| AUGUST 23 - BIRTHS | |
| Antonia Novello | |
 Born 23
Aug 1944
Physician and public official, the first woman and the first Hispanic to serve as surgeon general of the United States. |
|
| Robert F. Curl, Jr. | |
| Born 23
Aug 1933
American chemist who with Richard E. Smalley and Sir Harold W. Kroto discovered the first fullerene, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms, in 1985. The discovery opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work. In Sep 1985 Curl met with Kroto of the University of Sussex, Eng., and Smalley, a colleague at Rice, and, in 11 days of research, they discovered fullerenes. They announced their findings to the public in the 14 Nov 1985, issue of the journal Nature. |
|
| Hamilton Othanel Smith | |
| Born 23
Aug 1931
American microbiologist who shared, with Werner Arber and Daniel Nathans, the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1978 for his discovery of a new class of restriction enzymes that recognize specific sequences of nucleotides in a molecule of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and cleave the molecule at that particular point. |
|
| Clifford Geertz | |
Born 23
Aug 1926
American cultural anthropologist, a leading rhetorician and proponent of symbolic anthropology and interpretive anthropology. |
|
| Sir Henry Tizard | |
(source) |
Born 23
Aug 1885; died 9 Oct 1959.
English chemist, inventor and administrator. Around 1920, with David Pye, his work on aircraft fuels ultimately led to the octane rating system, which expresses the anti-knocking characteristics of the fuel. In the 1930-40's he advised the British government in the scientific aspects of air defence, particularly radar. He led a mission of leading British and Canadian scientists to the USA (29 Aug 1940) to brief official American representatives on devices under active development for war use and to enlist the support of American scientists. Thus began a close cooperation of Anglo-American scientists in such fields as aeronautics and rocketry. His influence probably made the difference between defeat or victory at the Battle of Britain in 1940. |
| William Henry Eccles | |
(source) |
Born 23 Aug 1875; died 29 Apr 1966.
British physicist who pioneered in the development of radio communication. Eccles was an early proponent of Oliver Heaviside's theory that an upper layer of the atmosphere reflects radio waves, thus enabling their transmission over long distances. He also suggested in 1912 that solar radiation accounted for the differences in wave propagation during the day and night. He experimented with detectors and amplifiers for radio reception, coined the term "diode," and studied atmospheric disturbances of radio reception. After WW I, he made many contributions to electronic circuit development*, including the Eccles-Jordan "flip-flop" patented in 1918 and used in binary counters (working with F.W. Jordan). |
| Osborne Reynolds | |
(source) |
Born 23
Aug 1842; died 21 Feb 1912.
British engineer, physicist, and educator best known for his work in hydraulics and hydrodynamics. |
| Moritz Benedikt Cantor | |
(source) |
Born 23
Aug 1829; died 10 Apr 1920.
German historian of mathematics, one of the greatest of the 19th century. He is best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume (published 1880) traces the general history of mathematics up to 1200. The second volume traces the history up to 1668 (the year Newton and Leibniz were just about to embark on their mathematicalresearches). The third volume continues up to 1758 (Lagrange's work began shortly after this date). Cantor then, at the age of 69, as editor-in-chief, organised a team with nine further contributors to collaborate on the fourth volume (published 1908), continuing to 1799, the year of Gauss's doctoral thesis. |
| Auguste Bravais | |
(source) |
Born 23
Aug 1811; died 30 Mar 1863.
French physicist and mineralogist, best remembered for his work on the lattice theory of crystals. Bravais lattices are named for him. In 1850, he showed that crystals could be divided into 14 unit cells for which: (a) the unit cell is the simplest repeating unit in the crystal; (b) opposite faces of a unit cell are parallel; and (c) the edge of the unit cell connects equivalent points. These unit cells fall into seven geometrical categories, which differ in their relative edge lengths and internal angles. In 1866, he elaborated the relationships between the ideal lattice and the material crystal. Sixty years later, Bravais' work provided the mathematical and conceptual basis for the determination of crystal structures after Laue's discovery of X-ray diffraction in 1911. |
| Georges Cuvier | |
| Born 23
Aug 1769; died 13 May 1832.
(Baron) French zoologist and statesman, who established the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. |
|
| Sir Astley Paston Cooper | |
(source) |
Born 23
Aug 1768; died 12 Feb 1841.
(1st Baronet) English surgeon who was a pioneer in experimental surgery. He was the first to tie the abdominal aorta in treating an aneurysm (1817), among various other operations he performed successfully at a time before antiseptic procedures. He was devoted to the study and teaching of anatomy, and is said to have dissected daily throughout his career. In 1820, for removing a small tumour from the head of King George IV, he was rewarded with a baronetcy, and later appointed Sergeant-Surgeon to the King (1828). He wrote many medical books, including his major work The Anatomy and Surgical Treatment of Hernia (1804-07), and Dislocations and Fractures (1822). He became president of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1827, and vice-president of the Royal Society in 1830.« |
| AUGUST 23 - DEATHS | |
| Fred Hoyle | |
 Died
23 Aug 2001 (born 24 Jun 1915)
English astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang." He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on the nature of the universe. He recalled using "big bang" for the first time in the last of those talks, though he never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe. Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle had proposed the steady state theory in the 1940s, arguing that the universe developed in a process of continuous growth. Over time, his belief in a "steady state" universe was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries. Hoyle also did theoretical work on the formation - in older, hotter stars - of other elements as helium nuclei fuse to produce carbon, oxygen, and eventually elements up to iron. |
|
| Charles Davis Hollister | |
| Died
23 Aug 1999 (born 18 Mar 1936)
American marine geologist whose pioneering studies of the deep-sea floor revealed the strong currents and storms that occur there; in the 1970s he extracted a 30-m (100-ft) core sample that contained a continuous 65 million-year-long record of ocean-basin history. |
|
| Sir John Cowdery Kendrew | |
(source) |
Died
23 Aug 1997 (born 24 Mar 1917)
British biochemist who determined the structure of the muscle protein myoglobin, which stores oxygen and gives it to the muscle cells when needed. For his achievement he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (with Max Ferdinand Perutz , who worked out the structure of the related protein, hemoglobin). |
| Florence Seibert | |
 |
Died
23 Aug 1991 (born 6 Oct 1897)
American scientist who developed the protein substance used for the tuberculosis skin test, and contributed to safety measures for intravenous drug therapy. In the early 1920s, she discovered that the sudden fevers that sometimes occurred during intravenous injections were caused by bacteria in the distilled water used to make the protein solutions. She invented a distillation apparatus designed to prevent such contamination. In 1941, her improved TB skin test became the standard test in the U.S. and a year later was adopted by the World Health Organization. It is still in use today. Her later research involved the study of bacteria associated with certain cancers. |
| R.D. Laing | |
| Died
23 Aug 1989 (born 7 Oct 1927)
Ronald David Laing was a British psychiatrist noted for his alternative approach to the treatment of schizophrenia. |
|
| Stanford Moore | |
(source) |
Died
23 Aug 1982 (born 4 Sep 1913)
American biochemist, who was a co-recipient (with Christian B. Anfinsen and William H. Stein) of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of ribonuclease molecule, an enzyme. Enzymes are large molecules (macromolecules). The way in which an enzyme accelerates a chemical reaction involves an interaction of the reacting substance (the substrate) with only a limited part of the enzyme molecule, its active site. Moore and Stein have carried out investigations which supplement each other and have led to a complete elucidation of the sequence of amino acids in the enzyme ribonuclease. |
| Roy Chadwick | |
| Died
23 Aug 1947
British aeronautical engineer, killed on a test flight near Woodford airfield, Manchester.* |
|
| Philip Henry Gosse | |
(source) |
Died
23 Aug 1888 (born 6 Apr 1810)
English popular science writer and naturalist who wrote books illustrating such topics as Jamaican wildlife and marine zoology. Stephen Jay Gould called Gosse the "David Attenborough of his day." However, he did not accept the theory of evolution, and in his best-known book, Omphalos, he attempted to apply biblical literalism in a way still consistent with uniformitarianism. His premise in the book was criticized by both sides of the debate. He invented the institutional aquarium when on 21 May 1853, he opened the Aquatic Vivarium, the world's first public aquarium in Regent's Park, London.*  Glimpses
of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, by
Ann Thwaite. |
| Alexander Wilson | |
(source) |
Died
23 Aug 1813 (born 6 Jul 1766)
Scottish-born ornithologist and poet who left his homeland in 1794, aged 27, in search of a better life in America. Naturalist William Bartram sparked his interest in birds. By 1802, Wilson had resolved to author a book illustrating every North American bird. He travelled extensively to make paintings of the birds he observed. This pioneering work on North American birds grew to nine volumes of American Ornithology, published between 1808 and 1814, with illustrations of 268 species, of which 26 were new. As a founder of American ornithology he became one of the leading naturalists who also made the first census of breeding birds, corrected errors of taxonomy, and may have inspired Audubon's later work when they met in 1810.« Alexander
Wilson: Naturalist and Pioneer,: A biography, by Robert
Cantwell. |
| Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | |
| Died
23 Aug 1806 (born 14 June 1736)
French physicist best known for the formulation of Coulomb's law, which states that the force between two electrical charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Coulombic force is one of the principal forces involved in atomic reactions. |
|
| AUGUST 23 - EVENTS | |
| First human-powered flight | |
In 1977, Bryan Allen won the Kremer Prize for the first human-powered flight
as he pedalled the Gossamer Condor for at least a mile at Schafter,
California. |
|
| First photograph of the Earth from Moon | |
|
In 1966, the Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of the Earth
from the Moon. |
|
| Tire chain patent | |
(USPTO) |
In 1904, Harry D. Weed of Canastota, NY, was issued a U.S. patent for his
"Grip-Tread for Pneumatic Tires" - a snow tire chain for automobiles (No.
768,495). His invention
was "to provide a fexible and collapsible grip or tread composed entirely
of chains linked together and applied to the sides and periphery of the
tire and held in place solely by the inflation of the tire, and which is
reversible" when one side is worn so the other side may be used. The linked-chain
device is assembled around a partially deflated tyre, fastened by hooks
at each end, and then the tyre is reinflated. His patent was eventually
acquired by the American Chain and Cable Company. Weed subsequently held
several related patents and also patents for a bomb carrying gear and a
bomb-release gear filed after WWI. « |
| Ship-to-shore wireless | |
Cliff House 1896 (source) |
In 1899, the first ship-to-shore wireless message
to be received in the U.S was: "Sherman is sighted." U.S. Lightship No.
70, San Francisco, announced the arrival of the U.S. Army troopship Sherman
to the crowd assembled at the Cliff
House. Reporters there from the San Francisco Call, who relayed
this information to a city awaiting the return of its hometown regiment
from the battlefields of the Spanish-American War. The lightship, miles
out at sea in deep fog, relayed this message via wireless telegraphy (later
known as radio) through the fog to the Cliff House. This was the first
19th-century working use of wireless telegraphy outside of England. The
method was still primitive, using sparks to emit intermittent radio waves
and code messages. |
| Hydrogen balloon begins filling | |
In 1783, filling of the first hydrogen balloon began, with the gas produced
by the action of sulphuric acid on iron. Following the success of
the Montgolfier brother's hot air balloon ascent on 5
Jun 1783, a 13-ft (4-m) diameter balloon was built by two brothers
named Robert, under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences. Its
construction was supervised by physicist Jacques
A.C. Charles, who had suggested the use of hydrogen rathe than hot
air. The process of filling the balloon took place over several days, beginning
at the Place des Victoires, Paris. Because of the crowds, it was moved
on the night of 26 Aug to the Champ de Mars, where it was eventually released,
on 27 Aug 1783.«  |
|
| One-way streets | |
|
In 1617, the first one-way streets were established in London. An Act of
Common Council was passed to regulate the "disorder and rude behaviour
of Carmen, Draymen and others using Cartes." Seventeen narrow and congested
lanes were specified. They ran into Thames Street, including Pudding Lane
(where the Great Fire of London began in 1667). "No Carter or Carman to
come into Thames Street by Saint Magnus Corner Eastward with his Carr before
he is hired under penalty of 2s. 6d. for the 1st offence, 5s. for the 2nd
and to be disabled from using a Carr." and "For
avoiding the great numbers of Carrs which come out of ...As late as 1755, the Christ's Hospital Carmen's Committee fined seven carmen 5s. each for violations. The traffic regulation continued for two centuries.* |
|
| Galileo's telescope | |
|
In 1609, the telescope was demonstrated by Galileo. |
|
