| JUNE 10 - BIRTHS | |
| Edward O. Wilson | |
(source) |
 Born 10
June 1929
Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist recognized as the world's leading authority on ants who has conducted extensive studies of the ecology and evolution of the ant. He has travelled the world studying ant populations, and he has discovered several new ant species. These currently number practically 9,000, but Wilson predicts that count will someday total nearly 20,000. He also estimates that within these species there are over a million billion individuals. In 1967, he co-published The Theory of Island Biogeography, a study of islands, which examines the relation between island size, the number of species contained, and their evolutionary balance. He is also active in sociobiology, a genetic study of social behaviour. |
| Pierre(-Maurice-Marie) Duhem | |
(source) |
Born 10
June 1861; died 14 Sep 1916.
French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science who emphasized a history of modern science based on evolutionary metaphysical concepts. He had a wide variety of mathematical interests from mechanics and physics to philosophy and the history of mathematics. Duhem studied magnetism following the work of Gibbs and Helmholtz and also worked on thermodynamics and hydrodynamics producing over 400 papers. He maintained that the role of theory in science is to systematize relationships rather than to interpret new phenomena. |
| Nikolaus August Otto | |
 |
Born 10
June 1832; died 26 Jan 1891.
German engineer who developed the four-stroke internal-combustion engine, which offered the first practical alternative to the steam engine as a power source. A French engineer, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, formulated the basic design for the four-stroke internal combustion engine and patented it in 1862, but never built a working model. In 1876, Otto used principles from Beau de Rochas and others to construct the prototype of today's automobile engines, often called the Otto-cycle engine. He sold thousands of copies before Beau de Rochas sued him and invalidated Otto's patent. But light, efficient Otto-cycle engines largely enabled the creation of automobiles, powerboats, motorcycles and even airplanes. |
| Henri-Philibert-Gaspard Darcy | |
(source) |
Born 10
June 1803; died 3 Jan 1858.
French hydraulic engineer who first derived the equation (now known as Darcy's law) that governs the laminar (nonturbulent) flow of fluids in homogeneous, porous media. In 1856, modern studies of groundwater began when Darcy was commissioned to develop a water-purification system for the city of Dijon, France. He constructed the first experimental apparatus to study the flow characteristics of water through the earth. From his experiments, he derived the Darcy's Law equation, describing the flow of water in nature, which is fundamental to understanding groundwater systems. He performed extensive tests on filtration and pipe resistance. He initiated the open-channel studies carried out by Bazin. |
| Chauncey Jerome | |
(source) |
Born 10
June 1793; died 20 Apr 1868.
American inventor and clockmaker whose products enjoyed widespread popularity in the mid-19th century. About 1838 Jerome invented the one-day brass movement, an improvement over the wood clock. Applying the mass-production techniques of American inventor Eli Whitney, Jerome flooded the United States with low-priced brass clocks. His clocks quickly spread to Europe and so astonished the English that "Yankee ingenuity" became a byword. In the 1850s Jerome became associated with unethical businessmen, and his company failed; he died in poverty. |
| John Morgan | |
 |
Born 10
June 1735; died 15 Oct 1789.
American pioneer of U.S. medical education, surgeon general of the Continental armies during the U.S. War of Independence, and founder of the United States' first medical school - the College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) in 1765. He joined the faculty and wrote his influential Discourse upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America (1765). In 1775, after the American Revolution had started, Congress appointed him medical director of the hospitals and chief physician of the colonial army. Morgan insisted upon such high standards and reforms in the medical department that his subordinates rebelled and forced him from office. He was later exonerated by George Washington, but never completely recovered, dying in poverty ten years later. |
| James Short | |
(source) |
Born 10
June 1710; died 14 Jun 1768.
British optician and astronomer who produced the first truly parabolic and elliptic (hence nearly distortionless) mirrors for reflecting telescopes. During his working life of over 35 years, Short made about 1,360 instruments - not only for customers in Britain but also for export: one is still preserved in Leningrad, another at Uppsala and several in America. Short was principal British collator and computer of the Transit of Venus observations made throughout the world on 6th June 1761. His instruments travelled on Endeavour with Captain Cook to observe the next Transit of Venus on 3rd June 1769, but Short died before this event took place. [Image: .Binocular Gregorian telescope by James Short, c. 1765, focal length 9.5 inches. Tubes numbered 275/1307 and 276/1308. The 275 and 276 are the numbers made of this focal length, and 1307 and 1308 are the total number of telescopes he made.] |
| John Dollond | |
(source) |
Born 10
June 1706; died 30 Nov 1761.
British maker of optical and astronomical instruments who developed (1758) and patented an achromatic (non- colour- distorting) refracting telescope and a practical heliometer, a telescope used to measure the Sun's diameter and the angles between celestial bodies. In the 1730's, Chester More Hall, an attorney with an interest in telescopes, first discovered that flint glass appeared to have a greater color dispersion than crown glass did at the same magnifications. Hall reasoned that if he cemented the concave face of a flint glass lens to the convex face of a crown glass lens, he could remove the dispersion properties (and thus, chromatic aberration) from both lenses simultaneously. Dollond learned of the technique in the 1750's and developed it. |
|
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| JUNE 10 - DEATHS | |
| Otto Heinrich Schindewolf | |
 Died
10 June 1971 (born 7 June 1896)
German paleontologist, known for his research on corals and cephalopods. He was an anti-Darwinist, who advocated a cataclysmic theory of evolution to explain the origin of the higher taxonomic categories. Studying different fossil species of coral and ammonites obtained from sequential geological strata, he concluded that the most recent taxonomic categories could not have arisen by slow, intermediate steps, generally thought to characterize evolution, but rather by large, single transformations. Though his views are not accepted by many biologists, particularly the population geneticists, who consider them too controversial, he has drawn attention to fundamental problems in evolution. |
|
| Filippo Silvestri | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1949 (born 22 Jun 1873)
Italian entomologist, best remembered for his pioneering work in polyembryony, the development of more than one individual from a single fertilized egg cell. During the late 1930s Silvestri discovered that this type of reproduction occurs in the insect species Litomatix truncatellus. His finding, resulting from a close analysis of the reproductive stages, cell division, and egg structure of these parasitic hymenopterans, attracted the attention of many biologists because of its implications for the nature of the egg and the causes of multiple generation. He also studied the morphology and biology of the Termitidae, the most highly evolved family of termites. He also made a comparative study of the form and structure of the millipede and the centipede. |
| Mary Putnam Jacobi | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1906 (born 31 Aug 1842)
(née Mary Corinna Putnam) American physician, well-respected for her medical abilities, who advocated social reform to expand educational opportunities for women by providing the same training and clinical practice as men. She was awarded Harvard University's Boylston Prize for her 1876 essay, The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation. In this work, she refuted allegations of the physical limitations of women, such as published by Dr. Edward H. Clarke's in Sex in Education (1873). She supported her position with scientific data including sphygmographic tracings of pulse rate, force, and variations to confirm that a woman maintained vigorous health throughout her monthly cycle. Jacobi became the first female member of the Academy of Medicine.« |
| Willy Kühne | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1900 (born 28 Mar 1837)
Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne was a German physiologist known for his researches on vision and the chemical changes occurring in the retina under the influence of light. His original work falls into two main groups—the physiology of muscle and nerve, which occupied the earlier years of his life, and the chemistry of digestion, which he began to investigate while at Berlin with Virchow. He was proposed the word enzyme meaning "in yeast" (1878), and he isolated trypsin from pancreatic juice. He demonstrated usefulness of cytophysiological investigations for solving problems of general physiology. He devised an "artificial eye," discovered the light sensitive "visual purple" in the retina and was first to perceive migrating pigments in the living retina (1877-78). |
| Luigi Cremona | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1903 (born 7 Dec 1830)
(Antonio) Luigi (Gaudenzio Giuseppe) Cremona was an Italian mathematician who was an originator of graphical statics (the use of graphical methods to study forces in equilibrium) and work in projective geometry. Cremona's work in statics is of great importance and he gave, in a clearer form, some theorems due to Maxwell. In a paper of 1872 Cremona took an idea of Maxwell's on forces in frame structures that had appeared in an engineering journal in 1867 and interpreted Maxwell's notion of reciprocal figures as duality in projective 3-space. These reciprocal figures, for example, have three forces in equilibrium in one figure represented by a triangle while in the reciprocal figure they are represented by three concurrent lines. |
| Robert Brown | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1858 (born 21 Dec 1773)
Scottish botanist who was an outsatanding authority on plant physiology in his day. improved the natural classification of plants by establishing and defining new families and genera, but is best known for being the first to notice the natural continuous movement of minute particles in colloidal solution (1828), since known as Brownian movement. Later scientists recognized that this gives direct evidence of molecular motion in liquids, and links to the kinetic theory of gases. Brown established the distinction (1826) between what became known as the conifers (gymnosperms) and the flowering plants (angiosperms). He recognized the general occurence in living cells of a structure for which he coined the name nucleus (Latin: "little nut").« |
| André-Marie Ampère | |
(source) |
Died
10 June 1836 (born 22 Jan 1775)
French mathematician and physicist who founded and named the science of electrodynamics, now known as electromagnetism. His interests included mathematics, metaphysics, physics and chemistry. In mathematics he worked on partial differential equations. Ampère made significant contributions to chemistry. In 1811 he suggested that an anhydrous acid prepared two years earlier was a compound of hydrogen with an unknown element, analogous to chlorine, for which he suggested the name fluorine. He produced a classification of elements in 1816. Ampère also worked on the wave theory of light. By the early 1820's, Ampère was working on a combined theory of electricity and magnetism, after hearing about Oersted's experiments. |
| JUNE 10 - EVENTS | |
| Millenium Bridge | |
In 2000, the Millenium Bridge - a footbridge across the River Thames -
was opened by Queen Elizabeth. The radical new design was the work of architect
Sir Norman Foster with sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and engineering support
from Arup. It was the first new crossing of the River Thames in over 100.
As the first few thousand people crossed the bridge, it developed an unexpected
and potentially dangerous lateral "wobble". This caused people to unwittingly
walk "in step", which increased the oscillation. The design had been adapted
from a computer model typical for a car bridge, but which did not take
into account the lateral forces associated with human walking. After structural
damping was added to stop the oscillation, the bridge re-opened in 2002.« |
|
| Virus separation | |
(source) |
In 1955, the first U.S. report was made of the separation of a virus into
component parts. This work was performed on the tobacco virus, which furthermore
could be reconstructed
from those parts to produce a material as effective as the virus in its
original form in producing disease in tabacco and other plants. They demonstrated
that tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) spontaneously formed when mixtures of purified
coat protein and its genomic RNA were incubated together, i.e. the structure
that TMV adopts is self-ordered and corresponds to a free energy minimum.
The report covered the research work of Drs. Heinz L. Fraenkel-Conrat
and Robley Williams at the Virus Laboratory of the University of California
at Berkeley. |
| Gas turbine bus | |
|
In 1954, General Motors announced their GM Turbocruiser, a modifed GMC
coach powered by a gas turbine, had been built by their research staff
and its test runs already exceeded a total of 2,000 miles. The engine consisted
of a single burner with two turbine wheels. While one turbine wheel was
used to drive the centrifugal compressor, the second delivered power for
the transmission to the rear wheels of the vehicle |
|
| Mylar | |
 |
In 1952, Mylar®
was registered as a DuPont trademark for an extraordinarily strong polyester
film that grew out of the development of Dacron® in the early
1950s. During the 1960s its superior strength steadily replaced cellophane
because of its its superior strength, heat resistance, and excellent insulating
properties. The unique qualities of the film made new consumer markets
in magnetic audio and video tape, capacitor dielectrics, packaging and
batteries possible. By the 1970s, it become DuPont’s best-selling film,
despite mounting competition. It is also used as food wrap, for balloons,
and by instrument manufacturers to produce high-quality drumheads. |
| Ball point pen | |
|
In 1943, the ball point pen was patented by Laslo Biro. He had invented
the pen with quick-drying ink in 1938 while Biro was a journalist in Budapest,
Hungary, where he was also a sculptor and hypnotist. Biro escaped the Nazis
by travelling via Paris to Argentina in 1940. There, Englishman Henry Martin,
in Buenos Aires on a mission for the British government, saw the invention
and recognized its value for air crews making high altitude navigational
calculations. This new type of pen would write blot-free, unaffected by
low or changing atmospheric pressure. Martin aquired the rights and began
small scale production of ballpoint pens for the RAF. Commerical
production under Biro's patents began in 1945 by the Eterpen Co in Buenos
Aires. |
|
| Artificial lightning | |
|
In 1932, artificial lightning using 10 million volts of electricity was
demonstrated in the U.S. by the General Electric Company at Pittsfield,
Mass. This was twice the previous maximum voltage produced in a laboratory. |
|
| Electrical stethoscope | |
|
In 1924, the first U.S. portable electrical stethoscope was demonstrated
in Chicago, Ill. to amplify the sounds of the human body. It was designed
by the Western Electric Co. with Bell System engineers and physiologist
Dr. Horatio B. Williams. It was subsequently maketed in Oct 1925. |
|
| Air brake | |
(source) |
In 1902, An "Automatic Air Brake" patent was issued to black American inventor
Granville
T. Woods (U.S. No. 701,981), which was an important safety device for
the railroads.
The
Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity,
by Patricia Carter Sluby. |
| Window envelope | |
(USPTO) |
In 1902, the first U.S. patent for a window envelope was issued to Americus
F. Callahan of Chicago, Ill., which he called the outlook envelope (U.S.
No. 701,839). He leased the patent to the Envelope company of Springfield,
Mass., which began its manufacture in Jul 1902. This style of envelope
was able to save expense of printing or labour of addressing, and in addition
save time in preparing the message for dispatch when the customary addresses
are already on the letter paper itself. |
| Grass catcher | |
(USPTO) |
In 1890, black American inventor Daniel Johnson received a patent for "Grass
Receivers for Lawn Mowers" (U.S. No. 429,629). This was an improvement
on the inventor's own earlier patent application. It consists of a means
for suspending the receiver from the mower-handle and enabling the weight
of the receiver to be equally distributed. The side of the receiver is
covered with woven wire netting. For the purpose of dumping the contents
of the receiver, a sliding bottom is provided, operated with a foot stirrup.
The patent application was signed by Daniel Johnson making his X mark with
two witnesses adding their signatures.
The
Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity,
by Patricia Carter Sluby. |
| Frozen food | |
 |
In 1869, machine-frozen food was transported a significant distance in
the U.S. for the first time. A shipment of frozen Texas beef had been processed
by refrigeration equipment invented by John Gorrie, and delivered by the
steamship Agnes in New Orleans, La. The meat was served in meals
at hospitals, and celebration banquiets at hotels and restaurants. This
was an irony, for John Gorrie had unsuccessfully sought financial support
to develop his invention in New Orleans and had died shortly thereafter
in 1855. |
| Curved space | |
(source) |
In 1854, G.F. Bernhard Riemann
proposed that space is curved in a lecture
titled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.
He described the old-fashioned Euclidean plane geometry and solid geometry,
respectively, as two-, and three-dimensional examples of what we now call
Riemann spaces with zero curvature. Saying that the space is curved, rather
than flat or Euclidean, is another way saying that the familiar properties
of Euclidean geometry - such as the Pythagorean theorem - do not hold.
He went on to suggest that all physical laws become simpler when expressed
in higher dimensions. Einstein in 1915 used Rieman’s work in his theory
of General Relativity which incorporated time as the fourth dimension. |
| Wheatstone telegraph | |
|
In 1837, the electric "Five Needle Telegraph" was patented in London (U.K.
No. 7390) by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke. The instrument
required six wires between each of its stations. In the Wheatstone system,
letters on a board were indicated by the deflection of 5 needles, and a
calling device was incorporated to draw attention to the observer. They
were granted a patent in the U.S. 10 days before Morse received his, but
Morse was given priority as the first inventor. The Morse patent described
a prototype of his famous dot-dash code. However, Wheatstone and Cooke
had the priority in the U.K. Their telegraph had no means of recording
messages, which Morse regarded as a great disadvantage. |
|
| Steamboat | |
John Stevens (source) |
In 1809, the Phoenix
paddle wheel steamboat
took 13 days to sail from New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It was the first steamboat to navigate the open seas. This was John
Stevens' first commercial steamboat,
100-ft long, built at Hoboken, N.J. Because of the Fulton monopoly in Jersey-New
York waters, the Phoenix went to Philadelphia. There, it began to
run to Bordentown in 1809, becoming a link in the fast stage-coach and
boat service connecting New York and Philadelphia. [Image
top R: The steamboat Phoenix (source)] |
