhard
Herzberg: An Illustrious Life in Science, by Boris Stoicheff. |
| Robert Henry Dicke | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1997 (born 6 May 1916)
American physicist worked in such wide-ranging fields as microwave physics, cosmology, and relativity. As an inspired theorist and a successful experimentalist, his unifying theme was the application of powerful and scrupulously controlled experimental methods to issues that really matter. He also made a number of significant contributions to radar technology and to the field of atomic physics. His visualization of an oscillating universe stimulated the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the most direct evidence that our universe really did expand from a dense state. A key instrument in measurements of this fossil of the Big Bang is the microwave radiometer he invented. His patents ranged from clothes dryers to lasers. |
| Walter Schottky | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1976 (born 23 July 1886)
Swiss-born German physicist whose research in solid-state physics led to development of a number of electronic devices. He discovered the Schottky effect, an irregularity in the emission of thermions in a vacuum tube and invented the screen-grid tetrode tube (1915). The Schottky diode is a high speed diode with very little junction capacitance (also known as a "hot-carrier diode" or a "surface-barrier diode.") It uses a metal-semiconductor junction as a Schottky barrier, rather than the semiconductor-semiconductor junction of a conventional diode.« |
| Édouard Belin | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1963 (born 5 Mar 1876)
French engineer whose invention (1907) made the first telephoto transmission by wire, from Paris to Lyon to Bordeaux and back to Paris. He further developed the Belinograph able to make the first transatlantic radio facsimile transmission, on 4 Aug 1921, between Annapolis, Md., and Belin's laboratories at La Malmaison, France. His invention scanned an image on a cylinder reflecting a light beam onto a photoelectric cell which converted varying reflected light intensity into electrical impulses. His equipment was adopted in Britain in 1928, and used almost exclusively by European news media in the 1930s -'40s, when the term "Belino" came into general use for all kinds of picture transmission. By 1923, he had dabbled in ideas for television.«  |
| Evarts Graham | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1957 (born 19 Mar 1883)
Evarts Ambrose Graham was an American surgeon who performed the first operation to remove a lung, on 5 Apr 1933*. At Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, he operated on a fellow physician with lung cancer. Until then, removal of a lobe of a lung was occasionally done to treat lung cancer, if the tumour was limited to one lobe. When exploration revealed this patient's cancer involved more than one lobe, he removed the entire lung. Seven ribs were removed to permit the soft tissues of the chest wall to fill the resulting cavity. The patient recovered and was cured of the disease. This was a triumph for the era that electrified the surgical world. Graham devoted many years to the study of lung cancer and its link to cigarette smoking. |
| Sir Charles Scott Sherrington | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1952 (born 27 Nov 1857)
English neurophysiologist who won (with Edgar Adrian) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932 for research into the function of the neuron. Sherrington proposed the key concept of nociception: pain as the evolved response to a potentially harmful, "noxious" stimulus in 1898. In his book, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, (1906) he compared various sensory stimuli (such as those which normally elicit pain or nociception vs. those evoking the scratch reflect) competing in the production of various behavioral responses using the same motor pathways, in what he called "the struggle between dissimilar arcs for mastery over their final common path." |
| Alexander Stanley Elmore | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1944 (born 1 Jan 1867)
British technologist who with his brother Francis Edward Elmore, jointly developed floatation processes to separate valuable ore, such as copper, from the gangue (worthless rock) with which it is associated when mined. In 1898, they obtained a patent for the first practical equipment (British patent No. 21,948). Pulverized ore is mixed with water and brought into contact with thick oil. The oil entraps the metallic constituents, which are afterwards separated, and gangue passed away with the water. They installed their equipment at mines in north Wales, northern England, and at the Broken Hill lead and zinc mines in Australia. Today, floatation methods remain vital in the mining industry, processing millions of tons of ores each year. |
| Ira Remsen | |
| Died
4 Mar 1927 (born 10 Feb 1846)
American chemist who codiscovered saccharin. He taught chemistry at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 (where he became its second president 1901-13). He introduced advanced laboratory instruction using teaching methods he had learned in Germany under Fittig. Remsen specialized in the benzene ring and related groups. With Constantine Fahlberg, a student working under his direction, he first synthesized orthobenzoyl sulfimide (1879). Fahlberg accidentally discovered its intensely sweet taste by touching his fingers to his lips while unknowingly having a few grains on them. The compound was patented, and is now known as saccharin. |
|
| James Ward | |
| Died
4 Mar 1925 (born 27 Jan 1843)
Philosopher and psychologist who exerted a major influence on the development of psychology in Great Britain. In 1886, Ward's influential article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica defined psychology's principal task as "to analyze and trace the development of individual experience as it is for the experiencing individual." In 1904, The British Journal of Psychology began publication, edited by James Ward and WHR Rivers. |
|
| William Willett | |
(source) |
Died 4 Mar 1915 (born 10 Aug 1856)
English builder who invented Daylight Saving Time. He claimed he had the idea while taking an early summer morning ride in Petts Wood near to his home in Chislehurst, London. He observed that many blinds were still down, although there was already good daylight, yet many made no use of it. He used his wealth as a prominent home builder to campaign for a scheme of adjusting clocks with the season and published a pamphlet in 1907. His original idea was to make four weekly changes of 20-mins each, for a total of 80-mins. The first Daylight Saving Bill, proposing a single one hour at the change of season failed in 1908. After his death, the idea was adopted during WW I for wartime fuel savings. A memorial was erected in Petts Wood. [Image right: Sundial on the Willett memorial tin Petts Wood.] Seize
the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time,
by David Prerau. |
| Knut Johan Angstrom | |
| Died
4 Mar 1910 (born 12 Jan 1857)
Swedish physicist, son of Anders Angstrom, who invented an electric compensation pyrheliometer and other devices for infra-red photography. With these, he studied the sun's heat radiation.« |
|
| Leopold von Buch | |
(source) |
Died
4 Mar 1853 (born 26 Apr 1774)
(Baron) (Christian) Leopold von Buch was a German geologist, paleontologist and geographer. On his geological research trips in Europe he travelled as far north as Lapland. He investigated Vesuvius with his life-long friend Alexander von Humboldt, and examined the huge craters of the Canary Islands. His broad interests in geology also included the study of fossils, stratigraphy, and in particular the Jurassic system.« |
| Jean-François Champollion | |
(source) |
Died 4 Mar 1832 (born 23 Dec 1790)
French Egyptologist who established scientific methods in archaeology and pioneered in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was well prepared, with a genius for languages, having by age 13 mastered Latin, Greek, Arabic, Syrian, and Chaldean and later Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, and Coptic, an old Egyptian language written in Greek letters. He started interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphics, building on the earlier efforts of Thomas Young. Champollion succeeded in deciphering the Rosetta Stone, a stone slab unearthed (1799) at Rosetta (near Alexandria, Egypt) inscribed in two languages and three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic, and Greek, each recording.a decree (196 BC) of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (reigned 205-180).« [Image right: Rosetta Stone (source)] The
Rosetta Stone: The Story of the Decoding of Hieroglyphics,
by Robert Sole, et al. |
| MARCH 4 - EVENTS | |
| Rotoblator | |
(source) |
In 1991, the "Rotoblator," an artery cleaning tool,
was announced by Dr. Maurice Buchbinder at the annual meeting of the American
College of Cardiology. Using a diamond head rotating at 200,000 rpm on
a small shaft (only nine thousandths of an inch) inserted in a clogged
artery, obstructions could be successfully removed in about 95% of cases.
This
procedure
is particularly useful for hardened, calcified blockages. The blockage
is pulverized to particles smaller than the size of a red blood cell -
particles that harmlessly exit the bloodstream. The device, dubbed a Rotablator,
won Food and Drug Administration approval in 1993, and is manufactured
by Heart Technology Inc. of Bellevue, Wash. |
| Cray supercomputer | |
(source) |
In 1977, the first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer,
costing
$19,000,000, was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, NM, and was used to
help the defense industry create sophisticated weapons systems. This system
had a peak performance of 133 megaflops and used
the newest technology, integrated circuits and vector register technology.
The Cray-1 looked like no other computer before or since. It was a cylindrical
machine 7 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, weighed 30 tons and required
its own electrical substation to provide it with power (an electric bill
around $35,000/month). The inventor, Seymour Cray, died 5 Oct 1996 in an
auto accident. His innovations
included vector register technology, cooling technologies, and magnetic
amplifiers. |
| North Sea gas | |
(source) |
In 1967, the first North Sea gas was piped ashore to BP's Easington
terminal on the East Riding of Yorkshire coast of England. Thus this year
also saw the beginning of the ten year national Conversion programme which
involved the physical conversion of every appliance in the country from
coal gas to natural gas. The first surveys in the North Sea had begun in
1962. The West Sole field was discovered in September 1965. The field lies
70 kilometres off the Humberside coast, in approximately 28 metres of water.
Drilling of the production wells began in July 1966, and in March 1967
the first North Sea natural gas was piped ashore. Within ten years, the
West Sole field was supplying almost all of Britain’s gas. |
| Atomic power in Antarctica | |
(1965) (source) |
In 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the first atomic
power plant in Antarctica, the PM-3A, Naval Nuclear Power Unit, was
in operation at McMurdo Sound. Between 1 Jan and 1 Mar 1962, the prefabricated
plant was assembled on Observation Hill by a team of contractors and military
technicians. This source of power was initially chosen when engineers realized
that a fission power plant could operate
for years without new fuel. In 1970, management and funding of all Antarctic
operations was consolidated by President Nixon under the National Science
Foundation. The NSF was to take over the funding of PM-3A as of 1 Jul 1972,
but it was decommissioned that year, and replaced with a diesel electricity
generator. |
| Coolidge Dam | |
(source) |
In 1930, the Coolidge Dam on Gila River in Arizona was dedicated by dedicated
by President Calvin Coolidge. Built 31 miles east of Globe, Ariz., on the
San Carlos Indian Reservation, it irrigates 100,000 acres. Coolidge Dam
was designed and constructed, and is owned and operated,
by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and was contructed between 1924
and 1928. The dam used 200,000 cu yd of concrete and consists of three
domes, which are supported by massive buttresses on 100-foot centers. It
rises 249 feet, with a crest length of 580 feet. Two uncontrolled ogee
crest spillways are concrete lined and located on each abutment. |
| Forth Railway Bridge | |
(source) |
In 1890, the Forth Railway Bridge was opened, spanning the Forth river
between Edinburgh and Dundee, Scotland. It remains the main railway link
over the "Forth", crossed by about 200 trains a day.It was built
between 1882 and 1890 for the Forth Bridge Railway Company, a consortium
set up by the North British, North Eastern, Great Northern and Midland
Railways. Pioneering the use of mild steel (in place of wrought iron) in
large structures, it was designed by John
Fowler and Benjamin Baker and
built by Tancred Arrol and Co. Its total length being 8300-ft is comprised
of 3 double cantilevers and high approach girders. |
| US photo studio | |
(source) |
In 1840, the world's first commercial photography studio was opened in
New York City by John Johnson and Alexander S. Wolcott. On 6 Oct 1839,
Johnson had taken to Wolcott's residence a full description of Daguerre's
discovery. That afternoon they worked to produce a camera and plates. The
same day, they exposed and processed their first Daguerreotypes. Johnson
later wrote
that they ended the day "little dreaming or knowing into what a labyrinth
such a beginning was hastening us." Over the next few months, they experimented
in various aspects of the construction of the camera, lighting, and using
persons as subjects. By 8 May 1840, Wolcott
had patented a camera
using a mirror reflector to correct the reversed image from the usual single
lens. |
| First US railroad charter | |
(source) |
In 1826, the first chartered railroad in the U.S. was chartered as the
Granite Railway in Quincy, Mass. It was organized to transport
granite blocks from quarries
in the Blue Hills that were used to build the Bunker Hill monument. The
Granite Railway was an inclined plane built to carry granite to Neponset
wharf and thence to Charlestown via barges for construction of the Bunker
Hill Monument.The Granite Railway also carried stone to Boston Harbor for
shipping,
as well as for the Minot’s Ledge lighthouse at the entrance to Boston Harbor.
The three-mile track
was powered by gravity in one direction and beast-powered in the other.
A pioneer in
the American railroad industry, Gridley Bryant, engineered its design and
construction and many of his inventions are still in use today. The Railway
is a Civil Engineering Landmark. |
