March 11 - Today in Science History



MARCH 11 - BIRTHS
Nicolaas Bloembergen
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1920 Dutch-born American physicist, corecipient with Arthur Leonard Schawlow of the United States and Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn of Sweden of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physics for their revolutionary spectroscopic studies of the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with matter. Bloembergen made a pioneering use of lasers in these investigations and developed three-level pumps used in both masers and lasers.
Vannevar Bush
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1890; died 28 Jun 1974. American electrical engineer and administrator who and oversaw government mobilization of scientific research during World War II. At the age of 35, in 1925, he developed the differential analyzer, the world's first analog computer. It was capable of solving differential equations. He put into concrete form that which began 50 years earlier with the incomplete efforts of Babbage, and the theoretical details developed by Kelvin. This machine filled a 20 x 30 foot room. He innovated one of the largest growing media in our time, namely hypermedia as fulfilled in the Internet with hypertext links.
Joseph Bertrand
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1822; died 5 Apr 1900. Joseph(-Louis-François) Bertrand was a French mathematician and educator remembered for his elegant applications of differential equations to analytical mechanics, particularly in thermodynamics, and for his work on statistical probability and the theory of curves and surfaces. In 1845 Bertrand conjectured that there is at least one prime between n and (2n-2) for every n>3, as proved five years later by Chebyshev. In 1855 he translated Gauss's work on the theory of errors and the method of least squares into French. He wrote a number of notes on the reduction of data from observations.
Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1818; died 1 Jul 1881. French geologist and chemist who invented the first industrial process for producing aluminium. In 1854, he built on earlier work of German chemist, Friedrich Woelher, and found a method of preparing aluminium, based on aluminium chloride and sodium. By 1860, he was producing aluminium at a factory in Javel, Paris, and later in Nanterre. Yet the metal was more expensive than gold! This industrial method was later replaced by Charles Hall's easier electrolytic procedure. As a geologist making volcanic studies, he visited the coastal sites of Vesuvius and Stromboli . He proposed that volcanic eruptions are due to the entrance of sea water into the fissures of the earth's crust which, in contact with hot rocks, produces the explosive eruptions.
Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1811; died 23 Sep 1877. French astronomer who predicted by mathematical means the existence of the planet Neptune. He switched from his first subject of chemistry to to teach astronomy at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1837 and worked at the Paris Observatory for most of his life. His main activity was in celestial mechanics. Independently of Adams, Le Verrier calculated the position of Neptune from irregularities in Uranus's orbit. As one of his colleagues said, " ... he discovered a star with the tip of his pen, without any instruments other than the strength of his calculations alone. Incorrectly, he predicted a planet, Vulcan, or asteroid belt, within the orbit of Mercury to account for an observed discrepancy (1855) in the motion in the perihelion of Mercury.
August Leopold Crelle
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1780; died 6 Oct 1855. Mathematician and engineer. As a civil engineer in the service of the Prussian Government and worked on the construction and planning of roads and the first railway in Germany (completed in 1838). Crelle advanced the work and careers of many young mathematicians of his day. He founded (1826) the world's oldest mathematical periodical still in existence, Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik ("Journal for Pure and Applied Mathematics"), now known as Crelle's Journal,and edited it for the rest of his life.
Otto Friedrich Müller
(source)	Born 11 Mar 1730; died 26 Dec 1784. German-Danish biologist and microscopist who concentrated on viewing bacteria, as previously seen only dimly by Leeuwenhoek. Despite the limited resolution of the microscopes of his time, Müller was the first to see bacteria with sufficient clarity to divide them into categories, and introduced to the world the new animal kingdom of Infusoria. In 1773, he was the first to describe diatoms. He coined the terms baccilum and spirillum and was also was the first to make a general classification of micro-organisms, following the scheme of Linnaeus. He invented the naturalist's dredge.

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MARCH 11 - DEATHS

Philo Taylor Farnsworth
	Died 11 Mar 1971 (born 19 Aug 1906) American pioneer in the development of electronic television, taking all of the moving parts out of television inventions. Farnsworth was a 15-year-old high school student when he designed his first television system. Six years later he obtained his first patent. In 1935 he demonstrated his complete television system. Farnsworth's basic television patents covered scanning, focusing, synchronizing, contrast, controls, and power. He also invented the first cold cathode ray tubes and the first simple electronic microscope. The Philco TV manufacturing was named after him. (Image: Collier's Weekly, 1936)
Roy Chapman Andrews
(source)	Died 11 Mar 1960 (born 26 Jan 1884) American naturalist, explorer, and author, who spent his entire career at the American Museum of Natural History. He led many important scientific expeditions with financial support through his public lectures and books, particularly in central Asia and eastern Asia. On his 1925 central Asian expedition, the first known dinosaur eggs were discovered, also: a skull and parts of Baluchitherium, the largest known land mammal; extensive deposits of fossil mammals and reptiles previously unknown; evidence of prehistoric human life; and geological strata previously unexplored. During his career he was not known as an influential scientist, yet Andrews was the museum promoter, creating immense excitement and successfully advancing research there.
Sir Alexander Fleming
(source)	Died 11 Mar 1955 (born 6 Aug 1881) Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish bacteriologist, born in Darvel, Strathclyde, who discovered penicillin. In 1928, while working on influenza virus, he observed that mould had developed accidently on a staphylococcus culture plate and that the mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He experimented further and he found that a mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. The active substance, which he named penicillin, initiated the highly effective practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious diseases. Fleming shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey, who both (from 1939) continued Fleming's work. Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth, by Gwyn MacFarlane.
Sir Ralph Freeman
	Died 11 Mar 1950 (born 27 Nov 1880) English civil engineer whose Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932), Australia, which with a main arch span of 1,650 feet (500 m), and a deck 160 feet wide is the world's largest (and among the longest) steel arch bridge, now carrying eight lanes of highway traffic, two train lines, a footway and a cycleway. Freeman also designed the Tyne Bridge, Newcastle, England; Victoria Falls Bridge over Zambezi River; Royal Naval Propellant factory; Furness shipbuilding yard in Lancashire; and five major bridges in the Rhodesias.
Arthur Jeffrey Dempster
(source)	Died 11 Mar 1950 (born 14 Aug 1886) Canadian-American physicist who in 1918 built the first mass spectrometer (based on the invention of Francis W. Aston) and discovered isotope uranium-235 (1935). The mass spectrometer is an instrument that uses electric and magnetic fields to separate and measure a sample's atoms according to their mass and relative quantity. In 1935, he discovered that naturally occurring uranium, though mostly uranium-238, contained 0.7% U-235 (later used as the primary fuel in atomic bombs and reactors after Niels Bohr predicted it could be used to produce a chain reaction releasing huge amounts of nuclear fission energy). During WW II, Dempster worked with the secret Manhattan Project that developed the world's first nuclear weapons.«
John Shaw Billings
(source)	Died 11 Mar 1913 (born 12 Apr 1838) American surgeon and librarian whose organization of U.S. medical institutions played a central role in the modernization of hospital care and the maintenance of public health. During the Civil War, in the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, he performed many operations and was the first surgeon in the war to attempt, with success, excision of the ankle joint. He was profoundly interested in advancing knowledge by creating libraries, including the New York Public Library, to improve access to books. Billings also had ideas about hospital architectural design. He planned the new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore with ventilation systems that reflected the best contemporary understanding of industrial hygiene.
Archibald Scott Couper
(source)	Died 11 Mar 1892 (born 31 Mar 1831) Scottish chemist who, independently of August Kekulé, proposed the tetravalency of carbon and the ability of carbon atoms to bond with one another to form long chains, which concepts are fundamental to understanding the molecules found in living organisms. He also created the use of a line between element symbols to indicate a chemical bond. He wrote these landmark ideas in a paper to be submitted to the French Academy of Sciences through his superior, Adolphe Wurtz. Sadly for Couper, that paper was not forwarded from the lab in a timely fashion, and meanwhile another chemist, August Kekulé had published the same, though independent, idea of tetravalence, depriving Couper of his due fame.



MARCH 11 - EVENTS

Daylight Savings Time
(source)	In 2007, in the U.S., Daylight Saving Time begins three weeks earlier than in previous years. It was reset by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, signed into law by the president on 8 Aug 2005. Among hundreds of other provisions giving incentives and subsidies concerning energy production and conservation, the Act set the change to DST to begin three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday of March, and end a week later on the first Sunday of November. When it was first introduced in the U.S., On 31 Mar 1918, the U.S. first began daylight saving time (DST) on Easter Sunday, when clocks were set ahead by one hour. The concept was introduced earlier in Great Britain during WWI as a coal-conserving measure.«
Pioneer V
(source)	In 1960, Pioneer V was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in one of the first in-depth attempts to study the solar system. The spacecraft was carried into space on a Thor-Able three stage rocket. It was a beach ball sized spacecraft equipped with four paddle like solar cells that recharged the on-board batteries that provided electrical power. Pioneer V entered an orbit around the Sun between Earth and Venus. It provided a wealth of new data on interplanetary space including measurements of magnetic fields, cosmic radiation, electrical fields and micrometeorites. It was stabilized by slowly spinning about its axis. The spacecraft transmitted information until 26 Jun 1960 when it was 22.5 million miles (36 million km) from Earth.
Spanish flu
(source)	In 1918, the first cases of "Spanish Influenza" in the U.S. were reported. Early in the morning, a young private reported to the Army hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of fever, sore throat, and headache. By noon, the hospital had more than 100 cases; in a week, there were 500. During the Spring, 48 soldiers died at Fort Riley. No one knew why until the cause of death was identified as influenza - but unlike any strain ever seen. As the killer virus spread across the country, hospitals overfilled, death carts roamed the streets and helpless city officials dug mass graves. It was the worst epidemic in American history, killing over 600,000 - until it disappeared as mysteriously as it had begun. Worldwide, up to 40 million people died in its wake.
Luddite riots
1812 (source)	In 1811, the Luddite riots began in Nottingham, England. There was poverty and misery, made worse by the new inventions - machinery which could do jobs better and faster than people. In those days of low wages and the ever-present threat of actual starvation should those wages stop for any reason, these innovations must have made the prospect even more gloomy. There were food shortages resulting from the Napoleonic Wars, and high unemployment. A group of laborers attacked a factory, breaking up 63 stocking and lace manufacturing frames, the machines which they feared would replace them. During the next three weeks gangs of upwards of fifty men, armed with pistols, guns and heavy hammers broke two hundred more frames.« [Image: Luddite breaking frame machine, 1812]
Multiple patentee
	In 1791, Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, Penn. became the first person to receive more than one U.S. patent. The Secretary of State issued him the first patent on a threshing machine for corn and grain, being the seventh in the records of the office. On the same day he was granted three more letters patent: for breaking and swingling hemp; for cutting and polishing marble; and to raise the nap on cloths. Although his threshing machine was too complicated to work efficiently, no other inventors made significant improvements until 1820. The Patent Office records concerning these patents were destroyed in the 1836 fire. Most were not reconstructed, and the full patents are not now available in the Patent Office records.«
Paper
(source)	In 105, A.D., Ts'ai Lun invented paper, made from bamboo, mulberry, and other fibers, along with fish nets and rags. He lived and served as an official at the Chinese Imperial Court at the Han Dynasty in China. He presented samples of paper to Emperor Han Ho Ti. He was promoted by the Emperor for his invention and became wealthy. Later he got involved in palace intrigue, which led to his downfall. Finally he ended his life drinking poison. In China, before Tsai, Lun, books were made of bamboo, which were heavy and clumsy. Some books were made of silks, which were very expensive. In the West at that time, books were made of sheepskin or calfskin.