| MAY 5 - BIRTHS | |
| Arthur L. Schawlow | |
 Born 5
May 1921; died 28 Apr 1999.
American physicist and corecipient, with Nicolaas Bloembergen of the United States and Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn of Sweden, of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in developing the laser and in laser spectroscopy. |
|
| Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod | |
1952 (source) |
Born 5
May 1892; died 18 Dec 1968.
English archaeologist who, between the wars, dominated a string of pioneering excavations in the Near East (1929-34), most notably the 22 month excavation at Mount Carmel, Palestine, which put Near Eastern prehistory on the map. The Mount Carmel cave deposits spanned 200,000 years of human occupation, and finds included over 92,000 stone tools. Most important were the finds of human fossils, including the skeleton of a female Neanderthal dated c. 110,000 BC, the first ever to be found outside Europe. This led on to the discovery of more skeletal remains of primary importance to the study of human evolution. A leading authority on the Paleolithic for many years, Garrod was the first woman to receive a professorship at the University of Cambridge (1939-52). |
| Sir Douglas Mawson | |
| Born 5
May 1882; died 14 Oct 1958.
Australian geologist and explorer whose travels in the Antarctic earned him worldwide acclaim. |
|
| John Garstang | |
| Born 5
May 1876; died 12 Sep 1956.
English archaeologist who made major contributions to the study of the ancient history and prehistory of Asia Minor and Palestine and best known for excavating Ancient Jericho. |
|
| Peter Cooper Hewitt | |
(source) |
Born 5
May 1861; died 25 Aug 1921.
American electrical engineer who invented the mercury-vapour lamp, an important forerunner of fluorescent lamps. He studied the production of light using electrical discharges (while Edison was still developing incandescent filaments). The mercury-filled tubes he developed from the late 1890s, gave off an unattractive blue-green light. Although unsuitable in homes, its brilliance won wide adoption by photo studios because the black and white film of the time needed just bright light, despite its colour. There were many other industrial uses for the lamp. His manufacturing company (est. 1902) was bought by General Electric in 1919 which produced a new design in 1933. He took out his first eight mercury vapour lamp patents on 17 Sep 1901.« |
| Ferdinand Paul Wilhelm Richthofen | |
| Born 5
May 1833; died 6 Oct 1905.
(Baron) German geographer and geologist who produced a major work on China and contributed to the development of geographical methodology. He also helped establish the science of geomorphology, the branch of geology that deals with land and submarine relief features. |
|
| Elkanah Billings | |
(source) |
Born 5
May 1820; died 14 Jun 1876.
Canadian geologist and paleontologist, who was the first Canadian paleontologist. For three years as the editor of the Ottawa Citizen, he wrote a series of articles on science, including geology and paleontology. He published his first scientific paper on Trenton fossils in 1854. He launched a new monthly periodical, The Canadian Naturalist and Geologist in 1856, which he also edited and was the major contributor. In Aug 1856 he was appointed staff paleontologist with the Canadian Geological Survey by William Edmond Logan, the founder of the Survey. Billings immediately began the task of identifying a 20-year backlog of fossils collected by the Survey. By 1863 he had published descriptions of no fewer than 526 new species of fossils. |
| John William Draper | |
(source) |
Born 5
May 1811; died 4 Jan 1882.
English-American chemist who pioneered in photochemistry. He recognized that light initiated chemical reactions as molecules absorbed light energy. The Draper Point is the name given to the point at which all substances glow a dull red (about 525 degrees C.). He described the effect of rise in temperature as the addition of more and more of the visible light region produced a white glow (1847). His interest in spectroscopy and photography was applied to give the first atronomical photograph. Its subject was the moon (1840). He also studied photographs of the solar spectrum to show that contained both infrared and ultraviolet light. His photographs of persons include the oldest surviving photgraphic portrait (1840), and he was one of the first to produce microphotographs. |
|
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| MAY 5 - DEATHS | |
| Theodore Maiman | |
(source) |
 Died
5 May 2007 (born 11 Jul 1927)
Theodore H(arold) Maiman was an American physicist who built the first working laser. He began working with electronic devices in his teens, while earning college money by repairing electrical appliances and radios. In the 1960s, he developed, demonstrated, and patented a laser using a pink ruby medium. The laser is a device that produces monochromatic coherent light (light in which the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase). The laser has since been applied in a very wide range of uses, including eye surgery, dentistry, range-finding, manufacturing, even measuring the distance between the Earth and the Moon.  The
Laser Odyssey, by Theodore Maiman. |
| Sir Alastair Pilkington | |
| Died
5 May 1995 (born 7 Jan 1920)
Sir Lionel Alexander Bethune Pilkington was a British industrialist and inventor of the float glass process. |
|
| Tom Blake | |
| Died
5 May 1994 (born 8 Mar 1902)
American inventor of the hollow-core surfboard. Following his first experimental hollow surfboard in 1926, his innovative, hollow-core surf/paddle boards dominated the surfing world until the late 1940's. It became standard rescue equipment in California's early lifeguard corps. Early surfboard designs consisted of solid wooden boards dating back to the ancient Hawaiians, these new-concept, lighter boards were an immediate success and became extremely important in the evolution of the modern surfboard. In the 1930's he made the first major design advancement with the invention of fins. Before this, a surfer had to use his back foot to make the board turn. Many early Blake boards are displayed at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu. |
|
| Sir Donald Coleman Bailey | |
| Died
5 May 1985 (born 15 Sep 1901)
British engineer who invented the Bailey bridge, which was of great military value in World War II. |
|
| Dr. Joseph William Kennedy | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1957 (born 30 May 1916)
American scientist, one of four co-discoverers of plutonium, (element 94) which was produced from uranium oxide bombarded with deuterons in a cyclotron at the Univ. of California at Berkeley. Subsequently, on 28 Mar 1941, Glenn Seaborg, Emilio Segrè and Joseph Kennedy demonstrated that plutonium, like U235, is fissionable with slow neutrons, thus neutrons of any speed, which implies it's a potential fission bomb material. He was a chemistry instructor while working on the research project led by Glenn Seaborg at the University of California, Berkeley. After working with Seaborg, Kennedy was chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project. Image: plutonium hydroxide, 20 microgram in a capillary tube, 1942. |
| William Friese-Greene | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1921 (born 7 Sep 1855)
English photographer and inventor who built and patented an early somewhat practical motion picture camera (21 Jun 1889, No. 10,131). From about 1875, he operated a portrait photography studio. He experimented with motion photography. An early attempt was a camera able to take 10 images per second on a roll of sensitized paper. Later he used celluloid film. He claimed perhaps the first time a film of an actual event was ever projected on a screen - a jerky picture of people and horse-drawn vehicles moving past Hyde Park Corner. Although he held and defended patents, his inventions were less significant than those developed by others. The first functional movie camera is generally credited to Frenchman Etienne-Jules Marey in 1888.« |
| James Theodore Bent | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1897 (born 30 Mar 1852)
British explorer and archaeologist who excavated the magnificent Iron Age ruined city named the Great Zimbabwe, an ancient site in SE Africa that inspired the name of the country Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). The word Zimbabwe traces to the Bantu dzimbahwe; i.e., stone houses, or chiefs' graves. The earliest habitation is dated to about 400 AD, with inhabitation by Shona cattleherders from about 500 AD. Between the 12th to 15th centuries, stone structures still visible were built. The site lies within the Victoria region of modern state of Zimbabwe, which lies between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. The outer elliptical wall measures 830-ft circumference, varied height, up to 40’ and up to 17-ft thick. |
| Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1859 (born 13 Feb 1805)
German mathematician who made valuable contributions to number theory, analysis, and mechanics. Dirichlet is best known for his papers on conditions for the convergence of trigonometric series and the use of the series to represent arbitrary functions. He also proposed in 1837 the modern definition of a function. In mechanics he investigated the equilibrium of systems and potential theory. This led him to the Dirichlet problem concerning harmonic functions with given boundary conditions. Dirichlet is considered the founder of the theory of Fourier series, having corrected the earlier mistakes of other workers on Fourier's writings. One of his students was Riemann. In 1855, he succeeded Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Göttingen. |
| Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1808 (born 5 Jun 1757)
French philosopher and physiologist noted for Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (1802; "Relations of the Physical and the Moral in Man"), which explained all of reality, including the psychic, mental, and moral aspects of man, in terms of a mechanistic Materialism. He argued that "to have an accurate idea of the operations from which thought results, it is necessary to consider the brain as a special organ designed especially to produce it, as the stomach and the intestines are designed to operate the digestion, (and) the liver to filter bile..." |
| Jean Nicot | |
(source) |
Died
5 May 1600 (born c.1530)
French diplomat who introduced tobacco to the French court. In 1560, while serving as ambassador in Portugal, he was shown a tobacco plant in the garden of Lisbon botanist Damião de Goes, who claimed it had healing properties. Nicot sent home seeds and leaves of tobacco, recommending its marvelous therapeutic value. He had applied it to his nose and forehead and found it relieved his headaches. Nicot sent snuff to Catherine de Medici, the Queen of France to treat her migraine headaches. She was impressed with its results. The tobacco plant, Nicotiana tabacum, and its active substance, nicotine, derive their names from his. He also compiled one of the first French dictionaries, Thresor de la langue françoyse (1606).« |
| MAY 5 - EVENTS | |
| Conjunction of the planets | |
In 2000, a conjunction of the five bright planets - Mercury, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - formed a rough line across the sky with the
Sun and Moon. Unfortunately, nothing was visible from the earth, because
the the line of planets was behind the Sun and hidden in its brilliance.
Such a conjunction last happened in Feb 1962 and will not happen again
until Apr 2438. Throughout former history, a conjuction event was regarded
with foreboding. However, now science
can be dismissive. Donald Olson, an expert on tides at Southwest Texas
State University, working with the assistance of a graduate student, Thomas
Lytle, calculated the stress on the Earth caused by the Moon and eight
planets has often been routinely greater, most recently on 6 Jan 1990. |
|
| First liver transplant | |
|
In 1963, the world's first human liver transplant was performed in America
by Dr. Thomas E. Starlz at a Denver, Col., hospital. His patient, a 48-year-old
man, survived for 22 days. He had also performed the world's first spleen
transplant four months earlier in the same year. |
|
| First U.S. space flight | |
(source) |
In 1961, America's first astronaut in space, Alan
Bartlett Shepherd, Jr., made a 15 minute sub-orbital flight that reached
an altitude of 115 miles, during which he experienced about five minutes
of "weightlessness." He was launched in the 2,000-lb. capsule Freedom
7 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, by a Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket. The
flight travelled 302 miles at a speed relative to the ground of of 4,500
mph. Although Shepard thus became the first American in space, the world's
first human in space flight was Yuri
Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, launched into orbit less than one month
earlier, on 12 Apr 1961. |
| Japanese bomb kills mainland U.S. civilians | |
|
In 1945, the only WW II deaths of civilians on the mainland of the U.S.
resulted from a Japanese bomb dropped over Gearhart Mountain, Oregon by
an unmanned balloon. It was disturbed and exploded, killing those civilians
who discovered it during a picnic: five local children and Elsie Mitchell,
the pregnant wife of a minister. Sand in the bags of ballast carried by
the balloon was scientifically identified. By microscopic study of the
grains, the sand was known by its characteristics to have come from Japan.
Earlier in the war, 23 Feb 1942, the mainland was first bombed, though
without casualties, by shells fired from a Japanese submarine about a half-mile
offshore of Ellwood, California. |
|
| Bottle patent | |
|
In 1936, a U.S. patent was issued for the first bottle with a screw cap
and a pour lip to Edward A. Ravenscroft, Glencoe, Illinois (No. 2,039,345).
Abbott Laboratories of North Chicago manufactured the bottles. |
|
| England to Australia flight | |
(source) |
In 1930, Amy Johnson left Croydon
on the first solo flight by a woman between England and Australia, a distance
of 11,000 miles. She flew a single-engine De Havilland Gipsy Moth (registration
G-AAAH) named Jason, and landed in Darwin, Australia on 24 May.
She had learned to fly only a few months more than a year before, during
the winter of 1928-29. She had also qualified
as the first British-trained woman ground engineer. For awhile she was
the only woman G.E. in the world. Her intention for her Australia flight
was to beat Bert Hinkler's record of 16 days (She missed it by 3 days.)
For her achievement, she was awarded the Harmon Trophy and a CBE. The aircraft
still exists, as an exhibit in the London at the Science Museum.« |
| Scope's Monkey Trial | |
Scopes (source) |
In 1925, a meeting of local leaders was held in Dayton, Tennessee, to plan
a challenge to that state's new law,
the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach Darwin's theory of evolution
in a public school. George W. Rappelyea and other local leaders of the
small mining town met at Robinson's drug store. The American Civil Liberties
Union in New York, concerned by the law's infringement on constitutional
rights, had advertised an offer to give legal support to any teacher who
would challenge the law. Rappelyea saw the publicity that would accompany
such a trial as an opportunity to promote his town. He approached John
T. Scopes, a 24-year-old teacher
and football coach, who was hesitant at first, to test the legality of
the law in court.« |
| Anthrax innoculations tested | |
|
In 1881, Louis Pasteur tested innoculations against anthrax upon an ox,
several cows and 25 sheep. His experiment proved successful, and was a
milestone in the treatment of disease. |
|
| American Medical Association | |
|
In 1847, the first permanent national U.S. medical society was organized.
The American Medical Association (AMA) met in the Hall of the Academy of
Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Two hundred and fifty delegates
were present for this first U.S. national convention of medical professionals,
coming from 22 states, 28 medical schools and 40 medical societies. The
AMA superceded the National Medical Association which existed only one
year since its organization on 5 May 1846. The first state-chartered medical
society - the Massachusetts Medical
Society - was incorporated in Boston on 1 Nov 1781. The first, though
short-lived, local medical society existed in Boston prior to 1735 to 1741.« |
|
| Anode and cathode | |
Whewell (source) |
In 1834, William Whewell wrote a letter
to Michael Faraday concerning names
to describe the process of electrolysis which he was investigating. Whewell
suggest the names Anode and
Cathode. The terms are based
on the Greek prefixes "ana-" meaning "up" and "kata-" meaning "down." The
chosen prefixes referred to the idea that (as was then applied) that electric
current flowed from a battery's positive to a negative pole, in the manner
that water would flow down from a hillside to a valley. He suggested a
term - ion - for the two together instead of Zetodes or Stechions. Faraday
replied that he was "delighted with the facility of expression which the
new terms give me and I shall ever be your debtor for the kind assistance
you have given me.” |
| American vaccination program | |
|
In 1832, the U.S. government passed an act authorizing the first vaccination
program to protect Native Americans against smallpox and allotted $12,000
to pay doctors $6 a day for their services. |
|
| First woman granted U.S. patent | |
|
In 1809, the first U.S. patent granted to a woman was issued to Mary Kies
for "a new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread." |
|
