| AUGUST 11 - BIRTHS | |
| Pierre-Louis Lions | |
(source) |
 Born 11
Aug 1956
French mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 for his work since the 1980's on partial differential equations. The sources of such equations are many - for example, physical, probalistic or geometric and other diverse subareas - each studying different phenomena for different nonlinear partial differential equations by utterly different methods. Pierre-Louis Lions has been called unique in his ability to transcend these boundaries and to solve pressing problems throughout the field. |
| Aaron Klug | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1926
British biochemist who received the 1982 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes." Whereas X-ray diffraction patterns reveal any highly ordered three-dimensional crystalline structures, the technique fails for those biological samples with less suitably ordered molecular structures. However Klug developed crystallographic electron microscopy which combined certain principles of the diffraction methods with electron miscroscopy so that he could figure out the 3-D structure of viruses or samples of complicated combinations of nucleic acids and proteins as found in membranes, muscle fibres and chromosomes.« |
| Tom Kilburn | |
c. 1948 (source) |
Born 11
Aug 1921; died 17 Jan 2001.
British electrical engineer who wrote the computer program used to test the first stored-program computer, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM, also known as "The Baby." First tested on 21 Jun 1948, the program took 52 minutes to run. The tiny experimental computer had no keyboard or printer, but it successfully tested a memory system developed at Manchester University in England. This system, based on a cathode-ray tube, was the first that could store programs, whereas previous electronic computers had to be rewired to execute each new problem. |
| Gifford Pinchot | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1865; died 4 Oct 1946.
American forester, who as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service popularized the conservation of natural resources. He became chief of the new Forest Service in 1905 when the management of the forest reserves was transferred to the Dept. of Agriculture from the Dept. of the Interior. At that time, the nation had 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres. In his five years in office, by 1910 those numbers increased to 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. He is regarded as a father of American conservation because of his great and unrelenting concern for the protection of the American forests. His efforts were supported by President Theodore Roosevelt, but not by his successor, President Taft, who replaced Pinchot in Jan 1910.«  Breaking
New Ground, (autobiography) by Gifford Pinchot. |
| James Bryan Herrick | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1861; died 7 Mar 1954
American physician and clinical cardiologist who was the first to observe and describe sickle-cell anemia. In 1910, he reported an unusual case he had examined. The patient was a 20-year-old West Indies student, attending a dental school in Chicago. "His illness had begun with malaise, pain in the back, the muscles of the legs and arms. He had a slight fever and was pale... he had suffered from a bilious attack... had vomited and... somewhat short of breath." In a blood test, Herrick found "nucleated reds were numerous [normal red blood cells lack a nucleus], 74 being seen in a count of 200 leukocytes [white blood cells]. The shape of the reds was very irregular... [with a] large number of thin, elongated, sickle-shaped and crescent-shaped forms." |
| Christiaan Eijkman | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1858; died 5 Nov 1930.
Dutch scientist, physician, hygienist who demonstration that beriberi is caused by poor diet led to the discovery of vitamins. He investigated beriberi (Sinhalese word for "extreme weakness") in the Dutch East Indies in 1886. Because an attendant had been feeding his laboratory chickens with cooked white rice instead of whole rice, Eijkman discovered by accident that diet produced a disease resembling beriberi in human beings. Experimenting with a diet of polished rice, Eijkman reproduced these results (1897) . He was the first to recognize that the human disease, too, was caused by lack of essential food factor (later shown to be vitamin B1). For this work, he shared (with Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1929. Beriberi,
White Rice And Vitamin B: A Disease, A Cause and A Cure,
by Kenneth J. Carpenter. |
| Cato Maximilian Guldberg | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1836; died 14 Jan 1902
Norwegian chemist who, with his brother-in-law Peter Waage, formulated the law of mass action (1864), which details the effects of concentration, mass, and temperature on chemical reaction rates. The law states that the rate of a chemical change depends on the concentrations of the reactants. Thus for a reaction: A + B >> C the rate of reaction is proportional to [A][B], where [A] and [B] are concentrations. In 1870 Guldberg investigated the way in which the freezing point and vapor pressure of a pure liquid are lowered by a dissolved component. In 1890 he formulated Guldberg's law which relates boiling point and critical temperature. |
| Joachim Barrande | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1799; died 5 Oct 1883.
French geologist and paleontologist. He settled in Prague (1832), at first as an engineer. While surveying the proposed route for a horse-drawn railway, he became interested in the local fossil-bearing rocks there. From 1840, he turned to the study of these fossils in the strata of the central Bohemian basin. In his lifetime, he gathered some 3500 species of graptolites, brachiopoda, mollusca, trilobites and fishes, showing a wide variety of life forms in the Early Paleozoic era. (The Paleozoic era spanned 540-245 million years ago.) He meticulously recorded his findings in Système silurien du centre de la Bohême, which remains a fine reference work. The first volume was published in 1852, and was followed by 20 more in his lifetime. He opposed Darwin's theory of evolution, instead advocating the theory of catastrophes.« |
| Richard Mead | |
(source) |
Born 11
Aug 1673; died 16 Feb 1754.
British physician who contributed to preventive medicine and helped establish smallpox inoculation. He wrote works on plague, smallpox, measles and scurvy. His Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702) included observations from his tests of the effects of viper venom on the body. This treatise established his reputation, and he later enlarged and republished the book in 1743. To allay fears of a possible outbreak of plague, he published A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion and the Methods to be Used to Prevent It (1720). He became wealthy as the pre-eminent medical practitioner of his day in London, and was physician to Royalty, statesmen and Sir Isaac Newton. Meade built an impressive collection of books, manuscripts, art and natural objects, but it was dispersed after he died.« |
|
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| AUGUST 11 - DEATHS | |
| Sir Frederic Williams | |
 |
 Died
11 Aug 1977 (born 26 June 1911)
British electrical and electronics engineer who, with Tom Kilburn, invented the Williams tube, a cathode-ray tube using the persistence of the image on the phosphor screen for data storage. This made possible the random access memory that launched the digital computer age. As the Chair in Electrotechnics at Manchester University, he incorporated this invention into the Mark I computer, the world's first stored-program digital electronic computer to be commercially produced during the early 1950's.  |
| Max Theiler | |
(source) |
Died
11 Aug 1972 (born 30 Jan 1899)
American microbiologist who won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on yellow fever. Theiler's discovery that mice are susceptible to yellow fever facilitated research and eventual development of a vaccine against the disease in humans. Upon graduation from medical training in tropical medicine in London, he joined the department of tropical medicine at the Harvard Medical School, U.S. and studied infectious diseases. His research on yellow fever led to development of the first attenuated strain of the virus. He moved to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical, N.Y. (1930-64), where with his associates he developed the improved (17-D) vaccine, widely used for human immunization against yellow fever. |
| Robert Williams Wood | |
(source) |
Died
11 Aug 1955 (born 2 May 1868)
Robert Williams Wood was an American experimental physicist. He photographed the reflection of sound waves in air, and investigated the physiological effects of high-frequency sound waves. The zone plate he devised could replace the objective lens of a telescope. He invented an improved diffraction grating, did research in spectroscopy, and extended the technique of Raman spectroscopy (a method to study matter using the light scattered by it.) He made photographs showing both infrared and ultraviolet radiation and was the first to photograph ultraviolet fluorescence. Wood was the first to observe the phenomenon of field emission in which charged particles are emitted from conductors in an electric field.« |
| Andrew Carnegie | |
(source) |
Died
11 Aug 1919 (born 1835)
Scottish-born American steel industrialist and humanitarian who began his career in the iron and steel business in 1865, focussed on steeel from 1873, owned Homestead Steel Works in 1888, and by 1899 had founded the Carnegie Steel Co., which merged with United States Steel Corp. in 1901. He then devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, especially as a benefactor of over 1700 libraries. He also supported public education, and international peace. His parents were handloom weavers in Scotland, made poor by the advent of mechanized factories, and the family emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., in 1848. At age 17, he became a telegraph operator, and by 1859 was vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.« |
| Macedonio Melloni | |
(source) |
Died
11 Aug 1854 (born 11 Apr 1798)
Italian physicist who was the first to extensively research infrared radiation. Sir William Frederick Herschel discovered infrared radiation in 1800, but research stalled until the invention of a thermopile in 1830. That instrument was a series of strips of two different metals that produced electric current when one end was heated. Melloni improved the thermopile and used it to detect infrared radiation. In 1846, from an observation point high on Mount Vesuvius, he measured the slight heating effect of moonlight. He showed also that rock salt, being transparent to infrared, made suitable lenses and prisms to demonstrate the reflection, refraction, polarization and interference of infrared in the same manner as visible light. |
| Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa | |
 |
Died
11 Aug 1464 (born 1401)
German theologian, influential philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. His scientific ideas, shrouded in theological language, were his personal speculations. Before Copernicus by half a century, he suggested that the Earth was a nearly spherical shape, turned on its axis and revolved around the Sun (1440); that each star is itself a distant sun with inhabited worlds in orbit; and that space was infinite. In mathematics, he contributed concepts of the infinitesimal and of relative motion. He made spectacles for nearsighted people using concave lenses, departing from the usual and more easily produced convex shape that worked only for farsighted users. He considered air as a source of some sustenance for plants, and recognized the pulse for diagnosis. |
| AUGUST 11 - EVENTS | |
| Total eclipse | |
(source) |
In 1999, the last total eclipse
of the millenium occurred. Because it travelled
across many populated areas, it was perhaps the most-watched eclipse of
all time, seen by possibly 350 million people. Totality occurred first
over the mid-Atlantic Ocean. The first land crossed by the moon's shadow
was the Isles of Scilly, then the far south-west of England, in Cornwall.
Although the sun was obscured
by clouds there, a dramatic darkness fell, and the temperature dropped,
during the totality lasting 1-min 30-sec. From there the path of totality
tracked across Europe, India and Iran. In Egypt, Muslims were ordered
by clerics to shut themselves away, but Jordan and Syria declared a national
holiday.« [Image: total
eclipse viewed from an airplane above the clouds in Cornwall.] |
| Double Eagle II balloon crossed Atlantic | |
(source) |
In 1978, the first successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon
began when three Americans, Ben Abruzzo,
Maxie
Anderson and Larry
Newman, took off in their Double
Eagle II from Presque Isle, Maine. Their 3,100-mile flight ended
on 17 Aug 1978, 137-hr 6-min later,
in France. The helium balloon
Double Eagle II was 112- ft high,
65-ft diam., capacity 160,000 cu.ft. with a 15x7x4½-ft passenger
gondola named The Spirit of Albuquerque. The underside of the gondola
was a twin-hulled catamaran to provide emergency flotation for any unplanned
water landing. Double Eagle II was built
by Ed Yost. The history of transatlantic balloon crossing included seventeen
prior unsuccessful attempts and seven lives lost.« [Image:
Double
Eagle II gondola] |
| Last British steam passenger train | |
|
In 1968, the last British Rail steam locomotive used to haul a passenger
train in regular service ran on the Liverpool to Carlisle route. |
|
| Third cosmonaut | |
|
In 1962, the Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour
flight in Vostok III, which set
an endurance record at the time. Eighteen months after Yury
Gagarin became the first man in space, Nikolayev became Russia's third
cosmonaut to travel into space. Pavel Popovich was launched in Vostok
IV the next day. The pair made the first simultaneous flights; both
returned on 15 Aug. Nikolayev's flight set an endurance record, circling
the Earth 64 times in 96 hours, having completed 1,650,000 miles. He returned
to space in 1970 for his second and final mission on the Soyuz 9 craft,
setting a new endurance record, spending 18 days in space in Soyuz 9.
He was twice named a Hero of the Soviet Union. |
|
| S.O.S. | |
In 1909, the liner S.S. Arapahoe was the first ship to use the S.O.S.
radio distress call. Its wireless operator,
T. D. Haubner, radioed for help after a propeller shafat snapped while
off the coast at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, USA. The call was heard
by the United Wireless station "HA" at Hatteras. A few months later, Haubner
on the S.S. Arapahoe received an SOS from the SS Iroquois,
the second use of SOS in America. Previously, the distress code CQD
had been in use as a maritime distress call,
standardised by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. in 1904. The second
International Radio Telegraphic Convention (1906) proposed the alternative
SOS for its distinctive sound. It was ratified as an international standard
in 1908. [Image right (source)] |
|
| Instant coffee patent | |
(source) |
In 1903, the first U.S. patent for instant coffee was issued to Satori
Kato of Chicago, Illinois. It was entitled "Coffee Concentrate and Process
of Making Same" (No. 735,777). The application was filed 17 Apr 1901, in
which year his Kato Coffee Company introduced the product at the Pam-American
Exposition in Buffalo. Two years earlier, four men had formed the company
when an American coffee importer and a roaster contacted Sartori Kato (the
Japanese inventor of a soluble tea), who adapted his process of dehydration
to coffee, with the assistance of an American chemist. [Image:
Souvenir from the 1901 Pan-American Exposition.] |
| Pull chain bulb socket | |
|
In 1896, the first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off pull
chain was patented by Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport, Connecticut (No. 565,541). |
|
| Sprinkler head patent | |
|
In 1874, Harry S. Parmelee of New Haven, Conn. received a patent for the
sprinkler head. |
|
| Moons of Mars | |
(source) |
In 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the two moons of Mars,
which he named Phobos
and Deimos.
In Greek mythology, these are the sons of Ares (Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus).
Deimos
is Greek for "panic" and phobos is Greek for "fear". These moons
are composed of carbon-rich rock like C-type asteroids and ice. But their
densities are so low that they cannot be pure rock. They are more likely
composed of a mixture of rock and ice. Both are heavily cratered. They
are probably asteroids perturbed by Jupiter into orbits that allowed them
to be captured by Mars. There is some speculation that they originated
in the outer solar system rather than in the main asteroid belt. [Image:
Moons of Mars images by Viking Orbiter 1977; shown at the same scale] |
| Factory explosion | |
(source) |
In 1871, an explosion at the factory of Patent Gun Cotton Company, Stowmarket,
Suffolk, England, killed 24 people and injured many more It happened in
the early afternoon, devastating
the factory and left a crater 100-ft long and 10-ft deep. Windows were
blown in all over Stowmarket ands roofs damaged, and the explosion was
heard up to ten miles away. It was the biggest disaster ever to hit the
town. The inquest found that it had probably been caused by sabotage but
no one was ever brought to trial. It has been suggested
that the findings were a whitewash which helped prevent any criticism falling
on the heads of the factory or the inventor of the process. (Guncotton
was first patented by Christian Frederick
Schönbein in 1846) |
| Astronomer Royal | |
 |
In 1835, George B Airy began his 46-year
reign as England's seventh Astronomer Royal. |
