| JULY 22 - BIRTHS | |
| Edward Farber | |
 Born 22
July 1914; died 22 Jan 1982
Edward (Rolke) Farber was an American who invented a portable, battery-operated stroboscopic flash unit for still cameras (1937) that effectively "stopped action." He began his career as a photojournalist on the staff of the Milwaukee Journal. After studying electrical engineering at Northwestern University, Farber went on to design flash equipment for the U.S. Army during World War II, and then established his own electronic-flash manufacturing firm. He was a good friend and collaborator of Harold Edgerton and developed the first practical portable strobe flash for news photographers. In 1942, the Milwaukee Journal became the first newspaper to furnish all of its photographers with the portable flash. Weighing only 13.5 pounds, it was a considerable improvement over the 90-pound units photographers used prior to Farber's invention. He sold his Strobe Research firm in 1954. He was a photographic adviser to the U.S. Government during its intercontinental ballistic missile testing program in the late 1950's. |
|
| Alexander Calder | |
(source) |
Born 22 July 1898; died 11 Nov 1976
Alexander (Stirling) Calder, born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, a U.S. sculptor and painter best known as the originator of the mobile, a kinetic sculpture constructed with delicately balanced or suspended components. The sculpture will respond to air currents, or sometimes powered with a motor. He began to make mobiles when he spent time abroad, living in Paris (1931-33). By contrast, Calder's stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus. Image (right): mobile of 1934. |
| Kirk Bryan | |
(source) |
Born 22
July 1888; died 22 Aug 1950.
American geologist and geomorphologist who pioneered in explaining the forces that molded the present landforms of arid climates. Through his studies inhydrology, Bryan became an authority on the geology of water conservation and dam sites, and on several occasions served as consultant to the Mexican government on the construction of dams and reservoirs for reclamation projects. In 1923-25, Bryan served as geologist on archaeological expeditions in the Chaco Canyon area of New Mexico where he applied geological research as an aid to archaeological and anthropological investigation. His correlations of alluviums, cave deposits bearing artifacts, moraines, and till helped establish the antiquity of man in North America. |
| Selman Waksman | |
(source) |
Born 22
July 1888; died 16 Aug 1973
Selman Abraham Waksman, was a Ukrainian-born (Priluka) American biochemist who was one of the world's foremost authorities on soil microbiology. After the discovery of penicillin, he played a major role in initiating a calculated, systematic search for antibiotics among microbes. In 1939, Dubos, a previous student pointed out a bacteria-killing agent in a soil microorganism. He introduced the term antibiotic, "against life." In 1943, he isolated streptomycin from a mold he had known and studied early in his life. His consequent discovery of this antibiotic streptomycin, the first specific antibiotic effective against tuberculosis, earned him the 1952 Nobel Prize. |
| Gustav Hertz | |
(source) |
Born 22
July 1887; died 30 Oct 1975.
German quantum physicist who, with James Franck, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 for the Franck-Hertz experiment, which confirmed the quantum theory that energy can be absorbed by an atom only in definite amounts and provided an important confirmation of the Bohr atomic model. He was a nephew of Heinrich Hertz. Although he fought on the German side in World War I, being of Jewish descent, he was forced to resign his professorship (1934) when Hitler took power. From 1945 he worked in the Soviet Union, and then in 1955 was a professor of physics in Leipzig, East Germany. |
| Gregor Mendel | |
1862 (source) |
Born 22
July 1822; died 6 Jan 1884.
Original name (until 1843) Johann Mendel. Austrian pioneer in the study of heredity. He spent his adult life with the Augustinian monastery in Brunn, where as a geneticist, botanist and plant experimenter, he was the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism. Over the period 1856-63, Mendel grew and analyzed over 28,000 pea plants. He carefully studied for each their plant height, pod shape, pod color, flower position, seed color, seed shape and flower color. He made two very important generalizations from his pea experiments, known today as the Laws of Heredity. Mendel coined the present day terms in genetics: recessiveness and dominance. |
| Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel | |
(source) |
Born 22
July 1784; died 17 Mar 1846.
German astronomer. In 1809, at the age of 26, Bessel was appointed director of Frederick William III of Prussia's new Königsberg Observatory and professor of astronomy, where he spent the rest of his career. His monumental task was determining the positions and proper motions for about 50,000 stars, which allowed the first accurate determination of interstellar distances. Bessel's work in determining the constants of precession, nutation and aberration won him further honors. Other than the sun, he was the first to measure the distance of a star, by parallax, of 61 Cygni (1838). In mathematical analysis, he is known for his Bessel function. |
| James Geddes | |
Lockport on Erie Canal(source) |
Born 22
July 1763; died 19 Aug 1838.
Civil engineer, lawyer and politician, born in Pennsylvania but moved to New York state in 1794. The New York State Legislature introduced a bill to fund a feasibility study for a New York State canal, and retained Judge James Geddes (1808) survey routes across the state, east to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. On 20 Jan 1809, Geddes recommended a Hudson-Erie route to the State legislature. Funding was delayed, but construction on the Erie Canal began on 4 Jul 1817. Taking eight years to complete, it is one of the first great engineering works in North America. Close to 1,000 Erie Canal workers died of malaria in the swamps. Geddes also consulted on canal routes for Ohio. |
| Pierre Lyonnet | |
(source) |
Born 22
July 1708; died 10 Oct 1789
Dutch naturalist and engraver who skillfully dissected insects and made detailed illustrations of their anatomy. He also had a career as an official codebreaker. In 1738 he entered the service of the States General as an administrator of secret expenses and as a code-clerk. In his leisure he turned to natural history. He believed that nature was a cipher that could be interpreted by tracing every detail of its perfect design. He designed a simple microscope which had each lens suspended at the end of a series of ball and socket joints over a small mahogony dissecting table mounted on a post above a wooden base with small drawers containing his instruments. After preparing engravings for several books written by others, he produced his own treatises.« [Other sources list his birth year as 1706 and others as 1707.] |
| JULY 22 - DEATHS | |
| Sir Mortimer Wheeler | |
(source) |
 Died
22 July 1976 (born 10 Sep 1890)
Sir (Robert Eric) Mortimer Wheeler was a Scottish archaeologist, born in Glasgow, who was a great popularizer for his subject, particularly on TV. His notable excavations in Britain were at Verulamium (St Albans) and Maiden Castle. While director-general of archaeology in India (1944-7), he was most active at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. His particular excavation method was the 'Wheeler' box trench system. Returning to London, he became professor of the archaeology of the Roman provinces at the newly founded Institute of Archaeology (1948-55) and was knighted in 1952. His books include Archaeology from the Earth (1954) and the autobiographical Still Digging (1955). |
| Ernest Brown | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1938 (born 29 Nov 1866)
Ernest (William) Brown was a British astronomer who devoted his career to the theory of the Moon's motion and constructing accurate lunar tables. His theory took account of "the gravitational action of every particle of matter which can have a sensible effect on the Moon's motion," some 1500 terms. He then determined the numerical values of the constants by analyzing 150 years of Greenwich observations, and computed tables accurate to 0.01 arcsec. After 30 years of work, Brown published his lunar tables Tables of the Motion of the Moon in 1919. In 1926 Brown published a paper in which he ascribed fluctuations in the Moon's motion to irregular changes in the Earth's period of rotation, which has subsequently proved correct. |
| Reginald Fessenden | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1932 (born 6 Oct 1866)
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was a Canadian inventor and engineer with 300 patents. He broadcast the first program of voice and music. In 1893, Fessenden moved to Pittsburgh as the head of electrical engineering at the university, Fessenden read of Marconi's work and began experimenting himself. Marconi could only transmit Morse code. But Fessenden's goal was to transmit the human voice and music. He invented the "continuous wave": sound superimposed onto a radio wave for transmission. A radio receiver extracts the signal so the listener with the original sound. Fessenden made the first long-range transmissions of voice on Christmas Eve 1906 from a station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, heard hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. |
| Sir Sandford Fleming | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1915 (born 7 Jan 1827)
Scottish surveyor and leading railway engineer who divided world into time zones. He emigrated at age 17 years to Quebec, Canada, on April 24, 1845, as a surveyor. Later became one of the foremost railway engineers of his time. While in charge of the initial survey for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the first Canadian railway to span the continent, he realized the problems of coordinating such a long railway. This lead him to the idea of time zones, which contribution to the adoption of the present system of time zones earned him the title of "Father of Standard Time." Fleming also designed the first Canadian postage stamp. Issued in 1851, it cost three pennies and depicted the beaver, now the national animal of Canada. |
| John A. Roebling | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1869 (born 12 Jun 1806)
German-American engineer who pioneered the design and construction of suspension bridges. In 1831 he immigrated to Saxonburg, near Pittsburgh, Pa., and shortly thereafter was employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad Corp. to survey its route across the Allegheny Mountains. He then demonstrated the practicability of steel cables in bridge construction and in 1841 established at Saxonburg the first U.S. factory to manufacture steel-wire rope. Roebling utilized steel cables in the construction of numerous suspension bridges including a railroad suspension bridge over the Niagara River at Niagara Falls (1851-55). He designed the Brooklyn Bridge. He died from injuries while supervising preliminary construction operations.  Builders
of the Bridge: The Story of John Roebling and His Son,
by David Barnard Steinman. |
| Giuseppe Piazzi | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1826 (16 Jul 1746)
Italian astronomer and author, born in Valtellina, discovered the first asteroid - Ceres. He established an observatory at Palermo and mapped the positions of 7,646 stars. He also discovered that the star 61 Cygni had a large Proper Motion , which led Bessel to chose it as the object of his parallax studies. He discovered Ceres in 1801, but was able to make only three observations. Fortuitously, Gauss had recently developed mathematical techniques that allowed the orbit to be calculated. This was the first asteroid discovered. The thousandth Asteroid discovered was named Piazzia in his honor. |
| George Shaw | |
(source) |
Died 22 July 1813 (born 10 Dec 1751)
George Shaw was a naturalist and an anatomist. In 1792, at the Royal Zoological Society in London, he received and was the first to preserve and classify an Australian echidna specimen. Spines and hair on the animal suggested a new genus of porcupine. But it was "captured in New Holland on an anthill," had a naked, elongated snout and long, cylindrical tongue. Thus, he mistakenly classified it in the taxonomic scheme as related to the South American ant bear. What had he missed? Not until 1884 was there verification (of the observations passed on from native aboriginal Australians many decades before) that this mammal laid eggs! |
| Jean Senebier | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1809 (born 6 May 1742)
Swiss naturalist and botanist who demonstrated that green plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of light. In 1788, Jean Senebier, in his Expériences sur l'action de la lumière solaire dans la végétation established the relationship between the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the production of oxygen by plants. His studies built on the work of Ingenhousz who showed that plants produce oxygen in sunlight and carbon dioxide in darkness. Neither scientist fully understood the puzzle of photosynthesis, but they provided steps to the solution by others after them. |
| Xavier Bichat | |
(source) |
Died
22 July 1802 (born 14 Nov 1771)
(Marie François) Xavier Bichat was a was a young French physician who was the first to investigate the body's organs as a complex of simpler structures. He made hundreds of post-mortem examinations, with an unaided eye, noting the effect of disease on the organs. Even before knowledge of the cell as the functional unit of living things, he was among the first to visualize the organs of the body as being formed through the differentiation of simple, functional units. For these, typically thin layers that make up the organs, he coined the term "tissues" and identified 21 types in his book General Anatomy (1800). He died young, at age 30, after fainting and falling down the steps in his laboratory. « |
| JULY 22 - EVENTS | |
| Shoemaker-Levy comet | |
(source) |
In 1994, the last of the large fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy strikes
Jupiter (Fragment W). This image of the collision of comet fragment W consists
of one frame taken within the 7-second period that the impact was visible
to Galileo. Enhanced, it shows a bright point about 44 degrees south latitude
on the far side of Jupiter from the Earth. The frame was obtained at 8:06
UT on July 22, 1994, with Galileo at a distance of about 150 million miles
from Jupiter. |
| Young pilot | |
(source) |
In 1989, the youngest pilot to fly around the world, 11 year old (4th grade)
Tony Aliengena, returned to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, CA, nearly
seven weeks and 21,567 miles after taking off in a Cessna 210 Centurion.
The around-the-world
trip had included good will stops in the Soviet Union. The plane crashed
while trying to take off from Alaska while the boy's father was at the
controls, giving his son a rest. There were no serious injuries, and the
journey was completed. Early the previous year, while still age 9 years,
he was the youngest pilot to cross the continental U.S. |
| Round-the-world solo helicopter flight | |
(source) |
In 1983, Dick Smith makes the first solo helicopter flight around the world,
taking a leisurely 11 months. The previous year, Ross Perot, Jr. with Jay
Colburn had, flying together, established an around the world helicopter
flight record. To make the flight
possible both Smith and Perot had to hire an ocean-going vessel and predisposition
it between Japan and the Aleutians for refueling. Choosing the route was
made more difficult at that time, when Russia's airspace was closed. Smith's
helicopter is now in the Sydney, Australia, aeronautical museum. |
| Centre-pivot irrigator | |
(source) |
In 1952, a U.S. patent for a "Self-Propelled Sprinkling Irrigating Apparatus"
was issued to Frank L. Zybach of Strasburg, Colorado (No. 2,604,359). A
centre-pivoted pipe supported on a series of water-piston-powered wheels
rotates and sprinkles water on the crops.A control system ensures that
each wheel advances at the correct rate. This is the now-familiar centre-pivot
machine that waters large circles of crops in those areas of a country
which have limited rainfall but have a supply of surface or well water.
It provides irrigation for large areas of even closely-spaced crops for
which irrigation ditches are not practical and wasteful of water, or that
would be expensive to supply with full coverage with stationary sprinklers.«
[Image:
a modern example showing the sprinkler pipe carried above a series of large
wheels.] |
| Round-the-world solo flight | |
(source) |
In 1933, the first round-the-world solo flight
(15,596 miles) was completed by Wiley Post, in his single-engine Lockheed
Vega 5B aircraft "Winnie Mae," in 7 days 18hr 49min. He had made an accompanied
flight around the world in 1931. Born 22 Nov 1898, Wiley Post made his
first
solo flight in 1926, the year he got his flying license, signed by
Orville Wright, despite wearing a patch over his left eye, lost in an oilfield
accident. Post invented the first pressurized suit to wear when he flew
around the world. Another credit was his research into the jet streams.
He died with his passenger, humorist Will Rogers, 15 Aug 1935 in a plane
crash in Alaska. |
| Tay Railway Bridge | |
(source) |
In 1871, the foundation stone was laid for the Tay Railway Bridge to be
built across the mile-wide Firth of Tay on the east Scottish coast. The
two-mile bridge of lattice girders on ironwork columns was opened 31 May
1878. At the time, it was the longest bridge in the world. It had a clearance
of about 88-ft above the high water mark in the middle of the firth to
allow ships to pass up the Tay to Perth. Sir
Thomas Bouch was the railway engineer in charge of its construction.
He was knighted in Jun 1878, the month after it opened. It collapsed
the following year, in a fierce gale on 28
Dec 1879, killing a trainload of people.« |
