| MAY 16 - BIRTHS | |
| J. Georg Bednorz | |
(source) |
 Born 16
May 1950
German physicist who, with Karl Alex Müller, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of superconductivity in a new class of materials at temperatures higher than had previously been thought attainable. They startled the world by reporting superconductivity in a layered, ceramic material at a then record-high temperature of 33 kelvin (that is 33 degrees above absolute zero, or roughly -460 degrees Fahrenheit). Their discovery set off an avalanche of research worldwide into related materials that yielded dozens of new superconductors, eventually reaching a transition temperature of 135 kelvin. Today, he develops complex oxide compounds with novel crystal structures for possible uses in microelectronics. |
| Roy Kerr | |
(source) |
Born 16
May 1934
Roy P(atrick) Kerr is a New Zealander mathematician who solved (1963) Einstein's field equations of general relativity to describe rotating black holes, thus providing a major contribution to the field of astrophysics. He deduced a unique two-parameter family of solutions which describes the space-time around black holes in July 1963. The two parameters are the mass of the black hole and the angular momentum of the black hole. (The static solution, with zero angular momentum, was discovered by Karl Schwarzschild in Dec 1915.) Rotating black holes are often called Kerr Black Holes. He showed that there is a vortex-like region outside the event horizon, called the ergo-region, that drags space and time around with the rotating black hole. |
| Konrad Wachsmann | |
(source) |
Born 16
May 1901; died 25 Nov 1980.
German-born American architect notable for his contributions to the mass production of building components. After emigrating to the U.S., together with Walter Gropius, he developed the General Panel System that was to become known as the "post-war dream house." Using prefabricated modular building units, five workers were able to assemble a house on site in under nine hours. Wachsmann developed a universal standard joint. It was this technique of invisible joinery that allowed prefabrication to become integrated in every aspect of building. The joint was to emerge as the central architectonic theme within this modular approach and has since become the standard for wood working and prefabrication. |
| Irving Wightman Colburn | |
(source) |
Born 16 May 1861; died 4 Sept 1917.
American inventor and manufacturer whose process for fabricating continuous sheets of flat glass made the mass production of glass for windows possible. Colburn began his experiments in 1899 which resulted in his patent for a sheet glass drawing machine on 25 Mar 1902. He formed the Colburn Machine Glass Co. in Aug 1906, installed drawing machines at two factories in 1908 but went bankrupt in 1911 before the technology was perfected. The Toledo Glass Company bought Colburn's patents in 1912 and hired him soon after. He began refining the process at the Toledo Glass experimental plant where its first draw of sheet glass took place on 25 Nov 1913. The company subsequently organized as the Libbey-Owens Sheet Glass Company in 1916.  [Image
right: Colburn Machine Glass Co., Reynoldsville, Pa, 1907] |
| Johannes von Mikulicz-Radecki | |
(source) |
Born 16
May 1850; died 4 Jun 1905.
Polish surgeon whose innovations in operative technique for a wide variety of diseases helped develop modern surgery. He contributed prodigiously to cancer surgery, especially on organs of the digestive system. He was first to suture a perforated gastric ulcer (1885), surgically restore part of the oesophagus (1886), remove a malignant part of the colon (1903), and describe what is now known as Mikulicz’ disease. In 1881 he developed improved models of the oesophagoscope and gastroscope. As an ardent advocate of antiseptics he did much to popularize Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods. He used a gauze mask and was one of the first to use gloves during surgery. |
| David (Edward) Hughes | |
(source) |
Born 16 May 1831; died 22 Jan 1900.
Anglo-American inventor of the carbon microphone, which was a significant contribution to telephony. His family emigrated to the U.S. when he was age seven. In 1850 he became professor of music at St. Joseph's College, Bardstown, Ky. Five years later, after he resigned, he took out a U.S. patent for the first telegraph system printing the text at the sending and at the receiving end, thus doing away with a special alphabetic code as required with the Morse telegraph. It was produced before the typewriter was even invented. Also, Hughes's loose-contact microphone, invented in 1878, was the forerunner of the various carbon microphones now in use. He also invented the induction balance and worked with the theory of magnetism.« [Image right: Hughes telegraph] |
| Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin | |
| Born 16
May 1763; died 14 Nov 1829.
French chemist who discovered the elements chromium (1797) and beryllium (1798). |
|
| Maria Gaetana Agnesi | |
(source) |
Born 16
May 1718; died 9 Jan 1799.
Italian mathematician and philosopher who was the first woman in the Western world considered to be a mathematician. In Propositiones Philosophicae (1738) she presented a series of essays on philosophy and natural science that she had defended in discourses with invited intellectuals who were invited her father's home. In 1748, her two volumes of Analytical Institutions, were acclaimed by the academic world as one of the first and complete publications that brought together the works of various mathematicians on finite and infinitesimal analysis. After the death of her father in 1752, Agnesi entirely devoted herself and spent her money to do charitable work. She died in total poverty in the poorhouse of which she had been the director. |
|
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| MAY 16 - DEATHS | |
| Raymond Arthur Lyttleton | |
(source) |
 Died
16 May 1995 (born 7 May 1911)
English mathematician and theoretical astronomer who researched stellar evolution and composition. In 1939, with Fred Hoyle, he demonstrated the large scale existance of interstellar hydrogen, refuting the existing belief of that space was devoid of interstellar gas. Together, in the early 1940's, they applied nuclear physics to explain how energy is generated by stars. In his own mongraph (1953) Lyttleton described stability of rotating liquid masses, which he extended later to explain that the Earth had a liquid core resulting from a phase change associated with a combination of intense pressure and temperature. With Hermann Bondi, in 1959, he proposed the electrostatic theory of the expanding universe. He authored various astronomy books.  Mysteries
of the solar system, by Raymond Arthur Lyttleton. |
| Alfred O. C. Nier | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1994 (born 28 May 1911)
Alfred Otto Carl Nier was a physicist who refined the mass spectrometric process to distinguish isotopes. In 1934, with Lyman T. Aldrich he applied the decay of potassium-40 to argon-40 to measure the age of geological materials. He discovered (1936-38) a number of new isotopes of such low abundance they had not been previously detected, including S36, Ca46, Ca48, and Os186. Nier showed how the ratio of radioactive isotopes of uranium and its decay products was a second method to estimate the age of rocks. During WW-II, with others, he showed (1940) that the rarer uranium-235 undergoes fission, not common U-238. Thereafter, Nier was active in the separaton of these two isotopes, important in developing atomic bombs. |
| Edward W(inslow) Gifford | |
1936 (source) |
Died
16 May 1959 (born 14 Aug 1887)
U.S. self-taught anthropologist and archaeologist. After high school, he became an assistant with the California Academy of Sciences, and on its expedition to the Galapagos Islands (1905-06) he observed and later described hoe the Pallid Tree Finch used a thorn or twig pry insects out from tree bark. He became assistant curator (1912) then curator (1925) at the University of California Museum of Anthropology. He made ethnographical field studies of native culture in California, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia and Yap. He succeeded Professor Alfred L. Kroeber as the museum director in 1947. Gifford developed the museum into a major U.S. collection, and wrote over 100 treatises related to ethnology, folklore and museum collections.« California
Indian Nights Entertainment, by Edward Gifford, Gwendoline
Gifford. |
| Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1947 (born 20 June 1861)
British biochemist, who received (with Christiaan Eijkman) the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovery of essential nutrient factors, now known as vitamins, needed in animal diets to maintain health. Hopkins fed young rats on a basic diet which, in addition to the necessary salts, contained a carefully purified mixture of lard, starch, and casein (the most abundant protein in milk). After some time the animals ceased to grow. Then Hopkins demonstrated that it was only necessary to add a very small daily amount of milk, 2 - 3 cc for each animal, for growth to recommence. Thus the sufficiency of food consumed without the added milk could be fully utilized by the body only when the growth-promoting influence of the milk was present.. |
| Bronislaw (Kasper) Malinowski | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1942 (born 7 Apr 1884)
Polish-born British anthropologist one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century who is widely recognized as the founder of social anthropology and principally associated with field studies of the peoples of Oceania. In 1914, on a research assignment to Australia, the outbreak of WW I kept him partially confined to the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern tip of New Guinea. In 1920, he returned to teaching in London, and in 1938 moved to teach in the U.S. He was the pioneer of "participant observation" as a method of fieldwork, used in his works on the Trobriand Islanders, especially Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Coral Gardens and their Magic (2 vols, 1935), which set new standards for ethnographic description.  Magic,
Science and Religion and Other Essays by Bronislaw Malinowski |
| Joseph B. Strauss | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1938 (born 9 Jan 1870)
Joseph B(aermann) Strauss was an American civil engineer who was chief engineer for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. His career began as a draftsman. A few years later had become a principal assistant engineer. By 1904 he had his own Strauss Bascule Bridge Company which constructed hundreds of drawbridges around the U.S. From 1919, he spent a decade campaigning for the idea of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was eventually funded by a vote on 4 Nov 1930 to issue bonds. It was his first suspension bridge, and he was assisted by engineers Charles Ellis and Leon Moissieff. The bridge opened to the public 27 May 1937. He was exhausted by the major task, and died within a year afterwards.« 
The
Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate
Bridge, by John Van Der Zee. |
| John Stevens Henslow | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1861 (born 6 Feb 1796)
British botanist, clergyman, geologist and mentor of Charles Darwin. Henslow popularized botany at the University of Cambridge by introducing new methods of teaching the subject. He fostered independent discovery and utilized unusual field trips for his students. In order to persuade farmers to apply scientific methods to their operations, Henslow gave public lectures on the fermentation of manure and wrote newsletters for publication in local newspapers. During the potato famine (1845-46) in Ireland, he showed stricken farmers how to extract starch from rotten potatoes. |
| Charles Chubb | |
| Died
16 May 1845 (born 1779)
British inventor and entrepreneur, founder of the locksmith firm of Chubb & Son (now Chubb & Son PLC), which in the 20th century became a major corporation manufacturing and distributing locks, safes, alarms, fire extinguishers, security systems, surveillance equipment, and other products. His brother Jeremiah patented a detector lock in 1818, which proved to be the foundation of the later success of the firm of Chubb & Sons which Charles founded when he moved to London in 1820. Charles Chubb made improvements on this lock, with patents in 1824, 1828, and 1833. He also took out several patents for fireproof and burglarproof safes. Eventually, his factories produced nearly 1,500,000 patent locks and about 30,000 safes and strongrooms, costing from £8 to £5,000 |
|
| Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1830 (born 21 Mar 1768)
(Baron) French mathematician, known also as an Egyptologist and administrator, who exerted strong influence on mathematical physics through his Théorie analytique de la chaleur (1822; The Analytical Theory of Heat). He introduced an infinite mathematical series to aid in solving conduction equations. This analysis technique allows the function of any variable to be expanded into a series of sines of multiples of the variable, which is now known as the Fourier series. His equations spawned many new areas of study in mathematics and physics, including the branch of optics named for him, have subsequently been applied other natural phenomena such as tides, weather and sunspots. |
| Sir William Congreve | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1828 (born 20 May 1772)
(2nd Baronet) English artillery officer who invented a rocket (about 1804) for use in warfare that improved on simple black-powder rockets. They were first used militarily against the French on 8 Oct 1806 at Boulogne and later at Copenhagen and Leipzig. By 1830, most European armies had copied them. He also invented a gun-recoil mounting, a steam engine, a triple-paper process for coloured watermarks and a "perpetual-motion" machine. He created a wheelchair for himself after losing the use of his legs. He designed a vessel propelled by a "wave-wheel" and a human-powered aircraft. His 18 patents also include making of gunpowder, gas lighting, "hydropneumatic" canal locks, a rolling-ball clock and a built-in sprinkler system.« |
| Jakob Chrisophe Le Blon | |
(source) |
Died
16 May 1741 (baptised 2 May 1667)
German painter and engraver who invented the modern system of four-colour printing. Influenced by Newton's work on the light spectrum, after many printing trials, Le Blon in 1710 proposed that three primary colours - cyan, magenta and yellow (blue, red, yellow) and black - are sufficient for mixing in varying proportions to produce all other colours. He used this process to print engravings that mimic the full colour of paintings by superimposing mezzotint plates in each primary colour. For each hand-engraved plate, the individual contribution of each colour estimated. In 1719, George I granted him a priviledge of a monopoly for the reproduction of pictures and drawings in full colour. Nevertheless, by 1725, his company failed.« |
| MAY 16 - EVENTS | |
| Space Shuttle Endeavour lands | |
In 1992, the space shuttle Endeavour completed its maiden voyage
with a safe landing in the California desert. |
|
| Nicotine | |
|
In 1988, nicotine was declared to be addictive in ways similar to heroin
and cocaine, in a report released by U.S. Surgeon-General C. Everett Koop. |
|
| First ruby crystal laser operated | |
|
In 1960, a synthetic ruby crystal laser was first operated
at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. The laser
is a device that produces monochromatic coherent light (light in which
the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase). This first operable
laser device was invented by American physicist Theodore
Maiman, for which he was issued U.S. Patent 3,353,115 on 14
Nov 1967. |
|
| Tape recorder demonstrated | |
|
In 1946, the world's first magnetic tape recorder was demonstrated for
the first time by Jack Mullin. |
|
| Dambuster bombs | |
(source) |
In 1943, during WW II, "bouncing bombs" invented by Dr
Barnes Wallis were dropped on the Mohne and Eder dams in the Ruhr Valley.
Wallace had realized that breaching the dams would destroy vital enemy
war factories and hydroelectricity to the industrial Ruhr area. He overcame
skepticism from the british military planners, and designed an innovative
bomb that could be delivered against the side of the dam. Both were demanding
tasks. Carefully planned bomber flights delivered very large, cylindrical
bombs rotating backwards at high speed that would, when dropped at the
right height and place, skip along the surface of the water, right up to
the base of the dam. Wallis based his idea on the simple pastime of skipping
stones on a pond.« [Image:
Dr Barnes Wallis at his drawing board]
The
Dam Busters, by Paul Brickhill. |
| London trolleybus | |
(source) |
In 1931 the London United Tramways (LUT) started London's first trolleybus
service. It replaced trams service on the Twickenham Junction to Teddington
route. The trolleybus had been demonstrated in London as early as 1909,
and were running in Leeds since 1911. Like trams, the trolleybus ran on
electricity drawn from a "trolley" running along overhead lines. Trolleybuses
had pneumatic tyres to run on the same road surface with other traffic.
London trams, their rail maintenance expense and trouble to other vehicles,
were thus all abandoned by 1952. Yet by 1959, the era of the trolleybus
was closing, as diesel-fuelled buses became economical alternatives. London's
last
trolleybus ran from Wimbledon to Fulwell on 8
May 1962.«
[Image:
An "A" class, first design of London trolleybus brought out of preservation
retirement making its Last Day Run, 8 May 1962, on King's Road, Kingston.]
The
London Trolleybus: 1931-1945, by Ken Blacker. |
| Patent | |
|
In 1893, black American inventor L.W. Benjamin received a patent for "broom
moisteners and bridles" (No. 497,747).
The
Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity,
by Patricia Carter Sluby. |
|
| Record demonstrated | |
|
In 1888, Emile Berliner gave the first demonstration of flat disc recording
and reproduction before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. |
|
| Root beer | |
|
In 1866, root beer was invented by Charles Elmer Hires. |
|
