March 24 - Today in Science History



MARCH 24 - BIRTHS
Joseph H. Taylor, Jr.
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1941 American radio astronomer and physicist who, with Russell A. Hulse, was the corecipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of the first binary pulsar (1974). This unique phenomenon, two stars orbiting each other - one of them giving off regular radio-frequency "beeps" - has been important as a deep space proving ground for Einstein's general theory of relativity. Their research group at Princeton used the 1,000 foot radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the largest and most sensitive in the world for catching radio waves from space.
Sir John Cowdery Kendrew
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1917; died 23 Aug 1977. British biochemist who determined the structure of the muscle protein myoglobin, which stores oxygen and gives it to the muscle cells when needed. For his achievement he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Max Ferdinand Perutz in 1962.
Krafft Arnold Ehricke
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1917; died 11 Dec 1984. German-born American physicist; rocketry engineer and space-travel theorist. During WW II, he was a key member of the famed Peenemunde Rocket Development team, specializing in the propulsion system for the German V-2 rocket (1942-45). He moved to the U.S. with Wernher Von Braun's rocket team in 1945. Entering the U.S. private industry in 1953, he helping develop the Atlas missile at General Dynamics. Subsequently, he invented the first liquid hydrogen propelled upper stage launch vehicle, the Centaur which enabled the U.S. to explore the solar system by launching planetary probes. A vial of his cremated remains accompany those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and others in space orbit, launched 20 Apr 1997.
Sidney W. Fox
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1912 Sidney W(alter) Fox was an American biochemist who was interested in the biological origin of life, rather than tracing a strictly biochemical path. He gave the name proteinoid to the protein-like polymer that results from a mixture of amino acids subjected to such considerable heating as would be present during the volcanic primordial earth. Fox observed that when proteinoids or "thermal proteins," are placed in water, they self-organize into microspheres or protocells, possible precursors of the contemporary living cell. Fox argued that RNA or DNA need not date back to the origin of life, and he showed that proteinoid microspheres exhibit growth, metabolism, reproduction (by budding), and responsiveness to stimuli - all properties of life - though without a genetic system.
Adolf Butenandt
(EB)	Born 24 Mar 1903; died 18 Jan 1995. German biochemist who was the co-winner (with Leopold Ruzicka) of the 1939 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for pioneering work (1929-34) on sex hormones, primarily the isolation of estrone (a hormone that influences development of the female reproductive tract.) Although forced by the Nazi government to refuse the prize, he was able to accept the honour in 1949.
Wilhelm Reich
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1897; died 3 Nov 1957. Viennese psychologist who developed a system of psychoanalysis that concentrated on overall character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. His early work on psychoanalytic technique was overshadowed by his involvement in the sexual-politics movement and by "orgonomy," a pseudoscientific system he developed. He also built a device he called a cloud buster, with which he claimed he could manipulate the weather by manipulating the orgone in the atmosphere. Reich's claims aroused much controversy, and he was taken to court for fraud by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The court ordered his books and research burned and his equipment destroyed. Reich was given a prison sentence, and he died in prison in 1957.
Walter Baade
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1893; died 25 Jun 1960. German-American astronomer who, with Fritz Zwicky, proposed that supernovae could produce cosmic rays and neutron stars (1934), and Baade made extensive studies of the Crab Nebula and its central star. During WW II blackouts of the Los Angeles area Baade used the 100-inch Hooker telescope to resolve stars in the central region of the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time. This led to his definition of two stellar populations, to the realization that there were two kinds of Cepheid variable stars, and from there to a doubling of the assumed scale of the universe. Baade and Rudolph Minkowski identified and took spectrograms of optical counterparts of many of the first-discovered radio sources, including Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A. Walter Baade: A Life in Astrophysics, by Donald E. Osterbrock.
John Rock
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1890; died 4 Dec 1984. Scientist and clinician; co-developed the birth control pill. Through collaborative activities of philanthropist Catherine Dexter McCormick, researcher and biologist Gregory Pinkus, Harvard gynecologist John Rock, and other scientists, the birth control pill was developed, and it was approved for marketing to "treat gynecologic disorders" by the Food and Drug Administration in 1957.
Peter Debye
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1884; died 2 Nov 1966. Petrus (Peter) Josephus Wilhelmus Debye was a Dutch physical chemist whose investigations of dipole moments, X rays, and light scattering in gases brought him the 1936 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Most of his work was in chemical-physics with special interest in electrolytes and dipolar momentum analysis. He established a theory of specific heat with some improvements on that proposed by Einstein. Debye performed important work in the analysis of crystalline powders using X-ray diffraction techniques. He also determined the dimensions of gaseous molecules and the interatomic distances using X-rays.
Édouard Claparède
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1873; died 29 Sep 1940. psychologist who conducted exploratory research in the fields of child psychology, educational psychology, concept formation, problem solving, and sleep. One of the most influential European exponents of the functionalist school of psychology, he is particularly remembered for his formulation of the law of momentary interest, a fundamental...
George Smith
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1840; died 19 Aug 1876. English archaeologist and Assyriologist who translated Babylonian cuneiform tablets (1872) describing a great deluge, part of the Gilgamesh epic, and akin to that found in Genesis. Smith, as an apprentice banknote engraver since age 14, spent much of his own time teaching himself how to decipher cuneiform, by studying inscriptions available at the British Museum. His skill was recognized, and he worked for the British Museum from 1867. Smith engaged in fieldwork in 1873 at Nineveh (Kuyunjik) finding more tablet fragments of the flood story, and others on the Babylonian dynasties. He published his work in The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876). He died at age 36 of a fever while excavating more of Assurbanipal's library.«
Josef Stefan
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1835; died 7 Jan 1893. Austrian physicist who proposed a law of radiation (1879) stating that the amount of energy radiated per second from a black body is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. (A black body is a theoretical object that absorbs all radiation that falls on it.) This law is known as Stefan's law or the Stefan-Bolzmann law. He also studied electricity, the kinetic theory of gases and hydrodynamics.
John Wesley Powell
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1834; died 23 Sep 1902. American geologist and ethnologist who published the first classification of American Indian languages and was the first director of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology (1879-1902). In 1869, despite having lost his right arm in the Civil War, Powell outfitted a small party of men in wooden boats in Wyoming, and descended down into the then unknown Colorado River. Daring that mighty river for a thousand miles of huge, horrifying rapids, unsuspected dangers, and endless hardship, he and his men were the first to challenge the mysterious Grand Canyon.
George Francis Train
	Born 24 Mar 1829; died 19 Jan 1904. American pioneer in street railways and an eccentric reformer.«
Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1819; died 14 Mar 1885. German founder of experimental pathology whose emphasis on the teaching of physiology and medical biochemistry helped give clinical medicine a scientific foundation. He brought medical recognition of multiple sclerosis a step closer by elaborating on the clinical description of MS provided by Cruveilhier and identifying specific symptoms and key features of the illness. Frerichs' clinical account for the first time recognised remissions as a characteristic feature of MS. In addition, he made a major contribution by providing the first medical description of mental disorders in MS, recognising the possible impact of the disease on cognitive and other higher functions of the brain.
Joseph Liouville
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1809; died 8 Sep 1882. French mathematician who discovered transcendental numbers (those which are not the roots of algebraic equations having rational coefficients), and that there are infinitely many of them. He also did work in real and complex analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. His name is remembered in the Sturm-Liouville theory of differential equations that generalises Joseph Fourier's ideas, and are important in mathematical physics. He studied celestial mechanics. Liouville founded in 1836, and editted for nearly four decades, the Journal de Mathématique which remains a leading French mathematical publication. He editted and published (1843) the manuscripts left behind upon the untimely death of Evariste Galois 22 years earlier.«
Georgius Agricola
(source)	Born 24 Mar 1494; died 21 Nov 1555. German scholar and scientist known as "the father of mineralogy." His work paved the way for further systematic study of the Earth and of its rocks, minerals, and fossils. He made fundamental contributions to mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology. He Latinized his real name of Georg Bauer, to be known as Georgius Agricola. Having studied medicine, he became interested in mineralogy through his study of miners' diseases. His most important work De Re Metallica (published a year after his death) summarized all the practical knowledge gained by Saxon miners. He was among the first to found a natural science upon observation. He may have coined the word petroleum ("rock oil").

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MARCH 24 - DEATHS

Joseph Needham
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1995 (born 9 Dec 1900) (Noël) Joseph (Terence Montgomery) Needham was an English biochemist, embryologist, and historian of science who wrote and edited the landmark history Science and Civilisation in China, a remarkable multivolume study of nearly every branch of Chinese medicine, science, and technology over some 25 centuries. As head of the British Scientific Mission in China (1942-46) he worked to assure adequate liaison between Chinese scientists and technologists and their colleagues in the West. As an historian of science and technology he wanted to break through the parochial, Europe-centred views of most of his colleagues by disclosing the achievements of traditional China and the contributions made by China leading up to the scientific revolution.
Auguste Piccard
(EB)	Died 24 Mar 1962 (born 28 Jan 1884) Swiss-born Belgian physicist notable for his exploration of both the upper stratosphere and the depths of the sea in ships of his own design. In 1930 he built a balloon to study cosmic rays. In 1932 he developed a new cabin design for balloons and in the same year ascended to 16,916 m (55,000 feet).
Sir Edmund Taylor Whittaker
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1956 (born 24 Oct 1873) English mathematician who made pioneering contributions to the area of the special functions, which is of particular interest in mathematical physics. Whittaker is best known work is in analysis, in particular numerical analysis, but he also worked on celestial mechanics and the history of applied mathematics and physics. He wrote papers on algebraic functions and automorphic functions. His results in partial differential equations (described as most sensational by Watson) included a general solution of the Laplace equation in three dimensions in a particular form and the solution of the wave equation. On the applied side of mathematics he was interested in relativity theory and he also worked on electromagnetic theory.
Willem Hendrik Keesom
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1956 (born 21 Jun 1876) Dutch physicist who was a pioneer in cryogenics and was the first to solidify helium (1926). In work done with M. Wolfke, after studying discontinuities in several properties of helium at very low temperatures (1927) they suggested that it may be due to a phase change. They called the helium above the transitional helium I and the helium below the transition helium II. In 1932, he produced a temperature just two degrees above absolute zero (-272° C or -457.6° F). In 1942 he wrote the book Helium.
Frans Cornelis Donders
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1889 (born 27 May 1818) Ophthalmologist, the most eminent of 19th-century Dutch physicians, whose investigations of the physiology and pathology of the eye made possible a scientific approach to the correction of refractive disabilities such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. He found (1858) that hypermetropia (farsightedness) is caused by a shortening of the eyeball, so that light rays refracted by the lens of the eye converge behind the retina. He discovered (1862) that the blurred vision of astigmatism is caused by uneven and unusual surfaces of the cornea and lens, which diffuse light rays instead of focusing them.
Karl Karlovich Klaus
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1864 (born 23 Jan 1796) Russian chemist and biologist (of German origin) credited with the discovery of ruthenium (1844), which was the last dense, inert, platinum-like metal to be found. Klaus was noted for his researches on the platinum metals osmium, palladium, iridium, and rhodium, and it was in the course of investigating the waste residues of the platinum refinery in St. Petersburg that he discovered ruthenium. He named the element from Ruthenia, the Latin name for Russia. Klaus also investigated flora and fauna of Volga steppes..
Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1849 (born 13 Dec 1780) German chemist whose observation of similarities among certain elements anticipated the development of the periodic system of elements. Around 1817, Döbereiner noticed a pattern among three elements with similar chemical properties, chlorine, bromine, and iodine - that the atomic weight of bromine (80.970) was the arithmetic mean of the atomic weights of chlorine (35.470) and iodine (126.470) and the properties of the three elements varied in an orderly manner, from chlorine to bromine to iodine. Döbereiner found two other such "triads" - calcium, strontium, barium; and sulfur, selenium, tellurium. He was one of the first chemists to offer laboratory instruction in chemistry. He studied in general, pharmaceutical, and analytical chemistry.
John Harrison
(source)	Died 24 Mar 1776 (born Mar 1693) English horologist who invented the first practical marine chronometer, which enabled navigators to compute accurately their longitude at sea. He was prompted to begin this work after a reward was offered by the British government for new navigational tools to avoid further disasters at sea. John Harrison took on the scientific and academic establishment of his time and won the longitude prize through extraordinary mechanical insight, talent and determination.



MARCH 24 - EVENTS

Swine Flu
(source)	In 1976, following advice from medical experts, President Ford called for the U.S. to give swine flu vaccinations, a $135 million program of mass inoculation of the entire population. No comparable vaccination effort had ever been attempted in the U.S. before. The nationwide vaccination effort began as a result of a novel virus that was first identified at Fort Dix, N.J., and labeled a "killer flu." Experts compared it to the Spanish flu of 1918 and sounded the alarm of a possible major pandemic. In fact, the virus never moved outside the Fort Dix area. Later research showed it would probably have been much less deadly than the Spanish flu. [Image: swine Influenza virus electron microscope view (source)]
Maser
(source)	In 1959, the maser was patented by Charles Townes (No. 2,879,439). "Maser" is an acronym for "Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation ". The invention is an apparatus for amplifying and producing electromagnetic energy directly from excited molecules or atoms. The concept grew out of research in microwave spectroscopy following Word War II . The image shows Townes with the second maser at Columbia University. The normally evaculated metal box where maser action occurs is opened up to show the four rods (centre) that send excited molecules into a resonant cavity (to the right). The microwaves that were generated emerged through the vertical copper waveguide near Townes' hand.
Offshore oil rig
(search)	In 1955, the first seagoing oil drill rig (for drilling in over 100 feet of water) was placed in service by the U.S. company C.G. Glasscock Drilling Co. The rig, built by Bethlehem Steel at their Beaumont Yard, was able to drive piles with a force of 827 tons, and pull a pile with the force of 942 tons. [Another oil rig of 1955, south of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico]
Rotary disk plow
(USPTO)	In 1896, Clement Hardy was issued a patent for the rotary disk plow (No. 556,972). His patent described a rotary-disk plow constructed with one or more plowing disks arranged diagonally to the line of draft and suitable supported by furrow and landside wheels and a suitable metal or wooden frame. The plow disks were designed to be drawn into the earth by their own action and by the weight of the soil lifted by the disks and carried on their faces and have a cutting action on the bottom of the furrow instead of scraping, thereby enabling much reduction of the machinery's weight that had previously been thought necessary in this class of plows in order to force the disks into the soil and hold them to their work. [Image: top view, showing seat to left of rear wheel.]
Tuberculosis
(source)	In 1882, German scientist Robert Koch announced to the Berlin Physiological Society that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis. Three weeks later, on April 10, he published an article entitled The Etiology of Tuberculosis. In 1884, in a second paper with the same title, he first expounded "Koch's postulates," which have since become basic to studies of all infectious diseases. He had observed the bacillus in association with all cases of the disease, had grown the organism outside the body of the host, and had reproduced the disease in a susceptible host inoculated with a pure culture of the isolated organism. Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1905. He died in 1910,
Road locomotive patented
	In 1802, Richard Trevithick took out his first patent. It was for the first full sized road locomotive. He had demonstrated it to the public on 24 Dec 1801 with his cousin Andrew Vivian at the controls. It successfully carried a number of men up Beacon Hill, an event commemorated by the old Cornish song "Going up Camborne Hill" and marked by Trevithick's statute which stands outside Camborne library, gazing up that hill. By February 1804 Trevithick had the first locomotive running at the Penydarn ironworks in South Wales. It travelled over nine miles at a speed of five mph, pulled a ten ton load, five wagons and 70 men.