| JULY 29 - BIRTHS | |
| Heinz L. Fraenkel-Conrat | |
 |
 Born 29
July 1910; died 10 Apr 1999.
German-American pioneering biochemist who helped to reveal the complementary roles of the structural components of viruses: a hollow protein shell with a "core" of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside. In a series of experiments on the tobacco mosaic virus (1955), he disassembled the virus into its noninfectious protein and the nucleic acid without seriously damaging either portion - and then put them together again. Of the reconstituted virus molecules some retained their infectivity; their viral life still existed. He showed the protein was inert, and the infective agent was the RNA. |
| Harry Boot | |
| Born 29
July 1917; died 8 Feb 1983.
Dr Henry Albert Howard "Harry" Boot was an English physicist, who worked with John Randall developing the cavity magnetron, the microwave-generating device used in radar. This made a major contribution to winning WWII. Earlier magnetrons made in the 1920's gave low power output. By Feb 1940, advances by Randall and Boot in the design of the small-sized cavity magnetron, produced centimeter wavelengths at much higher power, which allowed radar to detect smaller objects. In turn, this more compact equipment with a smaller antenna permitted easy mobile installation of high-resolution radar in aircraft.« |
|
| Baron Marcel Bich | |
(source) |
Born 29
July 1914; died 30 May 1994.
French inventor who built his business empire by creating throwaway Bic pens, razors and lighters. In 1945, Marcel Bich and his friend, Edouard Buffard, acquired an empty factory shell near Paris, France, and soon developed a thriving business, producing parts for fountain pens and mechanical lead pencils. Later, Bich spent two years developing his ballpoint pen design, and in 1949, he was able to produce a reliable, low cost ballpoint pen. In 1973 the Bic Lighter was introduced in the U.S., followed by Bic Shavers, first introduced in 1976 |
| I. I. Rabi | |
(source) |
Born 29
July 1898; died 11 Jan 1988
Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944 for his invention (in 1937) of the atomic and molecular beam magnetic resonance method of measuring magnetic properties of atoms, molecules, and atomic nuclei. He spent most of his life at Columbia University (1929-67), where he performed most of his pioneering research in radar and the magnetic moment associated with electron spin in the 1930s and 1940s. His Nobel-winning work led to the invention of the laser, the atomic clock, and diagnostic uses of nuclear magnetic resonance. He originated the idea for the CERN nuclear research center in Geneva (founded 1954).  Rabi:
Scientist & Citizen, by John S. Rigden. |
| Anthony John Arkell | |
 |
Born 29
July 1898; died 26 Feb 1980.
Historian and egyptologist, an outstanding colonial administrator who combined a passion for the past with a humanitarian concern for the peoples of modern Africa. Arkell was one of the pioneers of archaeological search in Sudan. After serving in the Royal Air Force, Arkell joined the Sudan Political Service (1920) and set about abolishing the slave trade between the Sudan and Ethiopia. He was appointed commissioner for archaeology and anthropology in 1938 and undertook several digs that opened up the previously unknown field of Sudanese prehistory. He returned to England in 1948, and wrote his authoritative History of the Sudan (1955). A
History of the Sudan, by Anthony John Arkell |
| William Beebe | |
(source) |
Born 29
July 1877; died 4 June 1962.
(Charles) William Beebe was an American biologist, explorer, and writer on natural history who combined careful biological research with a rare literary skill. As director of tropical research for the New York Zoological Society from 1919, he led scientific expeditions to many parts of the world. He was the coinventor of the bathysphere, a spherical diving-vessel for use in underwater observations. In 1934, with Otis Barton, he descended in his bathysphere to a then record depth of 3,028 feet (923 metres) in Bermuda waters on 15 Aug 1934. Later dives reached depths of around 1.5 km (nearly 1 mile). The
Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist,
by Carol Grant Gould. |
| Eduard Brückner | |
(source) |
Born 29
July 1862; died 20 May 1927.
German pioneer climate researcher. He also studied the glaciers of the Alps and particularly the effect of the ice ages on the Earth's surface features. By analyzing direct and indirect observations of climatic fluctuations, he discovered the 35-year Brückner climatic cycle (1887) of swings between damp-cold and warm-dry conditions. He initiated scientific debate on whether climate change should be interpreted as a natural function of the Earth system, or whether it was influenced by man's activities, such as deforestation. He considered the impact of climate change on the balance of power between nations and its economic significance in agricultural productivity, emigration, river transportation and the spreading of diseases.« Eduard
Brückner - The Sources and Consequences of Climate Change and Climate
Variability in Historical Times, editted by N. Stehr
and H. von Storch |
| Walter Hunt | |
(source) |
Born 29 July 1796; died 8 Jun 1859.
American inventor who designed the first repeating rifle. Hunt began inventing in his late teens with a machine to spin flax, which he patented in 1826. He also invented a fire engine gong (1827), a forest saw, a stove and paper collars. In 1834, he invented a sewing machine with a lock stitch, which he failed to patent until it was too late. Although his inventions were worthwhile, he failed to market them effectively. In 1849, Hunt made the first safety pin out of a piece of brass wire about eight inches long, coiled at the center and shielded at one end. He patented this invention as a "dress pin", and sold the rights to it for $400. His rifle design of 1849 had a tubular magazine beneath the barrel used with his previously-patented self-propelled "rocket" ball ammunition.« |
| JULY 29 - DEATHS | |
| Dorothy Hodgkin | |
(source) |
 Died
29 July 1994 (born 12 May 1910)
Dorothy (Mary) Hodgkin (née Crowfoot) was an English chemist, born in Cairo, Egypt. A crystallographer of distinction, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964 for her discoveries, by the use of X-ray techniques, of the structure of biologically important molecules, including penicillin (1946), vitamin B-12 (1956), and later, the protein hormone insulin (1969). Her achievements included not only these structure determinations and the scientific insight they provided but also the development of methods that made such structure determinations possible. (One of her students was Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, the only British prime minister with a degree in science.) Dorothy
Hodgkin: A Life, by Georgina Ferry. |
| Vladimir Zworykin | |
(source) |
Died
29 July 1982 (born 30 Jul 1889)
Russian-born U.S. electronic engineer, inventor, "the Father of Television." Concurrent with the start of radio broadcasting, Zworykin was developing a system of transmitting sound and pictures. Other inventors were using a motorized, mechanical scanning system with rotating disks capable of a picture about one inch square. It was heavy, bulky and impractical for home use. Zworykin, at Westinghouse, instead developed an electronic scanning television system using his innovations, the iconoscope and kinescope, the forerunners of today's television camera. He also invented the electron microscope. Zworykin,
Pioneer of Television, by Albert Abramson. |
| Clyde K.M. Kluckhohn | |
(source) |
Died 29 July 1960 (born 11 Jan 1905)
Clyde K(ay) M(aben) Kluckhohn was a American cultural anthropologist with a deep interestin culture and personality. He chose this profession based on his interest in psychology while at the same time expressing his interest in cultural diversity. He felt that diversities of authentic cultures must be represented in personality psychology. As a professor of anthropology at Harvard University, he contributed to anthropology in a number of ways: by his ethnographic studies of the Navajo; by his theories of culture, partial-value systems, and cultural patterns; by his intellectual leadership and stimulation of a large number of students; and by his representation of anthropology in government circles. [Image right: Navajo rug, circa 1900] |
| Richard Pearse | |
(source) |
Died
29 July 1953 (born 3 Dec 1877)
New Zealand inventor and aviation pioneer. Although at age 21, instead of farming his 100 acres of land, he built a workshop with a forge and a lathe and be came an inventor. His first patent was a type of bicycle. By 1902, Pearse had probably built a lightweight two-cylinder engine and first plane out of bamboo, tubular steel, wire and canvas. Accounts of the dates and details of his flights vary because they were not documented, but it is believed that on 31 Mar 1903 he made at least a powered takeoff, though not a controlled, sustained flight, covering perhaps 350 yards before crashing into a tall gorse fence. (It would be the fifth successful powered takeoff in the world.) He made other inventions in his life. Pearse died poor, in a mental hospital.« The
Riddle of Richard Pearse: The Story of New Zealand's Pioneer Aviator and
Inventor, by Gordon Ogilvie. |
| Sir William Willcocks | |
|
Died
29 July 1932 (born 27 Sep 1852)
British civil engineer who proposed and designed the first Aswan (Assuan) Dam (1898-1902) on the River Nile and executed major irrigation projects in South Africa and Turkey. He was born studied engineering in India before moving to Egypt in 1883, becoming director-general of reservoirs. On being asked to find a means of storing Nile water to allow the growth of an extra crop of cotton, he found a depression at Wadi Rayan, into which part of the annual flood waters could be diverted, then fed back into the river in the dry season. When persuaded to build a dam, he designed the Aswan Dam to allow the silt-laden waters of the early weeks of the annual flood to pass through, and only capture for storage the clear water that flowed later in the season. |
| John Alexander Newlands | |
(source) |
Died
29 July 1898 (born 26 Nov 1837).
John Alexander Reina Newlands, was a British chemist who first established an order of elements by the atomic weights, and observed a periodicity in the properties. Every eighth element has similar properties, hence he named the Law of Octaves (7 Feb 1863). It took another quarter century, and the work of others, such as Mendeleev, for the significance of his discovery to be recognized. He died in London. |
| John Elliotson | |
(source) |
Died
29 July 1868 (born 29 Oct 1791)
English physician who advocated the use of hypnosis in therapy and who in 1849 founded a mesmeric hospital. He was one of the first teachers in London to emphasize clinical lecturing and was one of the earliest of British physicians to urge use of the stethoscope, together with the methods of examining the heart and lungs which are used to this day. In 1823 acupuncture was mentioned in the first edition of the Lancet and in 1824 Dr. Elliotson began to use this method of treatment. In 1827 he published a series of results on the treatment of forty-two cases of rheumatism by acupuncture. In 1834 he became physician to the University College Hospital, where his interest in hypnosis led to conflicts with the hospital's medical committee and his resignation in 1838. |
| Charles-Lucien Bonaparte | |
(source) |
Died
29 July 1857 (born 24 May 1803)
(Prince) French zoologist who was a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1822 to 1828, he was in the United States, where he wrote four volumes of American Ornithology (1825-33) adding to the body of work left unfinished by Alexander Wilson at his death. Bonaparte's scientific reputation was established by these volumes, with which he had the assistance of the artist Titian Peale, who found and painted birds for him from the Rocky Mountains and Florida. In 1848-49, Bonaparte's scientific career experienced a brief hiatus when he took part in the political agitation for Italian independence against the Austrians and he was forced to leave Italy in July 1849. He went to Holland and then to France. The
Emperor of Nature: Charles-Lucien Bonaparte and his World,
by Patricia Tyson Stroud. |
| JULY 29 - EVENTS | |
| Tenth planet proposed | |
(source) |
In 2005, another candidate for tenth planet was announced
by Mike Brown of California Institute of Technology. Its diameter is estimated
at 2,100 miles - about 1-1/2 times that of Pluto. Its orbit is eccentric
and inclined at about 45 degrees to the main plane of the solar system.
It was named 2003 UB313 on a photograph made 31 Oct 2003. Later, its motion
was recognized, on 8 Jan 2005. With orbits significantly inclined to the
others, the status as a planet of either or even Pluto, is a subject for
debate. They are in a region of numerous frozen comet-like objects beyond
Neptune - the Kuiper Belt. The object Sedna - somewhat smaller than Pluto
- was also found there in 2004. NASA also in an official statement
referred to 2003 UB313 as a tenth planet.« [Image:
2003 UB313 is circled] |
| Iron lung | |
(source) |
In 1927, the first iron lung (electric respirator) was installed at Bellevue
hospital in New York for the post war polio epidemic. The first iron lung
was developed at Harvard University by Phillip Drinker
and Louis Agassiz Shaw built with two vacuum cleaners. The iron lung is
a negative pressure machine
which surrounds the patient's body except for the head, and alternates
a negative atmospheric pressure with the ambient one, resulting in rhythmic
expansion of the chest cage (and thus inhalation) in response to the negative
extra thoracic pressure. During periods of ambient extrathoracic pressure,
the lungs deflate. This type of machine is rarely used today.
[Image: Early Drinker respirator prototype, 1928] |
| Airmail | |
1924 (source) |
In 1920, the first transcontinental airmail flight relay from New York
to San Francisco occurred. A quote from the event, "I happened to be the
man on the spot, but any of the rest of the fellows would have done what
I did, " said Jack Knight, first night mail flight, which was part of a
record-setting transcontinental airmail relay. Interstate carriage of mail
by airplane was sanctioned between Garden City and Mineola, NY with
Earle H. Ovington, first U. S. mail pilot (1911). This was a dangerous
occupation: 31 of the first 40 pilots hired to fly mail were killed in
crashes. Regular transcontinental airmail service began in 1924. |
| Transcontinental phone call | |
 |
In 1914, transcontinental telephone service began. It was celebrated
with a telephone conversation between
Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco and Alexander Graham Bell in New York
City repeating their historic conversation from 1876. Wendover, Utah, was
the site of the completion
of the first transcontinental telephone line in 1914. The day's state-of-the-art
in signal transmission technology, loading coils, had reached its limit,
barely able to deliver a faint voice from New York to Denver until Western
Electric's high-vacuum tube for amplifying sound in telephone cables was
developed in 1913. |
| Asphalt | |
(source) |
In 1870, America's first asphalt pavement was laid in Newark, N.J. Although
many coal tar pavements (not asphalt) were built in the 1860s and 1870s,
the first recorded
asphalt pavement in the U.S. was a sand mix placed in front of the City
Hall in Newark, N.J., in 1870 by Edmund J. DeSmedt, a Belgian chemist who
became the inspector of asphalt and cements for the District of Columbia.
Early this century most roads, even in cities, were wide dirt pathways,
severely affected by weather. Asphalt roads were originally for bicyclists
who wanted a smooth surface. By 1904, only 141 miles were surfaced,
but commonplace by 1916. Natural asphalt deposits exist, but almost all
of the asphalt used commercially is made from petroleum. [Image:
Paving repair 1907] |
