| AUGUST 4 - BIRTHS | |
| Michael Scott Montague Fordham | |
 Born 4
Aug 1905; died 14 Apr 1995.
British analytical psychologist who applied Jungian analysis to the study of development in children. His research and writings produced a theory of the the processes of individuation in the childhood years that had formerly been lacking in Jungian thought. The concept of the self in childhood that he developed was revolutionary for Jungians and path breaking for child development, because at the time, modern research studies on infancy had not begun. Subsequent evidence accumulated from experimental and analytical sources has added further validity to his ideas about the dynamic of the self as an important feature of development.  Michael
Fordham: Innovations in Analytical Psychology by James
Astor |
|
| Alexander George McAdie | |
1893 (source) |
Born 4
Aug 1863 (died 1 Nov 1943)
American meteorologist who was a pioneer in employing kites in the exploration of high altitude air conditions. As a college graduate, McAdie in Jan 1882 joined the Army Signal Service, which preceded the civilian U.S. Weather Bureau. He invented and patented devices to protect fruit from frost. He examined the influence of smoke pollution on the atmosphere, McAdie studied the relation between atmospheric electricity and auroral phenomena, and wrote about lightning as a hazard both in the air and on the ground. He believed that the units used in meteorology should be standardized by adoption of the metric system. McAdie was a founder of the Seismological Society of America. Mt. McAdie (13,799 ft.) in the Sierra Nevada was named for him. 
[Image: Cloud and Multiple Flash from Pop. Sci. Monthly, 1893]  Making
the Weather, by Alexander G. McAdie. |
| William Henry Hudson | |
(source) |
Born 4
Aug 1841; died 18 Aug 1922.
English (born in Argentina of American parents) author, naturalist and ornithologist. His interest in nature started in his youth when he studied the local flora and fauna in Argentina, where he was born of American parents. After moving to England (1869) he published onithological works including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895). He followed these with popular books on the English countryside, including Hampshire Days (1903) and Afoot in England (1909). His work helped foster the back-to-nature movement of the 1920s to 1930s, and he was a founder member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.« 
William
Henry Hudson: Life, Literature, and Science, by Felipe
Arocena. |
| Sir William Rowan Hamilton | |
(source) |
Born 4
Aug 1805; died 2 Sep 1865.
Irish mathematician in the fields of optics, geometrics, and classical mechanics. By age 12, Hamilton had already learned fourteen languages when he met the American, Zerah Colburn, who could perform amazing mental arithmetical feats, and they joined in competitions. It appears that losing to Colburn sparked Hamilton's interest in mathematics. At 15, he began studied the works of LaPlace and Newton so by age 17 had become the greatest living mathematician. He contributed to the development of optics, dynamics, and algebra. His invention of the calculus of quaternions enabled a three-dimensional algebra or geometry which provided a basis for the later development of quantum mechanics. Sir
William Rowan Hamilton, by Thomas L. Hankins. |
| Gouverneur Emerson | |
| Born 4
Aug 1795; died 2 July 1874.
American physician, statistician and agriculturalist who prepared a series of tables of deaths and causes in Philadelphia, during thirty years from 1807. These showed, for example, the excessive mortality of males during childhood. He began practice in Philadelphia on 4 Aug 1820, where yellow fever broke out a few weeks later, with 73 deaths by that fall. Emerson recorded cases, dates, locations, and outcomes. He concluded no current medical treatments was especially effective. When smallpox reappeared there, with 325 deaths in 1824, Emerson drafted a bill for control measures. There were only 6 cases of smallpox in the city in 1825, and 3 in 1826. In retirement, he turned to peach culture, and studied phosphate and guano fertilizers. |
|
| Nicolas-Jacques Conté | |
(source) |
Born 4
Aug 1755; died 6 Dec 1805.
French inventor who devised a method of manufacturing pencil leads by mixing a finely powdered graphite with finely ground clay particles, baked, and used encased in wood. His innovation was prompted when imported plumbago supplies were disrupted by war. He was the first to use graphite - and that is still used as the basis for making pencil leads today. Using different ratios of clay to graphite varies the hardness of the pencil lead. He was commissioned by Napoleon as chief of the balloon corps in Egypt, where he invented ways to improvise tools and machines necessary to provide bread, cloth, munitions, surgical instruments and engineers' tools. As a youth, he had worked as a portrait painter. He lost his left eye in a chemistry laboratory accident.« The
Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. Henry Petroski |
| Johann Gottlob Lehmann | |
(source) |
Born 4
Aug 1719; died 22 Jan 1767.
German geologist noted for fundamental work in stratigraphy (comparing sequences of layers in beds of sedimentary rocks) and who published the first geologic profile in 1756. He developed categories describing the origin of mountains. ("Primitive" mountains lack strata; "secondary" mountains have sedimentary formations with abundant fossils.) He analyzed an orange-red mineral from a mine in the Ural Mountains and recognized that it contained lead, but missed identifying a new element - chromium - that it contained. (The mineral was crocoite, a lead chromate (PbCrO4) from which Nicolas-Louis Vauquelin later isolated chromium in 1798). Lehmann died accidentally when a retort containing arsenic burst upon heating.« [Image: from Lehmann's Versuch einer Geschichte von Flözgebirgen (1756)] |
| John Tradescant, the Younger | |
(source) |
Born 4
Aug 1608; died 22 Apr 1662.
British botanist and gardener who was appointed by King Charles I as Keeper of his Majesty's Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms at Oatlands Palace in Surrey, where he continued the work of his father John Tradescant the Elder (c.1570-1638). Together, they were among the earliest English botanists. After his apprenticeship, John Tradescant the Younger became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners (1634). Three years later, he went to Virginia on a botanical collection expedition (1637-38) "to gather up all raritye of flowers, plants, shells." His father had served similarly for the king from 1630, travelling abroad several times to bring back new plant species. The son succeeded to the post at Oatland Palace upon his father's death in 1638.« The
John Tradescants: Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen,
by Prudence Leith-Ross. |
|
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| AUGUST 4 - DEATHS | |
| Edgar Douglas Adrian | |
(source) |
 Died
4 Aug 1977 (born 30 Nov 1889)
(Baron) English electrophysiologist who is one of the founders of modern neurophysiology. He shared (with Sir Charles Sherrington) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932 for "for their discoveries regarding the functions of neurons." While a student under Keith Lucas at Cambridge, Adrian discovered the "all-or-none" phenomenon (the relation between stimulus intensity and muscle-fibre contraction) in muscle-nerve preparations. During a career at Cambridge he developed the capillary electrometer to measure minute signals from nerve fibres and discovered the nature of coding of the motor and sensory impulses in afferent and efferent fibres. In the early 1930s, he advanced concepts of electro-encephalography, research on electrical brain waves. |
| Daniel Hale Williams | |
(source) |
Died
4 Aug 1931 (born 18 Jan 1858)
American physician remembered as the first black American to suture the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the heart muscle). On 9 Jul 1893, he operated on a 24-yr-old stabbing victim and sutured the wound to the pericardium, but left the heart muscle itself alone, allowing a small (1/10" long) nick to heal on its own. The patient recovered and lived for at least 20 years afterward. (A similar procedure was performed earlier by H.C. Dalton on 6 Sep 1891. The first surgery on heart muscle was done on 10 Sep 1896, by Ludwig Rehn who sutured a myocardial laceration). Williams helped establish the Provident Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago (1891), the oldest free-standing black owned hospital in the U.S.« Daniel
Hale Williams: Negro Surgeon, by Helen Buckler. |
| Baron Carl Auer von Welsbach | |
(source) |
Died
4 Aug 1929 (born 1 Sep 1858)
(baron of Welsbach) Austrian chemist and physicist who invented the gas mantle, thus allowing the greatly increased output of light by gas lamps. |
| Walther Flemming | |
(source) |
Died
4 Aug 1905 (born 21 Apr 1843)
German anatomist who was the first to observe and describe systematically the behaviour of chromosomes in the cell nucleus during normal cell division (mitosis, a term he coined in 1882). Thus, he was a founder of cytogenetics as a branch of science to study chromosomes, the cell's hereditary material. Flemming coined other terms: spireme, aster, chromatin, achromatin, monocentric and dicentric phases. Chromatin (Gr. chroma = colour) referred to certain fragments of the cell nucleus that took on a strong colour from the dyes he used during microscopic study. Flemming did not know of Mendel's work, so 20 years passed before the genetic implications were realized. Chromosomes, formed from cromatin, were named in 1888 by Waldeyer-Hartz. |
| Etienne Lenoir | |
(source) |
Died 4 Aug 1900 (born 12 Jan 1822)
(Jean-Joseph-) Étienne Lenoir was a Belgian inventor who devised the world's first commercially successful internal-combustion engine. He moved to Paris where his work with electro-plating led him to other electrical inventions, among them a railway telegraph. Lenoir patented his first engine in 1860. Looking much like a double-acting steam engine, it fired an uncompressed charge of air and illuminating gas with an ignition system of his own design. One of these engines powered a road vehicle in 1863; another ran a boat. Because of improved designs by Nikolaus Otto and other inventors, the Lenoir engine became obsolete and only about 500 Lenoir engines were built. The Lenoir engine wasn't efficient enough, and the inventor died poor. Image right: patent diagram 24 Jan 1860 (source) |
| AUGUST 4 - EVENTS | |
| Potato flakes | |
In 1958, the first potato-flake plant was established in the U.S. at Grand
Fork, North Dakota. |
|
| UK supersonic fighter | |
|
In 1954, Britain's first supersonic fighter plane, the P-1 English Electric
Lightning, made its maiden flight. |
|
| Bell tribute | |
(source) |
In 1922, every telephone in North America was silent for one minute at
sunset marking the time funeral services were taking place for Alexander
Graham Bell. He was laid to rest in a tomb blasted in the solid rock
at the peak of Beinn Bhreagh Mountain on his estate
in Nova Scotia, Canada. A watch tower had been built there years earlier
by the inventor. His coffin was made in the inventor's own workshop by
his laboratory staff. In a memory of the famous inventor, all the
switchboards and switching stations of AT&T and the Bell System in
the U.S. and Canada suspended service to the 13 million telephones then
installed. Bell had died two days earlier on 2 Aug 1922..« [Image:
The burial of Alexander Graham Bell on his estate.] |
| Transatlantic Belinogram | |
(source) |
In 1921, a facsimile was transmitted by radio across the Atlantic Ocean
using the Belinograph invented by Eduard
Belin. A written message from the managing editor of the New York
Times was scanned by the equipment and sent by radio from Annapolis,
Md., within seven minutes to Belin's laboratories at La Malmaison, France.
The image received demonstrated that thereafter photographs could be scanned
for radio transmission in the same way. The method was already in use within
Europe sending
photographs by wire. The original, wrapped on a rotating cylinder was scanned
by a light beam reflected onto a photcell to convert the variations in
the received intensity to electrical signals forwarded by radio or telephone
wires.*« [Image:
view a photograph wrapped on the cylinder of a Belinograph; year unknown.] |
| Champagne | |
|
In 1693, champagne was invented by Dom Perignon. |
|
| Supernova | |
|
In 1181, supernova seen in Cassiopia. |
|
