| MARCH 29 - BIRTHS | |
| John Robert Vane | |
(source) |
 Born 29
Mar 1927; died 19 Nov 2004.
English biochemist, who shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Sune K. Bergström and Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson of Sweden) for their isolation, identification, and analysis of prostaglandins. In 1971, Vane discovered how aspirin's effect was to block the formation of the prostaglandins involved in pain, fever, and inflammation. Further, a relatively small dose (75 mg/day) prevents blood clotting and lessen heart attacks, strokes and leg thromboses. In 1976, he discovered prostacyclin, a blood-vessel dilating prostaglandin that inhibits blood-clotting. His discoveries led to the Ace inhibitors, a new class of drugs giving life-saving benefits to patients with pulmonary hypertension, and new treatments for heart disease.« |
| Charles Elton | |
 |
Born 29
Mar 1900; died 1 May 1991.
English biologist credited with describing the "sociology and economy of animals," thus outlining the basic principles of modern animal ecology. He thought of the "community" as a group of species related through the food chains. Elton developed the idea of a food chain in 1927. He described the way plants get energy from sunlight, plant-eating animals get their energy from eating plants, and meat-eating animals get their energy from eating other animals. Elton’s pyramid of numbers shows how energy flow links organisms to form the biological community. In 1932, Elton created the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford, which was a mecca for ecologists from around the world, until its demise when he retired in 1967. |
| Sir Harold Spencer Jones | |
(source) |
Born 29
Mar 1890; died 3 Nov 1960.
English astronomer who was 10th astronomer royal of England (1933–55). His work was devoted to fundamental positional astronomy. While HM Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, he worked on proper motions and parallaxes. Later he showed that small residuals in the apparent motions of the planets are due to the irregular rotation of the earth. He led in the worldwide effort to determine the distance to the sun by triangulating the distance of the asteroid Eros when it passed near the earth in 1930-31. Spencer Jones also improved timekeeping and knowledge of the Earth’s rotation. After WW II he supervised the move of the Royal Observatory to Herstmonceux, where it was renamed the Royal Greenwich Observatory. |
| Tullio Levi-Civita | |
(source) |
Born 29
Mar 1873; died 29 Dec 1941.
Italian mathematician who was one of the founders of absolute differential calculus (tensor analysis) which had applications to the theory of relativity. In 1887, he published a famous paper in which he developed the calculus of tensors. In 1900 he published, jointly with Ricci, the theory of tensors Méthodes de calcul differential absolu et leures applications in a form which was used by Einstein 15 years later. Weyl also used Levi-Civita's ideas to produce a unified theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. In addition to the important contributions his work made in the theory of relativity, Levi-Civita produced a series of papers treating elegantly the problem of a static gravitational field.« |
| Ales Hrdlicka | |
(source) |
Born 29
Mar 1869; died 5 Sep 1943.
Czechoslovakian-American physical anthropologist known for his studies of Neanderthal man and his theory of the migration of American Indians from Asia. He worked gratis as a field anthropologist (1899-1903) under Fredric Ward Putnam, in four intense anthropometric studies of the Indians of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. In 1903, Hrdlicka joined the Smithsonian Institute, where during the next forty years, he compiled the most complete collection of human bone material in the world. He was the one of the first scientists to argue the Americans originated in Asia and came across the Bering Strait, and participated in numerous archeological expeditions which contributed a great amount of information and physical evidence. |
| Elihu Thomson | |
(source) |
Born 29
Mar 1853; died 13 Mar 1937.
U.S. electrical engineer and inventor whose discoveries in the field of alternating current phenomena led to the development of successful alternating current motors. Thomson invented electric welding and other important inventions in electric lighting and power among his lifetime total of about 700 patents. Thomson was also a cofounder of the General Electric Company (in 1892, in a merger with the Edison Company) industry. |
| Ludwig Büchner | |
(sources) |
Born 29
Mar 1824; died 30 Apr 1899.
German physician and philosopher who became one of the most popular exponents of 19th-century scientific materialism. He wrote many works to disseminate knowledge of the natural sciences. These were based on his definition of force as "expression for the cause of a possible or an actual movement," and on the unity of matter and force. No insight was conceivable without exact knowledge of matter and its laws. "The laws according to which nature acts, and matter moves, now destroying, now rebuilding, and thus producing the most varied organic and inorganic forms, are eternal and unalterable." He also did much to spread knowledge of Darwin's work in particular. |
| Edwin Laurentine Drake | |
(source) |
Born 29
Mar 1819; died 8 Nov 1880.
American driller of the first productive oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, that launched the modern U.S. petroleum industry. A former railroad conductor, his success in hitting oil was based on his belief that drilling would be the best way to obtain petroleum from the earth. He organized Seneca Oil Co., leased land, and on 27 Aug 1859, struck oil at a depth of 69 feet. Drake used an old steam engine to power the drill. After his well began to produce oil, other prospectors drilled wells nearby. Other men, with better business sense, grew rich from the oil boom, yet Drake died in poverty, after years of crippling illnesses. |
| Santorio Santorio | |
(source) |
Born 29 Mar 1561; died 22 Feb 1636.
Italian physician who made the first systematic study of basal metabolism. In his research, he was also the first to employ instruments of precision and to apply quantitative experimental research techniques in the practice of medicine. His adaptation of the pendulum to medical practice (to determine pulse rate) was probably inspired by his discussions with Galileo on the latter's experiments with pendulums in 1602. His most famous medical contribution was a balance used to study the metabolic changes undergone by his experimental subjects, who included Galileo. He published descriptions of a new type of thermometer which may well have been inspired by Galileo's thermoscope. [Image right: Santorio's balance to to measure body weight after a meal] |
|
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| MARCH 29 - DEATHS | |
| Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus | |
(1955) (source) |
 
Died 29 Mar 1998 (born 25 Nov 1911)
South African-born American geophysicist and inventor. As a student at the University he built a sand yacht out of an old automobile and sailed it on nearby salt flats, much like an ice boat with wheels. By 1937, he invented the bathythermograph (or BT), a temperature measuring device. Initially it was used by biologists and oceanographers, but during WW II in conjunction with sonar it played a major role in the detection of German submarines. In 1954, he became the first U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. He launched a weekly science-oriented comic strip called "Our New Age," seen in 100 newspapers worldwide (1957-73). As a futurist, Spilhaus suggested covered skyways and tunnels connecting city buildings, useful in bad weather. [Image right: bathythermograph] |
| Norman Wingate Pirie | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1997 (born 1 July 1907)
British biochemist and virologist who collaborated with Frederick Bawden to demonstrate that the genetic material found in viruses is RNA. Together they obtained about a dozen viruses, or strains of viruses, in semi-crystalline or even crystalline form, including tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Pirie demonstrated that the preparations contained small amounts of phosphorus and showed conclusively that all contained ribonucleic acid (RNA). This contradicted the early views of Wendell Stanley (a later Nobel laureate), who believed viruses consisted entirely of protein. Bawden and Pirie realized that RNA might be the infective component of viruses; but they were unable to confirm this experimentally, and it was left until 1956 for others to establish. |
| Ruth Sager | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1997 (born 7 Feb 1918)
American cellular geneticist whose research (1950's - 60's) altered the prevailing view about where genetic material was within the cell. In particular, she recognized that a second set of genes were found outside of the cell's nucleus. Even though they were nonchrosomomal, these genes also influenced inherited characteristics. Previously, only the chromosomal genes had been considered to control genetic behaviour. Her research in later life turned to the study of genetic mechanisms involved in cancer. She was among the first to study the role of mutations in suppressor genes that neutralized their restraint on cell reproduction.«  Cell
heredity by Ruth Sager and Francis J. Ryan. |
| George P. Murdock | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1985 (born 11 May 1897)
George P(eter) Murdock was an American anthropologist who specialized in comparative ethnology, the ethnography of African and Oceanic peoples, and social theory. He is perhaps most notable as the originator, in 1937, of the Cross-Cultural Survey, a project of the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University. During WW II he enlisted in the Army, and arranged to be sent to Columbia University to produce informational handbooks on Micronesia. He also asked for the reports of the 1910 German expedition and the available Japanese reports to be translated. With these, he was able to create a set of Civil Affairs Handbooks covering not only Micronesia, but also the areas from Bikini to Yap, Okinawa and Taiwan. |
| Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1935 (born 2 Jun 1850)
English physiologist, one of the founders of endocrinology and inventor of the prone-pressure method (Schafer method) of artificial respiration adopted by the Royal Life Saving Society. In 1894, Sharpey-Schafer with George Oliver (1841-1915) discovered that an extract from the central part of an adrenal gland injected into the bloodstream of an animal caused a rise in blood pressure by vasoconstriction. They also noted that the smooth muscles of the animal's bronchi relaxed. These effects were caused by the action of the hormone adrenaline. Sharpey-Schafer also suspected that another hormone was produced by the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas. He adopted for it the name insulin (from the Latin for "island"). |
| George A. Dorsey | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1931 (born 6 Feb 1868)
George A(mos) Dorsey was an American anthropologist and early U.S. ethnographer of North American Indians, especially the Mandan tribe. He engaged in extensive field research, particularly among the Plains Indians, and published extensively. Between 1891-92 he conducted anthropological investigations in Peru, Ecuador, Chili and Bolivia for the World's Columbian Exposition. His positions included being a professor of anthropology, professor of comparative anatomy, Curator of the Field Museum of Natural History. On15 Sep 1897, Dorsey began testifying at the murder trial of Adolph Luetgert, probably the first anthropologist to testify in an American criminal trial. After WW I, he wrote works popularizing the science of anthropology.« The
story of civilization: Man's own show, by George Amos
Dorsey. |
| John Burroughs | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1921 (born 3 Apr 1837)
American naturalist and author who lived and wrote after the manner of Henry David Thoreau. Burroughs studyied and celebrated nature in his many essays and books. Growing up on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs absorbed much of the nature and country life that would fill his essays in later life. As a clerk in the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, he filled idle hours with writing about the outdoors he loved. This became his first book, Wake-Robin. Returning to the Hudson River Valley in 1873, he began fruit farming and continued to write, publishing a new book about every two years. He travelled extensively, camping out with such friends as the naturalist John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. |
| Gustavus Swift | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1903 (born 24 Jun 1839)
American manufacturer and inventor of the first refrigerated railroad cars. These improved his handling of the supply of beef from western states to the Chicago meat company of which he was a partner. No longer was it necessary to ship live cattle for slaughter in the East. Upon the huge success of this venture, he founded a new company with his brother, Swift and Company, worth $25 million at his death. The alliances he made with two other major meat suppliers, J.O. Armour and Edward Morris, formed such a monopoly that the "Beef Trust" was broken up by action of the Supreme Court in 1905. Swift further pioneered products such as glue, soap, and margarine to make use of the parts of cattle previously discarded. |
| Sir William Bowman | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1892 (born 20 Jul 1816)
(1st Baronet) was an English surgeon and histologist who obtained a European reputation for medical research long before he was thirty years of age. He described (1842) the histologic structure of the nephron, the functional unit of the kidney, where the process of of urine takes place as a by-product of blood filtration that is carried on in the kidney. The "Bowman's capsule" of the kidney carries his name. The kidney contains millions of very tiny sacs called Bowman's capsules that filter blood to produce urine. He also made important discoveries concerning the structure and function of the eye and of striated muscle. He collaborated with Todd in writing The Physiological Anatomy. |
| Alexander Carl Heinrich Braun | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1877 (born 10 May 1805)
German botanist who was the most highly regarded botanist of the "nature philosophy" school, a doctrine which attempted to explain natural phenomena in terms of the speculative theories that dominated early 19th-century German science. Several species of cryptogams he discovered bear his name, such as Chara braunii. With Karl Schimper, he established the theory of spiral phyllotaxy. In his book Betrachtungern über die Erscheinung der Verjüngung in der Natur (1851) he made some significant contributions to the morphology of plants, to the biology of freshwater algae, and especially to cell theory. He opposed Darwinian selection, and remained a believer of "nature philosophy" when the doctrine was falling out of favour. |
| Francesco Zantedeschi | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1873 (born 1797)
Italian priest and physicist, who published papers (1829, 1830) on the production of electric currents in closed circuits by the approach and withdrawal of a magnet, preceding Faraday's classic experiment of 1831. Studying the solar spectrum, Zantedeschi was among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere of the red, yellow, and green light. Though not confirmed, he also thought he detected a magnetic action on steel needles by ultra-violet light (1838), at least suspecting a connection between light and magnetism many years before Clerk-Maxwell's announcement (1867) of the electromagnetic theory of light. He experimented on the repulsion of flames by a strong magnetic field.« |
| Paul-Émile Botta | |
(source) |
Died 29 Mar 1870 (born 6 Dec 1802)
French consul and archaeologist whose momentous discovery of the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), Iraq, initiated the large-scale field archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia. As a French diplomat working in Mosul, a city on the River Tigris, Botta's duty included excavation. In 1843, Botta began to excavate a large mound in Khorsabad about 15 miles northeast of Nineveh. He uncovered the first of the Assyrian palaces, the monumental palace of Sargon II who ruled from 721 to 705 BC. His palace was built on a scale never till then attempted by an Assyrian monarch, covering an entire city within walls a mile long with huge stone sculptures. [Image right: Winged human-headed bull from Khorsabad] |
| Emanuel Swedenborg | |
(source) |
Died
29 Mar 1772 (born 29 Jan 1688)
Swedish scientist, philosopher, and theologian. While young, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences in England and Europe. From Swedenborg's inventive and mechanical genius came his method of finding terrestrial longitude by the Moon, new methods of constructing docks and even tentative suggestions for the submarine and the airplane. Back in Sweden, he started (1715) that country's first scientific journal, Daedalus Hyperboreus. His book on algebra was the first in the Swedish language, and in 1721 he published a work on chemistry and physics. Swedenborg devoted 30 years to improving Sweden's metal-mining industries, while still publishing on cosmology, corpuscular philosophy, mathematics, and human sensory perceptions. The
Generative Organs, Considered Anatomically, Physically and Philosophically,
by Emanuel Swedenborg. |
| MARCH 29 - EVENTS | |
| Thumbnail transplant | |
In 1980, the first transplant of a human fingernail was accomplished on
a 12-year-old boy's thumb, using one of his own toenails. Dr Guy Foutcher
performed the surgery in Strasbourg, France, for Christopher Kempf who
had lost the original thumbnail due to poor treatment of a hang-nail. |
|
| Smoking risk | |
|
In 1977, a U.S. study
found birth-control pills riskier for smokers over 30 years of age.* |
|
| Mercury | |
(NASA) |
In 1974, Mariner 10 took the first close-up pictures of Mercury.
It was launched 3 Nov 1973. On its way to Mercury, Mariner
10 made its first flyby of Venus on 5 Feb 1974 and discovered evidence
of rotating clouds. The mission required more course corrections than any
previous mission and was the first spacecraft to use the gravitational
pull of one planet to help it reach another planet. In three flybys past
Mercury, it mapped about half of the planet's surface. It found a thin
atmosphere and a magnetic field. This craft was also the first to use the
solar wind as a means of locomotion; when the probe's thruster fuel ran
low, scientists used the solar panels as sails to make course corrections.
It ended a series of Mariner missions. [Image:
Mercury shown from a mozaic of images with Marine 10 inset] |
| French nuclear submarine | |
(source) |
In 1967, the French Navy launchedLe
Redoutable, its first ballistic missile nuclear-powered submarine,
in the presence of General de Gaulle at the Cherbourg naval shipyard. It
entered service
1 Dec 1971 with 16 MSBS M-1 missiles aboard. Measuring 128.70 meters long
and 10.60 meters wide, Le Redoutable had a top speed (submerged)
of 25 knots. After 20 years of service, it was retired in 1991, after 58
patrols and 90,000 hours under water. It was disarmed, and opened for display
to the public at La Cité de la Mer, Cherbourg. |
| Test ban treaty | |
|
In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan reached agreement with
U.S. leaders in Washington, D.C., on a nuclear test ban treaty to be put
to the U.S.S.R.* |
|
| Electron microscope | |
|
In 1956, Soviet scientists reported in the U.K. the development of a new
form of electron microscope that enabled atoms to be seen for the first
time.* |
|
| Crete | |
|
In 1931, new excavations at Knossos, Crete, revealed relics of an ancient
snake cult.* |
|
| French air service | |
|
In 1920, the French airline CGEA introduced the splendid new Farman F.60
Goliath airplane on its service between Le Bourget (France) and Croydon
(U.K.)* |
|
| Oceanographic museum | |
(source) |
In 1910, in Monaco, the world's largest oceanographic museum was opened.*
The grandiose façade of the museum overlooks the Mediterranean Sea.
It was established through the generosity of Prince Albert I of Monaco
(1848-1922), a great oceanographer,
statesman, and humanitarian. The museum is part of the Oceanographic Institute,
founded 1906. [Image: The physical
oceanography hall of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco showing part of
the collections] |
| Wireless news service | |
(source) |
In 1903, regular news service began between New York and London on Marconi's
wireless.* On 30 Mar
1903, The Times in London became
the first newspaper to establish an ongoing arrangement with the Marconi
Telegraph Company for the regular transmission of news between the United
States and the UK. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times requested that
it be part of the arrangement. Despite extensive teething problems the
importance of wireless as a cheap form of communication quickly became
obvious |
| Coca-Cola | |
 |
In 1886, the first batch of Coca Cola was brewed over a fire in a backyard
in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. John Pemberton
had created the concoction as a cure for "hangover," stomach ache and headache.
He advertised it as a "brain tonic and intellectual beverage," and first
sold it to the public a few weeks later on 8 May. Coke contained cocaine
as an ingredient until 1904, when the drug was banned by Congress.
"For
God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American
Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It" by Mark Pendergrast. |
| Asteroid Vesta 4 | |
(source) |
In 1807, Vesta 4, the only asteroid
visible to the naked eye, thus the brightest on record, was first observed
by the amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers from Bremen. Vesta is
a main belt asteroid with a diameter of 525-km and a rotation period of
5.34 hours. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 show Vesta's
complex surface, with a geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds -
such as Earth or Mars - a surprisingly diverse world with an exposed mantle,
ancient lava flows and impact basins. Though no bigger than the state of
Arizona, it once had a molten interior. This contradicts conventional ideas
that asteroids essentially are cold, rocky fragments left behind from the
early days of planetary formation. |
