| JUNE 18 - BIRTHS | |
| Dudley R. Herschbach | |
(credit) |
 Born 18
Jun 1932.
American chemist and educator who shared (with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi) the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986. He pioneered the use of molecular beams to elucidate the processes of chemical reactions. This study of reaction dynamics details the sequence of events and energy states of the atoms and molecules.  |
| Allan Rex Sandage | |
(credit) |
Born 18
Jun 1926.
U.S. astronomer who (with Thomas A. Matthews) discovered, in 1960, the first optical identification of a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar), a starlike object that is a strong emitter of radio waves. Although a strange source of radio emission, in visible light, it looked like a faint star. Yet this object was emitting more intense radio waves and ultraviolet radiation than a typical star. |
| Jerome Karle | |
|
Born 18
Jun 1918
Jerome Karle joined the staff of the Naval Research Laboratory in 1946, becoming their chief scientist for the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter in 1968. With Herbert A. Hauptman, he developed a "direct method" to make X-ray crystal diffraction measurements. This made possible the determination of such 3D crystal structures as hormone, vitamin and antibiotic molecules. Their important work earned the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. |
| Alexander Wetmore | |
|
Born 18
Jun 1886; died 7 Dec 1978.
American Frank Alexander Wetmore, whose first name was never used, became a prominent ornithologist and avian paleontologist, noted for his research on birds of the Western Hemisphere. Between 1910 and 1924, he worked for with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, Department of Agriculture. In 1925, he was appointed Assistant Secretary, head of the Smithsonian's U.S. National Museum. From 1945 to 1952, he served as the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Upon retiring, he continued his research at the Smithsonian Institution for another quarter century. |
| F.A.F.C. Went | |
|
Born 18
Jun 1863.
F. A. F. C. Went, was professor of botany and director of the Botanical Garden at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands where he initiated the study of plant hormones and advanced the study of botany in the Netherlands. With a modern, well-equipped laboratory of botany, he attracted a great many visitors from all over the world, many of them famous in their own right. His son, Frits Warmolt Went followed in his footsteps researching plant hormones, and became well-known for studying and naming auxins. |
| Alphonse Laveran | |
 |
Born 18
Jun 1845; died 18 May 1922.
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 at 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) |
| William Lassell | |
|
Born 18
Jun 1799; died 5 Oct 1880.
William Lassell was a wealthy amateur English astronomer. He set up an observatory at Starfield, near Liverpool. England, He built his own 24" diameter telescope, and devised steam-driven equipment for grinding an polishing the speculum metal mirror. This telescope was the first of its size to be mounted "equitorially" to allow easy tracking of the stars. He discovered Triton, a moon of Neptune, and Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus. Later, Lassell built a 48" diameter telescope with th same design and took it to Malta for observations with clearer skies. |
| JUNE 18 - DEATHS | |
| Paul Karrer | |
(source) |
 Died
18 Jun 1971 (born 21 Apr 1889)
Swiss chemist who investigated the constitution of carotenoids, flavins, and vitamins A and B2, for which he shared the 1937 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (with Sir Norman Haworth of Great Britain). He studied plant pigments, particularly the yellow carotenoids, which are related to the pigment in carrots. He determined the chemical structure of the carotenoids (1930), showed that some of these substances are transformed into vitamin A in the animal body, then determined the structure of vitamin A itself. He also confirmed the constitution of vitamin C proposed by Albert Szent-Györgyi, showed lactoflavin to be part of the complex originally described as vitamin B2 , and studied vitamin E. |
| Harry Fielding Reid | |
(source) |
Died
18 Jun 1944 (born 18 May 1859)
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. |
| Florence Bascom | |
|
Died
18 Jun 1945 (born14 Jul 1862)
Florence Bascom was an American geologist and teacher. She was the first woman to receive a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Two years later she launched the geology department at Bryn Mawr. Bascom was the first woman to work as a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and to be made a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Bascom was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy, and petrography. She is known for inventing techniques that used microscopic analysis in the study of the oil-bearing rocks. She died at age 82. |
| Arthur Edwin Kennelly | |
(source) |
Died 18 Jun 1939 (born 17 Dec 1861)
Irish-American electrical engineer who was a prominent contributor to the science of electrical engineering. For six years he worked for Thomas Edison at West Orange Laboratory, then branched out as a consultant. Upon his co-discovery (with Oliver Heaviside) of the radio reflecting properties of the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere, the stratum was called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. |
| Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn | |
1908 (source) |
Died
18 Jun 1922 (born 19 Jan 1851)
Dutch astronomer who used photography and statistical methods in determining the motions and spatial distribution of stars. Such work was the first major step after the works of William and John Herschel. He tried to solve the questions of space density of stars as a function of distance from the sun, and the distribution of starts according to brightness per unit volume. Some of his results had lasting value, but some were superceded because he had failed to account for the interstellar absorption. In studies using proper motion to determine stellar distances, he discovered stellar motions are not random, as previously thought, but that stars move in two "star streams" (1904). He introduced absolute magnitude and colour index as standard concepts. |
| Per Teodor Cleve | |
 |
Died
18 Jun 1905 (born 10 Feb 1840)
Swedish chemist and geologist who discovered the elements holmium and thulium. He was the thirteenth child in his family. In 1874, Cleve concluded that didymium was in fact two elements (this was proved in 1885 and the two elements named neodymium and praseodymium.) In 1879, he showed that scandium (discovered by Lars Nilson), was in fact the eka-boron predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev in his periodic table. Also in 1879, working with a sample of erbia that had all traces of scandia and ytterbia removed, he found two new earths, which he named holmium, after Stockholm, and thulium, after the old name for Scandinavia. (Holmium, too was a mixture. In 1886, Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered that it contained the new element dysprosium.) |
| JUNE 18 - EVENTS | |
| Solar neutrino count | |
(source) |
In 2001, the result of experiments counting previously undetected, but
theoretically predicted,
solar neutrinos was announced
by a collaboration of Canadian, American and British scientists led by
Arthur McDonald. They detected
all three types of solar neutrinos (electron, muon and tau), using the
SNO
(Solar Neutrino Observatory) consisting of 9,456 photomultiplier tubes
lining a stainless steel tank containing 1,000 tons of heavy water (D2O)
6800-ft deep in a nickel mine at Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The combined
results agreed with the total flux calculated using the standard computer
model of the Sun, thus finally confirming the long-standing theory accounting
for the various nuclear reactions taking place within the Sun.« [Image:
external view of the SNO's photomultiplier array during detector construction.] |
| Killer bee | |
|
In 1993, the first lab test was released in Arizona confirming a bee involved
in a fatal on attack on a small dog at a Tucson home was an Africanized
honey bee. Because of their more intense defensive swarming behaviour,
such non-native bees earned the name "killer bee" in the media. Arizona
was the second state to be invaded, less than three years after this species
spread north into Texas from Mexico. Since the fifties, the bees had extended
their range northward through Central America. Their original source was
from cross-breeding with tropical African bees imported into Brazil for
experimental work. |
| First American woman in space | |
 |
In 1983, at 7:33 am EDT, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched
on its own second flight. This was the seventh shuttle mission, and the
first to carry a woman crew member. Sally
K. Ride, mission specialist, became America's first woman in space.
During the mission, two communications satellites deployed (ANIK C-2 for
TELESAT Canada and PALAPA-B1 for Indonesia). Canisters in the cargo bay
held variety of experiments including ones studying effects of space on
social behavior of ant colony in zero gravity. Ten experiments mounted
on Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS-01) performed research in forming metal
alloys in microgravity and use of remote sensing scanner. |
| First genetically engineered vaccine | |
(source) |
In 1981, the first genetically engineered vaccine was announced: the first
effective subunit vaccine for any animal or human disease using gene splicing.
It was designed
to prevent hoof and mouth disease
(FMD). The work was done by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture scientists
who by 1975 had discovered that injection of VP3 (a protein derived
from a portion of the coating of FMD virus) confers immunity to the disease.
In 1980, the USDA team turned to recombinant DNA technology, and collaborated
with scientists from Genentech, a private company. They inserted a bioengineered
plasmid containing the gene for VP3 into Escherichia coli bacteria
which grew obeying orders from the guest DNA, mass-producing the VP3 proteins
for the vaccine. |
| First Large Solid Fuel Rocket | |
 |
In 1965, the first large solid-fuel rocket - a Titan 3C - rocket was launched
into orbit. Compared to a liquid-propellant rocket, a solid-propellant
rocket has fewer parts, simpler construction, is safer and more reliable,
and yet it can develop greater power (thrust) than a liquid-propellant
rocket of the same size. Many military and NASA payloads have been put
into orbit with the generations of this launch vehicle family. |
| Rolls Royce | |
|
In 1935, the Rolls Royce trademark was registered in the U.S. |
|
| Amelia Earhart Flies Atlantic | |
|
In 1928, aviator Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the
Atlantic Ocean. She had accepted the invitation of the American pilots
Wilmer Stultz (1900-29) and Louis Gordon to join them on the transatlantic
flight. The crossing from Newfoundland to Wales took about 21 hours. Amelia
Earhart went on to establish herself as a respected role model, tirelessly
demonstrating that young women were as capable as men in succeeding in
their chosen vocations. In 1935 she crossed the Atlantic solo in record
time: 13 hr 30 min. |
| Mercury lamp | |
|
In 1912, a patent was issued for a mercury vapor lamp to Peter Hewitt (U.S.
No. 1,030178). |
|
| Children's carriage patent | |
|
In 1889, black American inventor W.H. Richardson was issued two patents
for a "Child's Carriage" (U.S. Nos. 405,599 - 600) In 1886, he had already
also patented a "Cotton Chopper".
The
Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity,
by Patricia Carter Sluby. |
|
| Moon | |
|
In 1178, about an hour after sunset - as chronicled
by the English monk, Gervase of Canterbury - a band of five eyewitnesses
watched
as the upper horn of the bright, new crescent Moon "suddenly split in two.
From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out...
fire, hot coals and sparks... The body of the moon, which was below writhed...
throbbed like a wounded snake." In 1976, a geologist suggested that this
was consistent with the location and age of the 22-km lunar crater Giordano
Bruno. However, such asteroid impact would have ejected debris causing
an astonishing meteor shower, which was never reported. Now the sighting
of 1178 is attributed to perhaps an exploding meteor that just happened
to line up with their view of the Moon. |
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