| MAY 18 - BIRTHS | |
| Malcolm Sim Longair | |
(source) |
 Born 18
May 1941
Scottish astronomer, noted for his scholarship and teaching, who in 1980 was appointed by Royal Warrant Astronomer Royal for Scotland, a post he held until 31 Dec 1990. The title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland was created in 1834. As Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy and head of Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, UK, his research interests include the emission from dust in the distant universe, observational cosmology, galaxy formation, and gravitational lensing. He is the current Public Understanding of Physics Fellow of the Institute of Physics |
| Elman Rogers Service | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1915; died 14 Nov 1996.
American anthropological theorist and formulator of the nomenclature now in standard use to categorize primitive societies as bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Although widely accepted, the system was abandoned by Service himself because his subsequent research made him question the accuracy of the terminology. Service did fieldwork among the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon and in Paraguay and Mexico. His principal theoretical interests were in kinship, cultural evolution, theories of culture and the evolution of political institutions. His principal ethnographic contribution was Tobati: Paraguayan Town (1954), written with his wife Helen. [Image: Havasupai Cliff Dwelling] |
| Vincent du Vigneaud | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1901; died 11 Dec 1978.
American biochemist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1955 for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone. Underneath the brain, the pituitary gland is well-protected and, in man about as big as a bean. It secretes several hormones, that is, substances which regulate important physiological functions. These are built up from amino acids in the same way as proteins, but with a far lower molecular weight. Vigneaud isolated and synthesized two pituitary hormones: vasopressin, which acts on the muscles of the blood vessels to cause elevation of blood pressure; and oxytocin, the principal agent causing contraction of the uterus and secretion of milk. |
| Thomas Midgley, Jr. | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1889; died 2 Nov 1944.
American engineer and chemist who discovered the effectiveness of tetraethyl lead (C2H5)4Pb in 1921 as an antiknock additive for gasoline. Knocking jars the wall of the automobile cylinders by the explosion instead of steadily pushing the cylinder back. This wastes a large percentage of the energy and damages the engine. He also developed carbon tetrafluoride (CF4) a cleaning agent and in 1930 dichlorofluoromethane (CCl2F2) later called “Freon”. This is a non-toxic and non-flammable gas, unreactive at normal temperatures but able to be easily liquified by pressure alone. It replaced toxic gases previously used in home refrigeration.  From
the Periodic Table to Production: The Life of Thomas Midgley, Jr.by
Thomas Midgley. |
| Robert E(lmer) Horton | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1875; died 22 Apr 1945.
American hydraulic engineer, who is regarded as the father of modern hydrology, and who developed and refined techniques for systematic separation of rainfall drainage into the components such as infiltration, evaporation, interception, transpiration and overland flow. He recognized that physical characteristics were important for determining runoff and flood discharge, such as drainage density, channel slope, and overland flow length. His studies established a basis for the analysis of soil erosion enabling strategies for soil conservation. One month before he died, he published a 95-page landmark paper that summarized two decades of study giving what are now known as Horton's Laws: the law of stream numbers, the law of stream lengths, limiting infiltration capacity, and the runoff-detention-storage relation.« [Image: from Robert E. Horton Medal awarded by the American Geophysical Union to recognize outstanding contributions to the geophysical aspects of hydrology.] |
| Bertrand Russell | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1872; died 2 Feb 1970.
(3rd earl) Bertrand Arthur William Russell was a Welsh mathematical logician, analytical philosopher and writer. He worked to establish foundations of mathematics and developed contemporary formal logic. He is known for Russell's paradox (concerning the set of all sets that are not members of themselves), his theory of types, and his contributions to the first-order predicate calculus. He believed in logicism, the theory that mathematics was in some important sense reducible to formal logic. With Alfred Whitehead, he co-authored Prinicpia Mathematica (1910). Russell is regarded as one of the most important logicians of the twentieth century. He was active in social and political campaigns, and advocated pacifism and nuclear disarmament. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Russell in 1950.« |
| Harry Fielding Reid | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1859; died 18 Jun 1944.
U.S. seismologist and glaciologist who introduced the term "elastic rebound" in a report (1910) on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. His early career was as a glaciologist, but then the study of earthquakes became his most significant work. Reid was the first to establish that it is the fault that causes an earthquake, rather than a fault results from an earthquake. His elastic rebound theory, said that an earthquake occurs upon the sudden release of a large amount of stored energy after a long gradual accumulation of stress along a fault line. Later, modern science explained that Earth's surface consists of huge tectonic plates slowly moving relative to each other, and stress (elastic strain energy) gradually builds along their edges moving against each other.« After
the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet,
by Hough and Bilham. |
| Oliver Heaviside | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1850; died 3 Feb 1925.
English physicist who predicted the existence of the ionosphere. In 1870, he became a telegrapher, but increasing deafness forced him to retire in 1874. He then devoted himself to investigations of electricity. In 1902, Heaviside and Kennelly predicted that there should be an ionised layer in the upper atmosphere that would reflect radio waves. They pointed out that it would be useful for long distance communication, allowing radio signals to travel to distant parts of the earth by bouncing off the underside of this layer. The existence of the layer, now known as the Heaviside layer or the ionosphere, was demonstrated in the 1920s, when radio pulses were transmitted vertically upward and the returning pulses from the reflecting layer were received. Oliver
Heaviside : The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian
Age, by Paul J Nahin |
| Wilhelm (Friedrich Benedikt) Hofmeister | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1824; died 12 Jan 1877.
Wilhelm (Friedrich Benedikt) Hofmeister was a German botanist whose investigations of plant structure made him a pioneer in the science of comparative plant morphology. He discovered the regular alternation of sexual and asexual generation in plants (1862), which is the basis for the explanation of the life cycle in all known plants. He recognized that all land plants form one multicellular individual which he called the gametophyte that produced gametangia; and then a second multicellular individual called the sporophyte that forms sporangia in which meiosis results in the formation of spores. Hofmeister called this life cycle pattern with distinct gametophytes and sporophytes: alternation of generations. |
| James Bicheno Francis | |
c.1887 (source) |
Born 18
May 1815; died 18 Sep 1892.
British-American engineer who originated the scientific method of testing hydraulic machinery and invented the Francis mixed-flow reaction turbine (combining radial- and axial-flow) for low-pressure installations. Shortly emigrating to the U.S. at age 18, he joined the Locks and Canal Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, where he became Chief Engineer (1837) and remained there for his entire career. The company owned and operated Lowell’s canal system providing waterpower for the textile industry's mills there. Francis designed a more efficient successor to the Boyden turbine of the Boston-based consulting engineer Uriah A. Boyden. He was a founding member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and its president in 1880.« |
| Arsène-Jules-Étienne-Juvénal Dupuit | |
| Born 18
May 1804; died 5 Sep 1866.
French engineer and economist who was one of the first to analyze the cost-effectiveness of public works. |
|
| Lionel Lukin | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1742; died 16 Feb 1834.
English coach-builder, inventor and pioneer who patented the "unimmergible" (unsinkable) construction of the modern lifeboat (2 Nov 1785, GB No. 1498/1785*). His design used airtight compartments, cork, and other lightweight materials to build small boats that would not sink even when filled with water. Despite the patronage of the Price of Wales, he was unable to attract support for his invention from the Admiralty. Lukin fitted a coble for the the Rev. Dr. Shairp, of Bamborough, who was in charge of a charity for saving life and property at sea, which was reported to have saved several lives within its first year of use. Lukin's other inventions included a raft for rescuing persons under ice, an adjustable reclining hospital bed, and a rain gauge.«  [Image:
Life-boat cross-section drawings from a book published by Lukin in 1790,
showing buoyancy compartments.] |
| Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1711; died 13 Feb 1787.
Astronomer and mathematician who gave the first geometric procedure for determining the equator of a rotating planet from three observations of a surface feature and for computing the orbit of a planet from three observations of its position. Boscovich was one of the first in continental Europe to accept Newton's gravitational theories and he wrote 70 papers on optics, astronomy, gravitation, meteorology and trigonometry. Boscovich also showed much ability in dealing with practical problems. He suggested and directed the draining of the Pontine marshes near Rome, and recommended the use of iron bands to control the spread of cracks in the dome of St. Peter's basilica. |
| Omar Khayyam | |
(source) |
Born 18
May 1048; died 4 Dec 1131.
Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer. Khayyam, who was born at Nishapur (now in Iran), produced a work on algebra that was used as a textbook in Persia until this century. In geometry, he studied generalities of Euclid and contributed to the theory of parallel lines. Around 1074, he set up an observatory and led work on compiling astronomical tables, and also contributed to the reform of the Persian calendar. His contributions to other fields of science included developing methods for the accurate determination of specific gravity. He is known to English-speaking readers for his "quatrains" as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald, though it is now regarded as an anthology of which little or nothing may be by Omar. |
|
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| MAY 18 - DEATHS | |
| Pierre-Gilles de Gennes | |
(source) |
 Died
18 May 2007 (born 24 Oct 1932)
French physicist who was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for "discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers." He described mathematically how, for example, magnetic dipoles, long molecules or molecule chains can under certain conditions form ordered states, and what happens when they pass from an ordered to a disordered state. Such changes of order occur when, for example, a heated magnet changes from a state in which all the small atomic magnets are lined up in parallel to a disordered state in which the magnets are randomly oriented. Recently, he has been concerned with the physical chemistry of adhesion. |
| Henri Marie Laborit | |
| Died
18 May 1995 (born 21 Nov 1914)
French neurologist and discoverer of some of the earliest known tranquilizing drugs, including chlorpromazine. |
|
| Kasimir Fajans | |
(source) |
Died
18 May 1975 (born 27 May 1887)
Polish-American physical chemist who discovered the radioactive displacement law simultaneously with Frederick Soddy of Great Britain. According to this law, when a radioactive atom decays by emitting an alpha particle, the atomic number of the resulting atom is two fewer than that of the parent atom. He discovered several elements that are created through nuclear disintegration. The first discovery of protactinium was in 1913 by Kasimir Fajans and O. Göhring, who found the isotope protactinium-234m (half-life 1.2 min), a decay product of uranium-238; they named it brevium for its short life. (Protactinium-231 was later identified in 1918 by other scientists; the name protoactinium was adopted at this time.) |
| Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla | |
| Died
18 May 1940 (born 26 Jul 1859)
French engineer and early advocate of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Path
Between The Seas : The Creation of the Panama Canal,
by David McCullough. |
|
| Alphonse Laveran | |
 |
Died
18 May 1922 (born 18 Jun 1845)
French physician, pathologist, and parasitologist. As a French military surgeon in Algeria, he discovered the parasite that causes human malaria in the red blood cells. He founded the medical field of protozoology, doing important work on other protozoal diseases, including sleeping-sickness and kala-azar. For this he received the 1907 Nobel Prize for medicine. From 1896 he spent the rest of his life as a researcher the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1907, Laveran founded the Laboratory of Tropical Diseases at the Pasteur Institute and founded the Société de Pathologie Exotique in 1908.
(Photo credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library) |
| Eduard Adolf Strasburger | |
(source) |
Died
18 May 1912 (born 1 Feb 1844)
German plant cytologist who was to accurately describe the embryonic sac in gymnosperms (such as conifers) and angiosperms (flowering plants), along with demonstrating double-fertilization in angiosperms. He recognized that new cell nuclei can only result from the division of other nuclei and showed that the sperm and the egg have half the number of chromosomes found in body cells. He coined the terms cytoplasm for the fluid found in a cell and nucleoplasm (1882) for the fluid found in the nucleus. The upward movement of sap in trees was demonstrated by his research to be physical, rather than a physiological, process.« Strasburger's
Textbook of Botany, by Eduard Strasburger. |
| MAY 18 - EVENTS | |
| First Briton into space | |
In 1991, the first Briton into space, Helen Sharman, launched with two
cosmonauts in a Soyuz spacecraft. |
|
| Mount St. Helens | |
|
In 1980, following a weeklong series of earthquakes and smaller explosions
of ash and smoke, the long-dormant Mount St. Helens volcano erupted
in Washington state, U.S., hurling ash 15,000 feet into the air and setting
off mudslides and avalanches. The eruptions caused minimal damage in the
sparsely populated area, but about 400 people - mostly loggers and forest
rangers - were evacuated. The explosion was characterized as the equivalent
of 27,000 atomic bombs. The cloud of ash eventually circled the globe. |
|
| Apollo X launch | |
(source) |
In 1969, the Apollo 10 was launched to be a complete staging of
the Apollo 11 mission without actually landing on the Moon. The
mission
was the second to orbit the Moon and the first to travel to the Moon with
the entire Apollo spacecraft configuration. It made a successful eight-day
dress rehearsal for the first manned moon landing. Astronauts Thomas Stafford
and Eugene Cernan descended inside the Lunar Module to within 14 kilometers
of the lunar surface (achieving the closest approach to the Moon before
Apollo
11 landed two months later). Apollo 10 splashed down at
12:52 pm on 26 May, less than 4 miles (6.4 km) from the target point and
the recovery ship |
| Legalized human artificial insemination | |
|
In 1967, the first legalization of human artificial insemination in the
U.S. was enacted by the state of Oklahoma and signed this day by the governor.
It came a century after the first trials. The first recorded human impregnation
by means of artificial insemination in the U.S. was made in 1866. Dr. James
Marion Sims, gynecologist and chief of the Woman's Hospital, New York gave
over 54 such injections in 1866-67. |
|
| First atomic pile patent issued | |
|
In 1955, the highly classified patent
for the first atomic pile was finally issued - 13 years after it had been
started and nearly 11 years after it had been filed (No. 2,708,656). Work
on the initial patent application had begun six months before the reactor
was completed. Fermi and his team
of scientists at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory ushered
in the nuclear age when they achieved the world's first controlled, self-sustaining
nuclear chain reaction on 2 Dec
1942. Filed with the U.S. Patent Office in Dec 1944, the patent application
listed Fermi and Szilard as co-inventors
and described the method by which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction
had been achieved. By the time it was issued, Fermi had been dead for six
months. |
|
| Stonehenge | |
|
In 1952, Prof. Willard F. Libby
determined the age of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, England, at about
1848 BC (+/- 275 years) through analysis of the carbon-14 radioisotope
in charcoal remains excavated there there. Update of C-14 ceases when plants
or animals die, and the proportion in the organic remains steadily declines
through radioactive decay. Since the half-life of C-14 is about 5,600 years,
measurement of the remaining proportion in dead organic matter, indicates
the age of that sample. Astronomer Sir Joseph Norman
Lockyer had previously calculated that on Midsummer Day, 1680 BC, the
sun rose directly over a special marking notch that can still be seen on
the Heel Stone. Libby's measurements support that estimate.«
Stonehenge
and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered,
by Norman Lockyer. |
|
| Rotary dial telephone | |
|
In 1923, the first patent application on a rotary-dial telephone was submitted
in France by Antoine Barnay. |
|
| Panama Canal | |
|
In 1914, the first commercial cargo began its passage through the Panama
Canal. |
|
| Halley's Comet | |
|
In 1910, Halley's Comet was visible from Earth, moving across the face
of the sun. |
|
| Lawn mower | |
|
(source) |
In 1830, English mechanic Edwin Beard Budding (c.1796 - 1846), inventor
of the lawn mover, signed a manufacturing agreement with John Ferrabee,
Phoenix Iron Works, Stroud. Budding based his design on the helical cutting
blades he had seen on cylinders run over newly woven cloth to cut the pile
for a smooth finish. His patent (No. 5,990, 31 Aug 1830) described his
mower to replace hand scythes for "cropping or shearing the vegetable surface
of lawns, grass plats, and pleasure grounds." It had a cast iron frame
with a large roller that turned a series of cogs which rotated the blades.
Production was increased in 1832 by license to the agricultural manufacturer
Ransomes. Budding also invented the adjustable spanner.« |
| Glass engraving | |
|
In 1787, glass was engraved for the first time in Toulouse, France. |
|
