May 17 - Today in Science History

MAY 17 - BIRTHS
Marcel Roland de Quervain
	Born 17 May 1915 Swiss glaciologist who investigated the physical properties of snow, which he applied to the development of avalanche warning systems and the mitigation of other problems associated with snowfields. An example of his work is the study of the metamorphism and the hardening of snow relative to the pressure and temperature gradient. He joined the Swiss Federal Snow and Avalanche Research Institute in 1943 as assistant director and became its director in 1950. He retired in 1980.«
Odd Hassel
(source)	Born 17 May 1897; died 11 May 1981. Norwegian physical chemist and corecipient, with Derek H.R. Barton of Great Britain, of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in establishing conformational analysis (the study of the 3-D geometric structure of molecules). A ring of six carbon atoms has two conformations - the chair and boat forms. These easily interchange - about a million times in a second at room temperature. One of the conformations is, however, strongly predominant (about 99%). Hassel carried out fundamental investigations on this system and showed how heavy or bulky groups, attached to the carbon atoms, take up their positions relative to the ring and to each other. Such work is of great importance for predicting the mode of reaction of a certain molecule.
Elvin Charles Stakman
(source)	Born 17 May 1885; died 22 Jan 1979. Pioneering American plant pathologist and educator. As an agricultural specialist, Stakman established the methods for identifying and combatting diseases of wheat and other important food crops. After investigating the behavior and control of fungal lead rust in cereals at the University of Minnesota, Stakman became involved in international scientific affairs. He pleaded for a joint U.S.-Mexico research station devoted to the improvement of corn. This was established in 1943 and eventually grew into a worldwide network of research stations under the International Center for Corn and Wheat Improvement, an organization to improve food production in developing nations. Stakman wrote many scientific papers, and co-authored Campaign Against Hunger (1967).
Horace E. Dodge
	Born 17 May 1868; died 10 Dec 1920. Horace Elgin Dodge, with his brother John Francis Dodge, were American automobile manufacturers who invented one of the first all-steel cars in America. They built their first Dodge car Nov 1914 in Detroit, Mich.
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer
(source)	Born 17 May 1836; died 16 Aug 1920. British astronomer who in 1868 discovered and named the element helium that he found in the Sun's atmosphere before it had been detected on Earth. He also applied the name chromosphere for the sun's outer layer. Lockyer discovered, together with Pierre J. Janssen, the prominences (red flames) that surround the solar disk. He was also interested in the classification of stellar spectra and developed the meteoric hypothesis of stellar evolution. His works include the books Contributions to Solar Physics (1873), The Sun's Place in Nature (1897) and Inorganic Evolution (1900). Science and Controversy: A Biography of Sir Norman Lockyer, by A. J. Meadows.
Thomas Davidson
(source)	Born 17 May 1817; died 14 Oct 1885. Scottish naturalist and paleontologist who became known as an authority on brachiopods, known as "lamp shells" because some varieties resemble a Roman oil lamp, a phylum of bottom-dwelling marine invertebrates (Brachiopoda). Some of these fossils are among the oldest found. His major work, Monograph of British Fossil Brachziopoda, was published by the Palaeontographical Society (1850-1886). Together with supplements, this comprised six quarto volumes with more than 200 plates drawn on stone by the author. Upon his death, he bequeathed his fine collection of recent and fossil brachiopoda to the British Museum.
John Gould Anthony
(source)	Born 17 May 1804; died 16 Oct 1877. American conchologist who was was recognized as an authority on the American land and fresh-water mollusca. During a career in business, his interest in natural history led to a collection of freshwater mollusks of the Ohio River. From 1835 on, he corresponded with mollusk researchers and began to publish his findings. Serious eye trouble (1851) forced his retirement from business. In 1853, he toured Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia to collect mollusks. His publications attracted the attention of Professor Agassiz, who asked him to take charge of the conchologieal department of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard (1863), where he remained until his death. He accompanied Agassiz on the Thayer expedition to Brazil in 1865.
Amos Eaton
	Born 17 May 1776; died 10 May 1842. American botanist, geologist, and lawyer who aroused widespread interest in science through his public lectures and inspired many students as a teacher and writer of textbooks.
Edward Jenner
(source)	Born 17 May 1749; died 26 Jan 1823. English surgeon and discoverer of vaccination for smallpox. There was a common story among farmers that if a person contracted a relatively mild and harmless disease of cattle called cowpox, immunity to smallpox would result. On 14 May 1796 he removed the fluid of a cowpox from dairymaid Sarah Nelmes, and inoculated James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy, who soon came down with cowpox. Six weeks later, he inoculated the boy with smallpox. The boy remained healthy, proving the theory. He called his method vaccination, using the Latin word vacca, meaning cow, and vaccinia, meaning cowpox. Jenner also introduced the word virus.

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MAY 17 - DEATHS

G. Evelyn Hutchinson
	Died 17 May 1991 (born 30 Jan 1903) G(eorge) Evelyn Hutchinson was an English-born American zoologist known as the "father of modern limnology" for his ecological studies of freshwater lakes.
Erwin Wilhelm Müller
(source)	Died 17 May 1977 (born 13 Jun 1911) German-U.S. physicist who invented the field emission microscope (FIM), which provided magnifications in excess of one million. For the first time made it possible to take pictures of individual atoms. Images of the atomic structures of tungsten were first published in 1951 in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. In FIM, a voltage of about 10kV is applied to a sharp metal tip, cooled to below 50 kelvin in a low-pressure helium gas atmosphere. Gas atoms are ionized by the strong electric field in the vicinity of the tip and repelled perpendicular to the tip surface. A detector images the spatial distribution of these ions giving a magnification of the curvature of the surface.
Boris Borisovich Golitsyn
	Died 17 May 1916 (born 2 Mar 1862) (Prince) Russian physicist known for his work on methods of earthquake observations and on the construction of seismographs. He invented the first effective electromagnetic seismograph in 1906. A seismometer of this type picks up earthquake waves with a pendulum that supports a coil of insulated wire between the poles of a magnet rigidly linked to the earth. The relative motion between the magnet and the coil caused by tremors in the earth generates corresponding electric currents in the coil. The currents can be amplified to operate a pen recorder.
John Deere
(source)	Died 17 May 1886 (born 7 Feb 1804) American agricultural equipment inventor and pioneer manufacturer. As a blacksmith in a U.S. prairie town, he frequently repaired the wood and cast-iron plows of eastern U.S. design because the local soils were heavy and sticky. By 1838 he had produced three more suitable steel plows of his own new design, and more in following years, which expanded into the agricultural machine business he began upon moving to Moline, Ill. (1847). In another ten years, his annual production had increased ten-fold. Originally using imported English steel instead of cast iron, he converted to U.S. made steel when Pittsburgh steel plants could supply a suitable product. The company diversified with production of harrows, drills, cultivators and wagons.« Genuine Value: The John Deere Journey, by John J. Gerstner.
Josef Leopold Auenbrugger
(source)	Died 17 May 1809 (born 19 Nov 1722) Austrian physician who devised the diagnostic technique of percussion (the art of striking a surface part of the body with short, sharp taps to diagnose the condition of the parts beneath the sound). With this technique, he could estimate the amount of fluid in a patient's chest and the size of his/her heart. (As a boy he had tapped the wine barrels in his father’s cellar to find how full they were.) After seven years of investigation, he published the method in Inventum Novum (1761), though his technique did not gain recognition and acceptance until years after his death. When a translator republished the work in French (1808) the method gained acceptance around the world, and through time to the present as a fundamental diagnostic procedure.
Alexis Claude Clairaut
	Died 17 May 1765 (born 7 May 1713) Mathematician prodigy. Tutored by his father, he was studying calculus at age ten. Clairaut read his first paper, Quatre problèmes sur de nouvelles courbes to the Paris Academy (1726) at the age of 13. He accompanied Maupertuis on an expedition to Lapland to measure the length of the meridian. From this experience, he began a book (1743) on the shape of the rotating earth under the influences of gravity and centrifugal forces. Further, he showed how to measure the shape by use of measurements of the effect of gravity at different location on the swing of a pendulum. He also determined the first reasonable value for the mass of Venus, an improved value for the mass of the moon, and predicted the timing of the return of Halley's Comet.



MAY 17 - EVENTS

Scopes monkey trial law repealed
(source)	In 1967, the governor of Tennessee signed into law the repeal of the 1925 state law, the Butler Act, prohibiting the teaching of evolution. The law had made it "unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The law had been tested in what became known as the "Scopes monkey trial." Scopes was found guilty, but the law had been undermined. Upon appeal, Scopes was acquitted on a technicality. The law itself remained a Tennessee state statute for 42 years.« [Image: cartoon from the New York Times, 25 Jul 1925. The cane is tagged "Evolution Trial."]
Reserpine
(source)	In 1955, the American psychiatrist, Nathan Kline, appeared before the U.S. Congress to explain his work with the drug reserpine. He is credited with founding the field of psychopharmacology with his discovery and use of reserpine to treat the mental disorder psychosis. His testimony before congress influenced the passage of the Mental Health Studies Act of 1955. Kline then used his Washington connections to write research grants to study antidepressant medications. By summer 1956, he gained two million dollars in congressional funding for psychopharmacological research by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The purified alkaloid reserpine was isolated in 1952 from the root of Rauwolfia plants found extensively in Africa.« [Image right: reserpine molecule] Ten Years Which Changed the Face of Mental Illness, by Jean Thullier.
Atomic reactor
	In 1955, an atomic reactor was patented by Fermi and Szilard (U.S. No. 2,708,656).
CERN groundbreaking
	In 1954, official ground-breaking took place at the Meyrin site of the new CERN Laboratory in Geneva. A recommendation had been adopted 12 Dec 1949 at the European Cultural Conference for a European Institute of Nuclear Physics. By 1952, the third session of its provisional Council decided to locate in Switzerland. In Jun 1953, the host community, the canton of Geneva, gave strong approval in a referendum passing with 16539 votes to 7332. On 29 Sep 1954, twelve founding Member States ratified CERN (Centre Européenne de Recherche Nucléaire): Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.« History of CERN, vol I, by A. Hermann, et al.
First G.B. automatic telephone exchange
	In 1912, the London newspaper, The Times, reported that new automatic telephone equipment was in place at Epsom, to be tested in the afternoon of the following day. The experiment, the first of its kind in Great Britain, provided 320 Epson telephone subscribers the ability to dial other numbers in the town themselves instead of having to ask the operator to get the number for them. The news article carefully described the operation of the new rotating dial with finger holes, about an inch above a numbered disk, attached to the subscriber's telephone. This marked the beginning of the telephone automation in Britain, which had already arrived in America, Canada, and other countries.
First British comic paper
	In 1890, Comic Cuts, the first British weekly comic paper, was published in London by Alfred Northcliffe.
Feed rack
	In 1887, black American inventor D.W. Shorter was issued a patent for a "feed rack" (U.S. No. 363,089) The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity, by Patricia Carter Sluby.
Dissociation theory
	In 1883, Svante Arrhenius was struck by the ideas for his dissociation theory during a sleepless night. This theory explains that substances like salt (ex. sodium chloride) when dissolved in water, dissociate (separate) into electrically charged ions (ex. positive sodium ions and negative chloride ions). The idea was controversial at first, but is now a basic fact in understanding the chemistry of ionic compounds.
Water wheel
	In 1839, a water wheel was patented by Lorenzo Adkins (U.S. No. 1,154).