| MARCH 15 - BIRTHS | |
| E. Donnall Thomas | |
(source) |
 Born 15
Mar 1920
American physician who in 1990 was corecipient (with Joseph E. Murray) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work in transplanting bone marrow from one person to another - an achievement related to the cure of patients with acute leukemia and other blood cancers or blood diseases. Although this prize usually goes to scientists doing basic research with test tubes, Thomas was a doctor doing hands-on clinical research with patients. |
| Waldemar Haffkine | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1860; died 25 Oct 1930.
Waldemar Mordecai Wolfe Haffkine was a Russian-British bacteriologist who worked to reduce deaths by cholera. He worked under Roux at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, taking a particular interest in cholera, since epidemics were frequent in Europe. In 1892, he prepared an attenuated strain of cholera culture. He believed in its safely and he tested it on himself after self-injecting a concentrated strain. In 1893, he went to India, where he inoculated 45,000 people to protect them against endemic cholera, despite difficult working conditions, a suspicious population, even with opposition from British medical officials. He reduced the death rate by 70% among those inoculated. He also attempted to produce a vaccine against the plague. |
| Liberty Hyde Bailey | |
(EB) |
Born 15
Mar 1858; died 25 Dec 1954.
American horticulturist who helped create the science of horticulture, made systematic studies of cultivated plants, and advanced knowledge in hybridization, plant pathology, and agriculture. He was a recognized authority on sedges, tropical palms, blackberries, grapes, cabbages, pumpkins and squashes, among others. He is particularly notable for his great encyclopedias (Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, in four volumes, 1907-9) and important manuals (Cyclopedia of Horticulture in six volumes). He was the first to experiment with continuous electric illumination (Influence of the electric arc lamp upon greenhouse plants, 1891) and coined the term cultivar (1920s) for a cultivated variety of plant, not a wild variety, produced through cultivation.«  Hortus
Third: A Concise Dictionary of Plants Cultivated...,
by Liberty Hyde Bailey |
| Sir Charles Vernon Boys | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1855; died 30 March 1944.
English physicist and inventor of sensitive instruments. He graduated in mining and metallurgy, self-taught in a wide knowledge of geometrical methods. In 1881, he invented the integraph, a machine for drawing the antiderivative of a function. Boys is known particularly for his utilization of the torsion of quartz fibres in the measurement of minute forces, enabling him to elaborate (1895) on Henry Cavendish's experiment to improve the values obtained for the Newtonian gravitational constant. He also invented an improved automatic recording calorimeter for testing manufactured gas (1905) and high-speed cameras to photograph rapidly moving objects, such as bullets and lightning discharges. Upon retirement in 1939, he grew weeds. |
| Emil (Adolf) von Behring | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1854; died 31 March 1917.
German bacteriologist who is considered the founder of the science of immunology. He received in 1901 the first Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria. In 1890, working with S. Kitasato, he discovered that immunity against tetanus and diphtheria could be produced by injecting serum from an animal that had recovered from the disease. He coined the word antitoxin for such substances. They also showed that the antitoxins thus produced by one animal could immunize another animal and that it could cure an animal actually showing symptoms of diphtheria. This great discovery was soon confirmed and successfully used by other workers. |
| Alice Cunningham Fletcher | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1838; died 6 Apr 1923.
U.S. anthropologist whose stature as a social scientist, notably for her pioneer study of Indian music, has overshadowed her influence on federal government Indian policies that later were considered to be unfortunate. Her early interests were in archaeology. Her later interests, however, focused on contemporary Native Americans. Fletcher was one of the first ethnologists to live among the people whom she studied, the Omaha. She had a lifelong interest in Native American music, customs, and language, and with collaborators, transcribed hundreds of songs of the Plains Indians. She helped write and get passed the Dawes Act (1887) which "...gave each Indian legal title to a plot of land and also granted them citizenship" |
| Germain Sommeiller | |
(source) |
Born 15 Mar 1815; died 11 Jul 1871.
French-Italian engineer who built the Mount Cenis (Fréjus) Tunnel (1857-70) through the Alps, the world's first important mountain tunnel. The two track railway tunnel unites Italian Savoy (north of the mountains) through Switzerland with the rest of Italy to the south. At 8 miles long and it was more than double the length of any previous tunnel. In 1861, after three years of tedious hand-boring a mere eight inches a day into the rock face, Sommeiller introduced the first industrial-scale pneumatics for tunnel digging. He built a special reservoir, high above the tunnel entrance, to produce a head of water that compressed air (to 6 atm.) for pneumatic drills, able to dig up to 20 times faster. Authorised on 15 Aug 1857, the tunnel opened on 17 Sep 1871, as a major triumph of engineering.« 
[Image right
top: Mont Cenis Tunnel entrance arch; right
bottom: Sommeiller Boring Machines.] |
| John Snow | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1813; died 16 Jun 1858
English obstetrician who was among the first to use anesthesia, renowned as a pioneer epidemiologist. In On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1849), Snow suggested that cholera was a contagious disease easily transmitted by contaminated water. The widely-held theory was that diseases are caused by bad air and his idea was ignored. Then, in London's 1854 cholera emergency, he painstakingly correlated individual cholera casualties to the water supply they had used in each case. He thus solved the deadly epidemic by removing a pump handle of the community water pump that he found to be the culprit. Investigation showed raw sewage from a cesspit had contaminated the well.« Cholera,
Chloroform and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow,
by Peter Vinten-Johansen. |
| George Perkins Marsh | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1801; died 23 Jul 1882.
American conservationist, whose book Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) was one of the 19th century's classic influences on geography, ecology, and resource management. Marsh demonstrated a remarkably wide range expertise in philology, etymology, the study of reptiles, engravings, music, the artificial propagation of fish, comparative grammar, physiognomy, and geography. Lewis Mumford was called "the fountain- head of the conservation movement" by Lewis Mumford. In his extensive touring of the Mediterranean world, Marsh became convinced that human civilization had remade the natural world but reshaped the face of nature with disastrous consequences. |
| William Rutter Dawes | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1799; died 15 Feb 1868.
English amateur astronomer who set up a private observatory and made extensive measurements of binary stars and on 25 Nov 1850 discovered Saturn's inner Crepe Ring (independently of William Bond). In 1864, he was the first to make an accurate map of Mars. He was called "Eagle-eyed Dawes" for the keenness of his sight with a telescope (though otherwise, he was very near-sighted). He devised a useful empirical formula by which the resolving power of a telescope - known as the Dawes limit - could be quickly determined. For a given telescope with an aperture of d cm, a double star of separation 11/d arcseconds or more can be resolved, that is, be visually recognized as two stars rather than one.« |
| Nicolas Louis de Lacaille | |
(source) |
Born 15
Mar 1713; died 21 Mar 1762.
Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille was a French astronomer who named 15 of the 88 constellations in the sky. He spent 1750-1754 mapping the constellations visible from the Southern Hemisphere, as observed from the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost part of Africa. In his years there, he was said to have observed over 10,000 stars using just his 1/2-inch refractor. He established the first southern star catalogue containing 9776 stars (Caelum Australe Stelliferum, published partly in 1763 and completely in 1847), and a catalogue of 42 nebulae in 1755 containing 33 true deep sky objects (26 his own discoveries). |
| Franciscus Sylvius | |
(EB) |
Born 15
Mar 1614; died 19 Nov 1672
Dutch physician, chemist and physiologist who was the founder of the seventeenth century's "iatrochemical school of medicine," which related living processes to chemical reactions. Thus, Sylvius helped move medicine away from mysticism (with its "humours" of blood, phlegm and biles) and towards an approach based in physics and chemistry. Sylvius strongly supported Harvey's view of blood circulation, and viewed the body chemistry as a balance between base and acids, capable of neutralizing each other. Sylvius and his followers studied the digestive juices, with which they recognized saliva, and viewed digestion as a kind of fermenting process. He may also have organized the first university chemistry laboratory. |
|
Today in Science History Science Store Browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books |
| MARCH 15 - DEATHS | |
| William Hayward Pickering | |
 |
 Died
15 Mar 2004 (born 24 Dec 1910)
Engineer and physicist, head of the team that developed Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. He collaborated with Neher and Robert Millikan on cosmic ray experiments in the 1930s, taught electronics in the 1930s, and was at Caltech during the war. He spent the rest of his career with the Jet Propusion Laboratory, becoming its Director (1954) with responsibility for the U.S. unmanned exploration of the planets and the solar system. Among these were the Mariner spacecraft to Venus and Mercury, and the Viking mission to Mars. The Voyager spacecraft yielded stunning photographs of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. |
| John A. Pople | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 2004 (born 31 Oct 1925)
British mathematician and chemist who, (with Walter Kohn), received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational methodology to study the quantum mechanics of molecules, their properties and how they act together in chemical reactions. Using Schrödinger's fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, he developed a computer program which, when provided with particulars of a molecule or a chemical reaction, outputs a description of the properties of that molecule or how a chemical reaction may take place - often used to illustrate or explain the results of different kinds of experiment. Pople provided his GAUSSIAN computer program to researchers (first published in 1970). Further developed, it is now used by thousands of chemists the world over. |
| Edwin J. Shoemaker | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1998 (born 2 Jun 1907)
American inventor and engineer who created the recliner chair and started the La-Z-Boy furniture company to manufacture it. He learned some drafting through correspondence school lessons, and by 1925 he held his first patent - a band saw guide. In 1928, he and his cousin Edward M. Knabusch made a reclining porch chair out of some wooden slats. It would automatically reclined as a sitter leaned back. Since it was a seasonal item, his sales prospects improved by adding plush upholstery for year-round indoor use. He planned and designed a manufacturing facility (opened Nov 1941) which utilized the mass-production methods of Detroit's automotive industry. By the 1960s, he created a model incorporated rocking together with reclining.« |
| Benjamin Spock | |
| Died
15 Mar 1998 (born 2 May 1903)
American pediatrician who was the most influential child-care authority of the 20th century. His book Baby and Child Care sold over 50 million copies worldwide and was translated into 42 languages. His Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946; 6th ed., 1992), influenced generations of parents and made his name a household word. |
|
| Wilson D. Wallis | |
| Died
15 Mar 1970 (born 7 Mar 1886)
Wilson D(allam) Wallis was an American anthropologist noted for his explorations of primitive science and religions. |
|
| Arthur Holly Compton | |
(EB) |
Died
15 Mar 1962 (born 10 Sep 1892)
American physicist and engineer. He was a joint winner, with C.T.R. Wilson of England, of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1927) for his discovery and explanation of the change in the wavelength of X rays when they collide with electrons in metals. This so-called Compton effect is caused by the transfer of energy from a photon to a single electron, then a quantum of radiation is re-emitted in a definite direction by the electron, which in so doing must recoil in a direction forming an acute angle with that of the incident radiation. During WW II, in 1941, he was appointed Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Evaluate Use of Atomic Energy in War, assisting in the development of the atomic bomb. [Image: Compton (left) with his assistant Richard L. Doan, 1936.] The
Cosmos of Arthur Holly Compton, by Arthur Holly Compton,
edited by Marjorie Johnson. |
| Nevil Vincent Sidgwick | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1952 (born 8 May 1873)
English chemist who contributed to the understanding of chemical bonding, especially in coordination compounds. He worked on kinetics (studying the rates of isomerisation of triphenylmethane dye intermediates and the hydration of carboxylic anhydrides), thermodynamics (investigating phase equilibria and the solubility of organic acids and bases), as well as investigating the colour of copper complexes. During WW I, he set to work on a process for the production of acetone (propanone) from ethanol and other wartime projects, such as the production of phenol from benzene. His book, The Electronic Theory of Valency (1927) was a culmination of many years' interest in the nature of covalent and dative bonds. |
| Davidson Black | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1934 (born 25 Jul 1884)
Canadian physician and physical anthropologist who first postulated the existence of a distinct form of early man, popularly known as Peking man. In 1920 he had a position at a Peking, China, college which gave him opportunity to investigate nearby Chou K'ou-tien. In 1927 he found a single human molar which he took to be an indicator of a small-brained ancestor, dubbed Peking man. Subsequently, more teeth, skulls, bones, tools and campfire remains were found (1929-30). These are now classifieded as examples of Homo erectus. |
| Sir Henry Bessemer | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1898 (born 19 Jan 1813)
English inventor and engineer who developed the first process for manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development of the Bessemer converter. Bessemer invented his steel making process to solve a specific problem vexing another of his inventions, the self-spinning artillery shell. The converter removed impurities from molten pig iron by oxidation through air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raised the temperature of the iron mass, keeping it molten. The oxidation process removed impurities such as silicon, manganese, and carbon as oxides, which oxides either escapd as gas or formed a solid slag. He also solved problems about the chemistry of ores, fuels, and steel. He held 110 patents at his death. Sir
Henry Bessemer: An Autobiography, by Henry Bessemer. |
| James Joseph Sylvester | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1897 (born 3 Sep 1814)
British mathematician who, with Arthur Cayley, founded the theory of algebraic invariants, algebraic-equation coefficients that are unaltered when the coordinate axes are translated or rotated. Beginning in 1833, he studied at St John's College, Cambridge. However, at this time signing a religious oath to the Church of England was required to graduate. Being Jewish, he refused and so he did not graduate. He taught physics at the University of London (1838-41), one of the few places which did not bar him because of his religion. Sylvester did important work on matrix theory, in particular, to study higher dimensional geometry. In 1851 he discovered the discriminant of a cubic equation. Earlier in his life, he tutored Florence Nightingale. |
| Sir Joseph William Bazalgette | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1891 (born 28 Mar 1819)
British civil engineer who designed the main drainage system for London. As an engineer, he built some major bridges in London, but his greatest accomplishment was to solve a growing problem with sewage pollution in the Thames River. By the mid-1800s, so many Londoners were using the new "water closets" that theriver was horribly polluted with sewage. The "Great Stink" crisis escalated with cholera outbreaks. Bazalgette was chosen to design and build London's sewer system, a 20-year project. Some of his ideas still influence urban engineering today. |
| Melville Reuben Bissell | |
(source) |
Died 15 Mar 1889 (born 25 Sep 1843)
U.S. inventor of the carpet sweeper. Melville Bissell and his wife, Anna, owned a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Mich. The dust from the packings was affecting Anna's health and, from a desperate need for self-preservation, he invented the carpet sweeper (issued a U.S. patent on 19 Sep 1876). They recognized the sweeper's marketing possibilities and began to assemble them in a room over the store. The inner workings and cases were made by women working in their homes. Tufts of hog bristles were bound with string, dipped in hot pitch, inserted in brush rollers and finally trimmed them with scissors. Anna Bissell gathered the parts together in clothes baskets and brought them back to the store for assembling. She grew the business after Melville's death. |
| Squire Whipple | |
(source) |
Died
15 Mar 1888 (born 16 Sep 1804)
U.S. civil engineer, inventor, and theoretician who provided the first scientifically based rules for bridge construction, was considered one of the top engineers of the 19th Century, and was known as the "father of iron bridges." He did survey work for several railroads and canal projects and made surveying instruments. He began his career as a bridge-builder in 1840 by designing and patenting an iron-bridge truss. He invented a lock to weight canal boats. During the next ten years he built several bridges on the Erie canal and the New York and Erie railroad. His book on the design of bridges using scientific methods (1847) was the first of its kind. The formulas and his methods are still useful. He obtained a patent for his lift draw-bridge in 1872. [Image: Bowstring Truss designed by Squire Whipple. This rare cast-and wrought iron bridge, built in 1872, was located in Coshocton County, Ohio, crossing Wills Creek on Linton Township Road 144.] |
| MARCH 15 - EVENTS | |
| Medical research reactor | |
(source) |
In 1959, at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., the first U.S.
atomic reactor built specifically for medical research, Brookhaven Medical
Research Reactor, reached criticality. The BMRR was a 5 megawatt, modified
tank-type reactor, which superceded the
Brookfield Graphite Research Reactor. It produced a neutron flux of as
many as 20 trillion neutrons per square centimeter per second. The reactor
was mainly used for developing and testing
boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT),
a promising treatment for patients with a deadly form of brain cancer called
glioblastoma multiforme. BNCT uses radiation and a boron compound to destroy
cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact. Use of the reactor ceased
in Dec 2000.«
Making
Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946-1972,
by Robert P. Crease. |
| Escalator | |
(source) |
In 1892, an escalator design was patented in the U.S. by inventor Jesse
W. Reno of New York City. It was built and opened in Sep 1895 as a
new Coney Island amusement ride,
a conveyor belt that moved people up a 25 degree slope. The first escalator-type
patent issued in the U.S. on 9 Aug 1859, was held by Nathan Ames of Saugus,
Mass. (No. 25,076), which had steps mounted on an inclined endless belt
or chain. The Otis Elevator Company registered the U.S. trademark Escalator
on 29 May 1901. Otis manufactured their first escalator
in 1900 which they had exhibited at the Paris Exposition in that year,
and then installed at the Gimbal Brothers store in Philadelphia, Penn.
in 1901. Otis later bought Reno's company.« |
| Chondrite meteor | |
(source) |
In 1806, a 6-kg chondritemeteorite
- carrying carbon-based, organic chemicals - was unequivocally identified
for the first time. Its arrival on earth was noted at 5:30 pm, outside
Alais, France. The organic chemicals it carried suggested the possibility
of life on whatever body was the source, somewhere in the universe. According
to the observations of Berzelius and a commission appointed by the French
Academy it "emits a faint bituminous substance" when heated. Berzelius
reported
his analysis of the Alais meteorite in 1833 that destructive distillation
yielded a blackish substance, indiginous water, carbon dioxide gas, a soluble
salt containing ammonia, and a blackish-brown sublimate, which Berzelius
confessed was unknown to him. |
| Scottish hackney cabs | |
|
In 1693, hackney cabs (horse-drawn taxis) were authorised
for the first time in Glasgow, Scotland. |
|
