| APRIL 19 - BIRTHS | |
| Glenn T. Seaborg | |
 |
 Born 19
Apr 1912; died 25 Feb 1999.
American nuclear chemist. During 1940-58, Seaborg and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, produced nine of the transuranic elements (plutonium to nobelium) by bombarding uranium and other elements with nuclei in a cyclotron. He coined the term actinide for the elements in this series. The work on elements was directly relevant to the WW II effort to develop an atomic bomb. It is said that he was influential in determining the choice of plutonium rather than uranium in the first atomic-bomb experiments. Seaborg and his early collaborator Edwin McMillan shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Seaborg was chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission 1962-71. Element 106, seaborgium (1974), was named in his honour.  Adventures
in the Atomic Age : From Watts to Washington by Glenn
T. Seaborg |
| Richard Pough | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1904; died 24 Jun 2003.
American ecologist who was founding president of the Nature Conservancy (1950), one of the nation's largest environmental organizations. He later helped develop the World Wildlife Fund. His training was in chemical engineering, but his lifelong passion was the outdoors. In the 1930s, he persuaded a New York socialite to raise money to buy Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, as a bird sanctuary to protect the hawks from devastation by hunters. In 1945, in the New Yorker magazine, he was one of the first to warn that DDT could drive fish, frogs, and birds extinct. He also fought for a law that banned the sale of rare-bird feathers for women's hats. He wrote the Audubon Bird Guide. |
| Richard von Mises | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1883; died 14 Jul 1953.
Austrian-American mathematician and aerodynamicist who notably advanced statistics and the theory of probability. Von Mises' contributions range widely, also including fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, and aeronautics. His early work centred on aerodynamics. He investigated turbulence, making fundamental advances in boundary-layer-flow theory and airfoil design. Much of his work involved numerical methods and this led him to develop new techniques in numerical analysis. He introduced a stress tensor which was used in the study of the strength of materials.Von Mises' primary work in statistics concerned the theory of measure and applied mathematics. His most famous, yet controversial, work was in probability theory. Theory
of Flight by Richard von Mises |
| Albert Wallace Hull | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1880; died 22 Jan 1966.
American physicist who independently discovered the powder method of X-ray analysis of crystals (1917), which permits the study of crystalline materials in a finely divided microcrystalline, or powder, state. His first work was on electron tubes, X-ray crystallography, and (during WW II) piezoelectricity. In the 1920's, he studied noise measurements in diodes and triodes. In the 1930's, he also took interest in metallurgy and glass science. His best-known work was done after the war, especially his classic paper on the effect of a uniform magnetic field on the motion of electrons between coaxial cylinders. He also invented the magnetron (1921) and the thyratron (1927), and other electron tubes with wide application as components in electronic circuits. |
| Ole Evinrude | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1877; died 12 July 1934.
Norwegian inventor and manufacturer of the outboard marine engine. Ole Evinrude was rowing his small boat one day. It struck him that rowing was more difficult than it needed to be, when his purpose was a picnic on a distant small island. He resolved then and there to invent a means of moving small boats quickly and easily through the water. When he figured out a better way he had invented the first practical outboard motor in 1909. He patented it in 1910; it quickly replaced steam and foot-driven motors for boats and spurred a new industry. The result was the Evinrude Outboard Motor that remains popular to this day. [Image: ca. 1915 model.] |
| Lucien Lévy-Bruhl | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1857; died 13 Mar 1939.
French philosopher whose study of the psychology of primitive peoples gave anthropology a new approach to understanding irrational factors in social thought and primitive religion and mythology. |
| Samuel Gregory | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1813; died 23 Mar 1872.
American pioneer in the medical education of women who founded the Boston Female Medical School, first medical school in the world exclusively for women, because he disapproved of male doctors attending childbirth. Opened 1 Nov 1848 with 12 students, its early curriculum focused on midwifery. Renamed in 1850, New England Female Medical College expanded to include a full medical curriculum, and began to grant medical degrees to women. Gregory wrote on educational and sanitary subjects. He was secretary of the College until his death. By 1873, the college had graduated 98 women. In 1874, it merged with Boston University School of Medicine, thus becoming one of the world's first coed medical colleges. [Image: from title page of of the Thirteenth Annual Announcement of the New England Female Medical College, 1860.] |
| Gustav Theodor Fechner | |
(source) |
Born 19
Apr 1801; died 18 Nov 1887.
German physicist and philosopher who was a key figure in the founding of psychophysics, the science concerned with quantitative relations between sensations and the stimuli producing them. He formulated the rule known as Fechner’s law, that, within limits, the intensity of a sensation increases as the logarithm of the stimulus. He also proposed a mathematical expression of the theory concerning the difference between two stimuli, advanced by E. H. Weber. (These are now known to be only approximately true. However, as long as the stimulus is of moderate intensity, then the laws will give us a good estimate.) Under the name “Dr. Mises” he also wrote humorous satire. In philosophy he was an animist, maintaining that life is manifest in all objects of the universe. |
| Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg | |
| Born 19
Apr 1795; died 27 Jun 1876.
German biologist, microscopist, scientific explorer, and a founder of micropaleontology - the study of fossil microorganisms. He advanced the view that all animals, from the most minute to the largest, possess complete organ systems, such as muscles, sex organs, and stomachs; he believed his concept of "complete organisms" (later refuted by Félix Dujardin) disproved both the theory of spontaneous generation and the validity of the traditional arrangement of animals in a simple-to-complex series. Arguing that a single "ideal type" may be applied to all animals, he worked toward a comprehensive system of classification. He used social behaviour as an important criterion, but he placed humans apart from other animals on the basis of intelligence. |
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| APRIL 19 - DEATHS | |
| Percy L. Julian | |
(source) |
 Died
19 Apr 1975 (born 11 Apr 1899)
African-American chemist, whose 100 patents include the synthesis of cortisone, hormones, and other products from soybeans. He isolated from plants simple compounds and investigated how they were naturally altered into chemicals essential to life, including vitamins and hormones; then he attempted to create the compounds artificially. Early in his career he synthesized physostigmine, a glaucoma drug. A refined soya protein was the basis of Aero-Foam, a foam fire extinguisher used by the U.S. Navy in WW II. His efforts led to quantity production of the hormones progesterone (female), testosterone (male) and cortisone drugs. In 1950, his home in an all-white suburb was bombed and burned.« |
| Edward Charles Jeffrey | |
| Died
19 Apr 1952 (born 21 May 1866)
Canadian-American botanist who worked on the morphology and phylogeny of vascular plants. |
|
| William Morton Wheeler | |
| Died
19 Apr 1937 (born 19 Mar 1865)
American entomologist recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on ants and other social insects (though he had trained as an insect embryologist). Two of his works, Ants: Their Structure, Development, and Behavior (1910) and Social Life Among the Insects (1923), long served as standard references on their subjects. Arguably the first important ethologist in North America, he popularized the term "ethology" in the English language with a 1902 paper in Science. He was interested in the evolution of social systems and a highly productive taxonomist. |
|
| Sir William Watson Cheyne | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1932 (born 14 Dec 1852)
(1st Baronet) surgeon and bacteriologist who was a pioneer of antiseptic surgical methods in Britain. Educated at Aberdeen University, then as an assistant to Lord Lister, one of the foremost surgeons of his day, he helped to formulate antiseptic techniques which revolutionised 19th century surgery. In 1885, he defined the four operational principles to respect to avoid the infection: surgical washing of the hands of the surgeon, sterilization of the instruments, disinfection of the operational site and protection by fields, and reduction of the number of germs present in the environment. During the Boer War in South Africa, he was Consultant Surgeon to Lord Roberts and wrote extensively on the problems of surgery in warfare. |
| Louis Dollo | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1931 (born 7 Dec 1857)
Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo was a French vertebrate paleontologist who stated Dollo's Law of Irreversibility whereby in evolution an organism never returns exactly to its former state such that complex structures, once lost, are not regained in their original form. (While generally true, some exceptions are known.) He began as an assistant (1882), became keeper of mammals (1891) at the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels where he stayed most of his life. He was a specialist in fossil fishes, reptiles, birds, and their palaeoecology. He supervised the excavation of the famous, multiple Iguanodons found in 1878 by miners deep underground, at Bernissart, Belgium.« |
| Ephraim Shay | |
1880 (source) |
Died
19 Apr 1916 (born 17 Jul 1839)
American logger who invented the Shay geared, small steam locomotive to haul heavy logging trains at low speeds over rough terrain with poorly-laid, uneven track, sharp curves, and grades up to 14 percent. His 1880 prototype had a steam boiler mounted amidships; fuel and water on opposite ends; and the unusual arrangement of two vertical cylinders. The wheels were driven by bevelled gears on a shaft. Power was transferred through a crankshaft and universal joints. On 14 Jun 1881, he was issued a U.S. patent for a Locomotive Engine (No. 242,992). In 1882, Ephraim assigned manufacturing rights to the company that would become Lima Locomotive Works. By the end of production in 1945, 2,771 Shays had been built.« [Image right: Shay locomotive and tender.] |
| Hugo Winckler | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1916 (born 19 Apr 1863)
German archaeologist and historian whose excavations at Bogazköy, in Turkey, disclosed the capital of the Hittite empire, Hattusa, and yielded thousands of cuneiform tablets from which much of Hittite history was reconstructed. He began excavating at Bogazköy in 1906. He found the hardened clay tablets in ruined storage chambers, very likely royal archives, that apparently were destroyed by a great fire. Most were in the then unknown Hittite language. A few, in Akkadian, included a cuneiform version of a peace treaty between the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite king Hattusilis, which Winckler translated. Winckler continued excavating, revealing the remains of a mighty capital city with temples, palaces, fortifications, and gateways. |
| Charles Sanders Peirce | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1914 (born 10 Sep 1839)
American scientist, logician, and philosopher who is noted for his work on the logic of relations and on pragmatism as a method of research. He was the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of "the economy of research." He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. |
| Pierre Curie | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1906 (born 15 May 1859)
French physical chemist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. His studies of radioactive substances were made together with his wife, Marie Curie, whom he married in 1895. They were achieved under conditions of much hardship - barely adequate laboratory facilities and under the stress of having to do much teaching in order to earn their livelihood. Together, they discovered radium and polonium in their investigation of radioactivity by fractionation of pitchblende (announced in 1898). Later they did much to elucidate the properties of radium and its transformation products. Their work in this era formed the basis for much of the subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry. |
| Charles Darwin | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1882 (born 12 Feb 1809)
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist who presented facts to support his theory of the mode of evolution whereby favourable variations would survive which he called "Natural Selection" or "Survival of the Fittest," and has become known as Darwinism. His two most important books were On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.« From
So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books, by
Charles Darwin, Edward O. Wilson. |
| Warren De la Rue | |
| Died
19 Apr 1889 (born 15 Jan 1815)
English pioneer in astronomical photography, the method by which nearly all modern astronomical observations are made. |
|
| Zygmunt Florenty von Wroblewski | |
(source) |
Died
19 Apr 1888 (born 28 Oct 1845)
Polish physicist who liquefied the "permanent gases" such as nitrogen and carbon monoxide in larger quantities than previously accomplished by Cailletet, whose method he improved. In 1883, he achieved the static liquefaction of oxygen and air. He was the first to liquify hydrogen. Although he achieved it only in a transient fine mist, he published (1885) remarkably accurate data: critical temperature 33 K, critical pressure, 13.3 atm and boiling point, 23 K (modern values 33.3 K, 12.8 atm, 20.3 K). He may also have had a hint of strange electrical properties at very low temperatures, but his research was cut short upon his accidental death. Wroblewski died as a result of burns in a fire started when he overturned a kerosene lamp in his laboratory*. |
| Benjamin Rush | |
| Died
19 Apr 1813 (born 4 Jan 1746)
American physician whose investigations spanned chemistry, medicine and psychiatry, though is best known as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Though he promoted clinical research, he still believed in bleeding, purging and other depleting remedies. |
|
| APRIL 19 - EVENTS | |
| Astronauts | |
In 1982, the U.S. announced that the first black astronaut would be Guion
S. Bluford, Jr., and the first woman astronaut would be Sally
K. Ride. On 30 Aug 1983,
Bluford became the first black American astronaut to travel in space, flying
aboard the shuttle Challenger 3 in the eighth Space Shuttle Mission. Ride
was the first American woman to orbit the earth when she flew aboard Space
Shuttle Challenger on 18 Jun
1983.« |
|
| Indian satellite | |
|
In 1975, India announced it had launched its first satellite. |
|
| Space station | |
|
In 1971, Salyut 1 (DOS 1) was launched
on a Proton rocket by the Soviet Union. Although primitive, having only
a single main module, it was the first space station ever in Earth orbit.
Its first crew launched in Soyuz 10 but was unable to board the
space station due to a failure in the docking mechanism. The second crew
arrived in Soyuz 11 and remained on board for 23 productive days.
Unfortunately, a pressure-equalization valve in the Soyuz 11 reentry
capsule opened prematurely when the crew returned to Earth, killing all
three. Salyut 1 reentered Earth's atmosphere 11 Oct 1971. Six more
Salyut
stations followed in the Soviet program, leading up to the
launch
of space station Mir on 20 Feb 1986.« |
|
| LSD | |
(source) |
In 1943, Albert Hofmann chose
to deliberately ingest 250 micrograms of the Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
(LSD) he had synthesized at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.
Three days earlier he had accidentally absorbed
some through his skin by touching a container of the drug. From the accidental
exposure he experienced restlessness, dizziness and "extreme activity of
imagination." Although he had first made it five years before, as a drug
intended to relieve respiratory ailments, it was only on this day that
he found the drug was a hallucinogen.
The striking experience was one he chose to repeat.
 LSD:
My Problem Child, by Albert Hofmann |
| Duryea automobile | |
 |
In 1892, the first Duryea automobile was operated by pioneer manufacturer
Charles E. Duryea. He had been building it since August 1891 at his shop,
47 Taylor St., Springfield, Mass. This would become the model for the first
automobile regularly made for sale in the U.S. The business was named the
Duryea Motor Wagon Company.
Carriages
Without Horses: J. Frank Duryea and the Birth of the American Automobile
Industry, by Richard P. Scharchburg. |
| U.S. astronomy | |
Thm.jpg)
c.1773 (source) |
In 1739, John Winthrop (12 Dec 1714-1779) of Cambridge, Mass., the first
astronomer
of note in the U.S. began sunspot observations and continued over the next
two days. No observations were possible on 21 Apr due to cloudy weather.
His observations exist
as one-page reports in the University Archives of Harvard University, though
they were never published. In 1761, he went on an expedition to St. John’s,
Newfoundland, to observe
the transit of Venus across the sun on 6 Jun 1761, which measurements could
be used to compute the distance between the sun and the Earth. He also
observed the transit of 1769 from Cambridge.«
The
Scientific Work of John Winthrop, by Michael N. Shute
and John Winthrop. |
