| MARCH 12 - BIRTHS | |
| Leo Esaki | |
(source) |
 Born 12
Mar 1925
Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1973) in recognition of his pioneering work on electron tunneling in solids. From some deceptively simple experiments published in 1958, he was able to lay bare the tunneling processes in solids, a phenomena which had been clouded by questions for decades. Tunneling is a quantum mechanical effect in which an electron passes through a potential barrier even though classical theory predicted that it could not. Dr. Esaki's discovery led to the creation of the Esaki diode, an important component of solid state physics with practical applications in high-speed circuits found in computers and communications networks. |
| W. H. R. Rivers | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1864; died 4 Jun 1922.
William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English medical psychologist and anthropologist. Rivers, who originally trained as a doctor, did work as a pioneering psychologist in the First World War. This background enabled Rivers to bring a scientific approach to anthropology and to set the trend for anthropologists to go and visit the cultures they are studying rather than stay at home and theorize. River's did his major field work with Torres Strait Australian aborigines and with a hill tribe in Southern India, the Todas. He is known principally for The Todas (1906), a model of precise documentation of a people, and the important History of Melanesian Society, 2 vol. (1914). 
Medicine,
Magic and Religion, by W.H.R. Rivers. |
| Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1863; died 6 Jan 1945.
Russian geochemist and mineralogist who is considered to be one of the founders of geochemistry and biogeochemistry. His great contribution was his his research on silicates and aluminosilicate minerals. He was one of the first to recognize radioactivity as a powerful source of energy. Within the last 200 years, humanity has been a powerful geologic force, moving more mass upon the earth than the biosphere. Two of the laws detailed by Vernadsky are that the number and kinds of chemical elements and compounds entering the cycling organization of living matter increase with time, and that as we move toward the present the pace of cycling increases. |
| Sir William Henry Perkin | |
 |
Born 12
Mar 1838; died 14 Jul 1907.
English chemist and inventor, Sir William Henry Perkin, in his youth was enthused about chemistry by attending public lectures by Faraday. While experimenting to synthesize quinine from a coal tar chemical, Perkins mixed aniline and sodium dichromate and unexpectedly found a dense colour - he named as aniline purple - which he extracted with alcohol. He had discovered the first artificial dye. Textiles of his era were coloured from natural sources; his was a valuable alternative. At the age of 18, he patented the dye. His father invested in his efforts to manufacture the dye. It went on sale in 1857, and it became popular in France. By age 23 he was fathering a new synthetic organic chemical industry. He continued synthesis research. He was knighted in 1906. |
| Simon Newcomb | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1835; died 11 Jul 1909.
Canadian-American astronomer and and mathematician who prepared ephemerides (tables of computed places of celestial bodies over a period of time) and tables of astronomical constants. He was an astronomer (1861-77) before becoming Superintendent of the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office (1877-97). During this time he undertook numerous studies in celestial mechanics. His central goal was to place planetary and satellite motions on a completely uniform system, thereby raising solar system studies and the theory of gravitation to a new level. He largely accomplished this goal with the adoption of his new system of astronomical constants at the end of the century. |
| Charles Friedel | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1832; died 20 Apr 1899.
French organic chemist and mineralogist who, with the American chemist James Mason Crafts, discovered in 1877 the chemical process known as the Friedel-Crafts reaction. In 1856, after studying in Strasburg, Friedel was appointed conservator of the mineralogical collections at the Superior National School of Mines. In 1871 he began to lecture at the École Normale and in 1876 became professor of mineralogy at the Sorbonne, but on the death of Wurtz in 1884 he exchanged that position for the chair of organic chemistry. He collaborated in efforts to form diamonds artificially, studied the pyroelectric properties of crystals, determined crystallographic constants, and did research on ketone and aldehyde compounds. |
| Clement Studebaker | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1831; died 27 Nov 1901.
American manufacturer who founded a family firm that became the world's largest producer of horse-drawn vehicles and a leader in automobile manufacturing. In 1852 Henry and Clement Studebaker opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend, Indiana. By the Civil War the shop as supplying wagons to the U.S. Army. In 1868 four of the brothers established the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company. Despite setbacks, the company grew to be the largest wagon factory in the world, delivering on its motto, "Always give more than you promise." As the 20th Century dawned, after Clement Studebaker's death, the company began building both electric and gasoline powered automobiles. |
| Gustav Robert Kirchhoff | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1824; died 17 Oct 1887.
German physicist who, with Robert Bunsen, established the theory of spectrum analysis (a technique for chemical analysis by analyzing the light emitted by a heated material), which Kirchhoff applied to determine the composition of the Sun. He found that when light passes through a gas, the gas absorbs those wavelengths that it would emit if heated, which explained the numerous dark lines (Fraunhofer lines) in the Sun's spectrum. In his Kirchhoff's laws (1845) he generalized the equations describing current flow to the case of electrical conductors in three dimensions, extending Ohm's law to calculation of the currents, voltages, and resistances of electrical networks. He demonstrated that current flows in a zero-resistance conductor at the speed of light. |
| John Frederic Daniell | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1790; died 13 Mar 1845.
British chemist and meteorologist who invented the Daniell cell, which was a great improvement over the voltaic cell used in the early days of battery development. His research in1820 led to the invention of a dew-point hygrometer that measured relative humidity which afterwards became a standard instrument. Daniell began experiments in 1835 in an attempt to improve the Voltaic battery with its problem of being unsteady and as a weak source of electrical current. In 1836, he invented a primary cell in which hydrogen was eliminated in the generation of the electricity. Daniell had solved the problem of polarization due to the was a thin film of hydrogen bubbles that formed over the positive electrode that reduced current. |
| William Buckland | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1784; died 15 Aug 1856.
English pioneer geologist and minister, known for his effort to reconcile geological discoveries with the Bible and anti-evolutionary theories. |
| John Theophile Desaguliers | |
(source) |
Born 12
Mar 1683; died 10 Mar 1744.
French-English chaplain and physicist. He studied at Oxford, became experimental assistant to Sir Isaac Newton. As curator at the Royal Society, his experimental lectures in mechanical philosophy and electricity (advocating, substantiating and popularizing the work of Isaac Newton) attracted a wide audience. In electricity, he first used the terms conductor and insulator. He repeated and extended the work of Stephen Gray in electricity. He proposed a scheme for heating vessels such as salt-boilers by steam instead of fire. He made inventions of his own, such as a planetarium, and improvements to machines, such as Thomas Savery's steam engine (by adding a safety valve, and using an internal water jet to condense the steam in the displacement chambers) and a ventilator at the House of Commons. He was a prolific author and translator. |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| MARCH 12 - DEATHS | |
| Count Eigil Knuth | |
(source) |
 Died
12 Mar 1996 (born 8 Aug 1903)
Danish explorer, archaeologist, sculptor and author whose extensive research in Greenland unearthed traces of previously unknown ancient North American Eskimo or Inuit cultures, dating back more than 5,000 years. He made the first of more than thirty expeditions in 1932 to take part in the Danish National Museum's excavations of 1,000-year-old Viking settlement ruins in west Greenland. The climax of Knuth's career was the discovery in three four-man summer treks from 1987 to 1989 of the ruins of 520 crude circular dwellings along the coast of the Ile de France off northeast Greenland, which cast new light on primitive Arctic civilisation. Active throughout his life, he made his only expedition only a year before his death. |
| David Lambert Lack | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1973 (born 16 Jul 1910)
Born 15 July 1910
British ornithologist, best known as the author of The Life of the Robin (1943) and other works that popularized natural science. At Oxford University, in the 1930's, David Lack studied the behavioural ecology of birds and its evolutionary significance. He was zoology master at Dartington Hall School (1933-40), taking a year off to study bird behaviour on the Galapagos Islands (1938-39). During WW II, he was recruited for operational research and was involved in early work on radar. He was one of the leading figures in British ornithology. His scientific research was on various aspects of speciation, population control, group selection, and ecological isolation. |
| Eugene Lindsay Opie | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1971 (born 5 Jul 1873)
American pathologist who conducted important research on the causes, transmission, and diagnosis of tuberculosis and on immunization against the disease. Opie published on malaria research and the causes of diabetes. He demonstrated that the islets of Langerhans were involved in the development of diabetes in humans and identified two forms of parasite (hyaline and granular) in crow malaria. Later, he embarked on research in immunology and carcinogenesis, the development of obstruction of the pancreatic duct, and tuberculosis. He remained active in research well into his nineties. |
| Alfred Lacroix | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1948 (born 4 Feb 1863)
French mineralogist and geologist whose Minéraux des roches (1888; "The Minerals of Rocks"), written with the geologist Albert Michel-Lévy, was a pioneer study of the optical properties of rock-forming minerals. He gave particular attention to minerals connected with volcanic phenomena and igneous rocks, to the effects of metamorphism, and to mineral veins. He pursued his interests in various parts of the world, but notably in the Pyrenees. In his numerous contributions to scientific journals he dealt with the mineralogy and petrology of Madagascar, and published an elaborate and exhaustive volume on the eruptions in Martinique, La Montagna Pelée et ses Éruptions (1904). |
| Sir William Bragg | |
(EB) |
Died
12 Mar 1942 (born 2 Jul 1862)
Sir William Henry Bragg was a pioneer British scientist in solid-state physics who was a joint winner (with his son Sir Lawrence Bragg) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for research on the determination of crystal structures. During the WW I, Bragg was put in charge of research on the detection and measurement of underwater sounds in connection with the location of submarines. He also constructed an X-ray spectrometer for measuring the wavelengths of X-rays. In the 1920s, while director of the Royal Institution in London, he initiated X-ray diffraction studies of organic molecules. Bragg was knighted in 1920. |
| Michael Idvorshy Pupin | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1935 (born 4 Oct 1858)
Serbian-American physicist who devised a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire. His parents were illiterate, but they encouraged his education. Pupin became an instructor in mathematical physics (1890) at Columbia University, New York City. In 1986, he discovered that atoms struck by X rays emit secondary X-ray radiation. He also invented a means for taking short-exposure X-ray photographs. The Bell Telephone Company, in 1901, acquired the patent for his invention for long-distance telephony. Pupin won a Pulitzer Prize (1924) for his autobiographical work, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923). |
| Asa Griggs Candler | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1929 (born 30 Dec 1851)
U.S. soft-drink manufacturer who expanded the marketing of the Coca-Cola® soft drink created (1886) by pharmacist John "Doc" Pemberton who made the syrup that he used in his drugstore fountain drinks. When he died, the formula (still a very well kept secret) was sold to Asa Candler, a marketing genius. Candler devoted $50,000 a year to advertising, an unheard-of amount at the turn of the century. His goal was to make the drink a national product. He did this partially by bottling the product and not relying totally on fountain sales. There were constant legal battles to keep copy-cat products off the market, a fight eventually won with the patenting of a uniquely-shaped bottle. Coca-Cola® advertising even influenced our view of Santa Claus.« 
"For
God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American
Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It" by Mark Pendergrast. |
| Hilaire Chardonnet | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1924 (born 1 May 1839)
Count (Louis-Marie-) Hilaire Bernigaud Chardonnet was a French chemist and industrialist who first developed rayon, the first commonly used artificial fibre. When it was first displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1891 it was called Chardonnet silk, and caused a sensation. Although trained as a civil engineer, he went to work under Louis Pasteur. Chardonnet was prompted by Pasteur's study of diseases in silkworms to seek an artificial replacement for silk. His starting point was mulberry leaves, the food of silkworms. He turned them into a cellulose pulp with nitric and sulphuric acids and stretched it into fibres. The original fibre was highly flammable, but by 1889 he had eliminated this and developed rayon. He opened factories for its manufacture. |
| George Westinghouse | |
1884 (source) |
Died
12 Mar 1914 (born 6 Oct 1846)
American inventor and industrialist who founded his own company to manufacturer his invention, the air brake. The son of a New York agricultural machinery maker, he began at age 21 to work on a new tool he invented to guide derailed train cars back onto the track. Before he died 46 years later, he produced safer rail transportation, steam turbines, gas lighting and heating, and electricity. He founded not only namesakes Westinghouse Air Brake and Westinghouse Electric, but also Union Switch & Signal and the forerunners to Duquesne Light, Equitable Gas and Rockwell International. He was also chiefly responsible for the adoption of alternating current for electric power transmission in the United States, and held 400 patents. A
Life of George Westinghouse, by Henry G. Prout |
| Johann Jakob Balmer | |
(source) |
Died
12 Mar 1898 (born 1 May 1825)
Swiss mathematician and physicist who discovered a formula basic to the development of atomic theory. Although a mathematics lecturer all his life, Balmer's most important work was on spectral series by giving a formula relating the wavelengths of the spectral lines of the hydrogen atom (1885) at age 60. Balmer's famous formula is 
= hm2/(m2-n2). Wavelengths are accurately
given using h = 3654.6x10-8-cm, n = 2, and m = 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
He suggested that giving n other small integer values would give other
series of wavelengths for hydrogen. Why this prediction agreed with observation
was not understood until after his death when the theoretical work of Niels
Bohr was published in 1913. |
| MARCH 12 - EVENTS | |
| Concorde | |
(source) |
In 1969, the supersonic aircraft, the Concorde made its first flight |
| Sound on film | |
(source) |
In 1923, the Phonofilm,
the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track was demonstrated at
a press conference. It was developed (1920) by Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor
of the radio tube (1907). Dancers and musicians were shown on the film
with music, but without voice dialogue. The sound was imaged in a narrow
margin alongside the picture frames on the film. (De Forest's process came
several years before the 1928 film, the "Jazz Singer," but that film used
the Warner Vitaphone system. The Vitaphone system attempted to synchronize
its sound from a record player turntable connected to the film projector.)
The de Forest process
read a series of light and dark areas on the film itself, using a photocell
to convert to audio. [Image
De Forest with Phonofilm camera, 1920] |
| Parachuting | |
|
In 1912, Capt Albert Berry performed the first parachute jump from an airplane. |
|
| Space rocket | |
|
In 1907, a camera-carrying space rocket patent was issued to Alfred Maul,
a German engineer. It could also carry scientific instruments and return
safely. |
|
| Coca-Cola | |
(source) |
In 1894, the first bottles of Coca-Cola
were sold. Coca-Cola was invented by Dr. John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist
who created the formula in a three legged brass kettle in his backyard
on 8 May 1886. He mixed a combination of lime, cinnamon, coca leaves,
and the seeds of a Brazilian shrub to make the famous beverage. Carbonated
water was introduced later to make the beverage as now familiar. Coca-Cola
was originally used as a nerve and brain tonic and a medical elixir. Asa
Candler owned the company, after Pemberton's death. On 31 Jan 1893, the
famous Coca-Cola formula was patented. He also opened the first syrup
manufacturing plant in 1884. He began large scale bottling of Coca-Cola
in 1899. [Image: replica 1894
"Hutchinson" bottle]
"For
God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American
Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It" by Mark Pendergrast. |
| Automatic telephone exchange | |
| In
1889, Almon B. Strowger of Kansas City patented the first automatic
telephone exchange. Tradition gives that his inspiration came because a
local telephone operator was his his principal competitor's wife, and she
would divert Strowger's clients to her husband. The original prototype
was devised using a collar box and a number of used matches. The first
Strowger telephone exchange opened on 3 Nov 1892 in LaPorte, Ind. This
early system did not use a dial to enter the desired number. Instead, using
three keys, one for each digit of a three-digit number, a subscriber pressed
each key the appropriate number of times for each digit. The first dial
phones (with projecting vanes instead of holes) was used in Milwaukee's
City Hall (1896).* |
|
| Starch process patented | |
|
In 1841, the first U.S. patent for starch processing was granted to Orlando
Jones of City Road, Middlesex, England (No.
2000). Previously, corn would be steeped in water for several weeks
to separate the starch by fermentation, though with limited yield. The
patent described a process to extract starch from rice which shortened
the production time, increased the yield, and left by-products in a condition
suitable for further uses. About 50 gal. of a caustic alkali solution containing
"about 200 grains of real soda or potash to the gallon", was used per 100
pounds of rice to macerate the rice for 20 - 24 hours. The rice was then
washed, drained, milled, sieved, further macerated and settled, yielding
a deposit of starch which was drained, washed and dried. This process was
later applied to corn. Corn starch is now used in deodorants, to heal diaper
rash, and to thicken gravy. |
|
| U.S. steam engine | |
|
In 1755, a steam engine was first reported used in America, at a copper
mine in New Barbados Neck (now North Arlington), NJ. It was imported from
England by Josiah Hornblower and put to use pumping water from the mine
of Colonel John Schuyler. |
|
