August 26 - Today in Science History

AUGUST 26 - BIRTHS
Edward Witten
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1951 American mathematical physicist who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990 for his work in superstring theory. This is work in elementary particle theory, especially quantum field theory and string theory, and their mathematical implications. He elucidated the dynamics of strongly coupled supersymmetric field. The deep physical and mathematical consequences of the electric-magnetic duality thus exploited have broadened the scope of Mathematical Physics. He also received the Dirac Medal from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1985) and the Dannie Heineman Prize from the American Physical Society (1998), among others.
Albert Bruce Sabin
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1906; died 3 Mar 1993. Polish-American physician and microbiologist best known for developing the first oral polio vaccine (1955), which was administered to millions of children in Europe, Africa, and the Americas beginning in the late 1950s. He was also known for his research in the fields of human viral diseases, toxoplasmosis, and cancer.
Hedley Marston
	Born 26 Aug 1900; died 1965 Hedley Ralph Marston was an Australian biohemist who spent three decades with his colleagues researching the role of cobalt and other trace elements in animal and plant nutrition. He is remembered for announcing at the 1935 meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science that a wasting malady of sheep in certain coastal regions was caused by a lack of sufficient of cobalt in their diet. This resulted from a deficiency of the trace element in those region's soils, but dramatic recovery of ailing sheep resulted when given cobalt salt supplements.
Lee De Forest
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1873; died 30 Jun 1961 American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. He held 300 patents.
Jerome C. Hunsaker
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1886; died 10 Sep 1984 American aeronautical engineer who made major innovations in the design of aircraft and lighter-than-air ships, seaplanes, and carrier-based aircraft. His career had spanned the entire existence of the aerospace industry, from the very beginnings of aeronautics to exploration of the solar system. He received his master's degree in naval architecture from M.I.T. in 1912. At about the same time seeing a flight by Bleriot around Boston harbour attracted him to the fledgling field of aeronautics. By 1916, he became MIT's first Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. He designed the NC (Navy Curtiss) flying boat with the capability of crossing the Atlantic. It was the largest aircraft in the world at the time, with four engines and a crew of six.
James Franck
	Born 26 Aug 1882; died 21 May 1964. German-born American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 with Gustav Hertz for research on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment that verified the quantized nature of energy transfer.
Charles Richet
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1850; died 4 Dec 1935. French physiologist, bacteriologist and pathologist who was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He coined (1902) the term "anaphylaxis" meaning "against protection" to describe the subject of his research, when he found a second vaccinating dose of sea anemone toxin caused a dog's death. Instead of producing protection, as expected in the normal response to vaccination, the first dose had produced a life-threatening sensitivity. This led to an understanding a variety of allergic reactions, hay-fever and asthma. His other interests included aviation: attracted by Marey’s experiments on bird flight, Richet participated in the design and construction of one of the first airplanes to leave the ground under its own power.«
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1740; died 26 Jun 1810. French balloon pioneer, with his younger brother, Étienne. An initial experiment with a balloon of taffeta filled with hot smoke was given a public demonstration on 5 Jun 1783. This was followed by a flight carrying three animals as passengers on 19 Sep 1783, shown in Paris and witnessed by King Louis XVI. On 21 Nov 1783, their balloon carried the first two men on an untethered flight. In the span of one year after releasing their test balloon, the Montgolfier brothers had enabled the first manned balloon flight in the world. The Montgolfier Brothers and the Invention of Aviation, 1783-1784, by Charles Coulston Gillispie.
Johann Heinrich Lambert
(source)	Born 26 Aug 1728; died 25 Sep 1777. Swiss-German mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher who provided the first rigorous proof that pi is irrational (cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers). In 1766, Lambert wrote Theorie der Parallellinien, a study of the parallel postulate. By assuming that the parallel postulate was false, he deduced many non-euclidean results. He noticed that in this new geometry the sum of the angles of a triangle increases as its area decreases. Lambert conjectured that e and p are transcendental, though this was not proved for another century. He is responsible for many innovations in the study of heat and light, devised a method of measuring light intensity, as well as working on the theory of probability.
Stephen McCormick
	Born 26 Aug 1784; died 28 Aug 1875. American inventor and manufacturer of a practical cast iron plow with detachable components. An earliest achievement was to increase the productivity of a water-powered grist-mill by improving the shape of its nether millstone (the lower of the two millstones used to grind flour). By 1816, he had invented, made, and used a cast-iron plough superior to Charles Newbold's earlier design. McCormick's first of several patents was issued on on 3 Feb 1819. His cast-iron mould board had an adjustable wrought-iron point mounted beneath, able to decrease the draft, while deepening the furrow, and breaking up the soil more effectively. Standardization of the replaceable parts led to the development of improved manufacturing processes.«
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
	Born 26 Aug 1743; died 8 May 1794. French scientist, the "father of modern chemistry," was a brilliant experimenter also active in public affairs. An aristocrat, he invested in a private company hired by the government to collect taxes. With his wealth he built a large laboratory. In 1778, he found that air consists of a mixture of two gases which he called oxygen and nitrogen. By studying the role of oxygen in combustion, he replaced the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier also discovered the law of conservation of mass and devised the modern method of naming compounds, which replaced the older nonsystematic method. During the French Revolution, for his involvement with tax-collecting, he was guillotined.

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AUGUST 26 - DEATHS

Frederick Reines
(source)	Died 26 Aug 1998 (born 16 Mar 1918) American physicist who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for his detection in 1956 of neutrinos, working with his colleague Clyde L. Cowan, Jr. The neutrino is a subatomic particle, a tiny lepton with little or no mass and a neutral charge which had been postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in the early 1930s but had previously remained undiscovered. (Reines shared the Nobel Prize with physicist Martin Lewis Perl, who discovered the tau lepton.)
Robert Joseph Huebner
	Died 26 Aug 1998 (born 23 Feb 1914) American virologist whose theory that certain genes, which he called oncogenes, are involved in cancer focused researchers' attention on finding them. His investigations paved the way for the discovery of viral causes of cancers and several other serious diseases and for the development of a number of vaccines and treatments
Georg Wittig
(source)	Died 26 Aug 1987 (born 16 Jun 1897) German chemist whose studies of organic phosphorus compounds won him a share (with Herbert C. Brown) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1979. In 1953, he discovered how a family of organic compounds called ylides could form the basis of the Wittig reaction, which easily and predictably joins two carbon atoms from different molecules to form a double bond. The Wittig reaction's reliability enabled other chemists to pursue and publish findings on thousands of applications for linking large carbon molecules. The process was used for synthesizing complex compounds such as vitamin A, vitamin D derivatives, steroids, and biological pesticides. Because of the Wittig reaction, such compounds can now routinely be synthesized.
Charles A. Lindbergh
1927 (source)	Died 26 Aug 1974 (born 4 Feb 1902) Charles A(ugustus) Lindbergh was a famous American aviator, remembered for the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic (1927). He first served as an apprentice to a barnstormer, performing as a wingwalker and parachute jumper. Then, he purchasing a war surplus Jenny trainer, made his first solo flight and barnstormed himself for about a year. Later, he became the first air mail pilot between Chicago, Ill., and St, Louis, Mo. On 20 May 1927, Lindbergh left New York for Paris, carrying sandwiches and water. He decided against carrying a parachute and radio in favor of more gasoline. He fought fog, icing and drowsiness. He landed 21 May, 33-1/2 hours later, in Paris after a 3,600 mile flight.« The Spirit of St. Louis, by Charles A. Lindbergh.
Ranson Eli Olds
	Died 26 Aug 1950 (born 3 Jun 1864) American inventor and automobile manufacturer, designer of the three-horsepower, curved-dash Oldsmobile, the first commercially successful American-made automobile and the first to use a progressive assembly system, which foreshadowed modern mass-production methods. When young, he worked in his father's machine and repair shop, in Lansing, Mich., where he experimented with small steam engines. In 1887, for a distance of one block, Olds drove Lansing's first automobile, an experimental steam vehicle. He continued to work with steam, gasoline and electric power. Eventually he produced a gasoline-powered vehicle that seated four persons and could do 18 miles per hour on level ground.
John North Willys
(source)	Died 26 Aug 1935 (born 25 Oct 1873) American industrialist who developed early automotive production. In 1912-18, Willys' output ranked second only to Ford. Willys first saw an early automobile in 1899, realized its potential, and came a car salesman. By 1907, his sales out-stripped his supplier's ability to produce, so he stepped in and reorganized the faltering Overland Company in Indianapolis. He successfully increased production, and expanded the Willys-Overland plant into a larger factory in Toledo, Ohio. During WW I, Willys-Overland became a major producer of trucks, airplanes and airplane engines. After his death, the Willys-Overland company pioneered the WW II Jeep, a rugged off-road vehicle. In 1970, the company was bought by American Motors Corporation.«
Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen
(source)	Died 26 Aug 1910 (born 2 Dec 1833) German pathologist, known by descriptions of two disorders, each called Recklinghausen's disease: multiple neurofibromatosis (1882), an inheritable disease characterized by café au lait spots combined with multiple peripheral nerve tumours and a variety of others dysplastic abnormalities of the skin, nervous system, bones, endocrine organs and blood vessels; and osteitis fibrosa cystica (1891), a now mostly historical term for a generalized rarefying bone disorder with skeletal deformation, seen in advanced hyperparathyroidism. He was a traditional histopathologist of his time, resistant to changes such as the use of the microtome or the results of the new science of bacteriology. He taught and remained active as a researcher until shortly before his death.
William James
	Died 26 Aug 1909 (born 11 Jan 1842) American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism and of the psychological movement of functionalism.
Johann Friedrich Miescher
	Died 26 Aug 1895 (born 13 Aug 1844) Swiss student of cell metabolism and discoverer of nucleic acids. In 1869, while working under Ernst Hoppe-Seyler at the University of Tübingen, Miescher discovered a substance containing both phosphorus and nitrogen in the nuclei of white blood cells found in pus. The substance, first named nuclein because it seemed to come from cell nuclei, became known as nucleic acid after 1874, when Miescher separated it into a protein and an acid molecule. It is now known as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Gustav Friedrich Klemm
	Died 26 Aug 1867 (born 12 Nov 1802) German anthropologist who developed the concept of culture and is thought to have influenced the prominent English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor. Klemm spent most of his life as director of the royal library at Dresden.
Johann Encke Encke
	Died 26 Aug 1865 (born 23 Sep 1791) German astronomer who established the period of Encke's Comet at 3.3 years (shortest period of any known).
Antony van Leeuwenhoek
	Died 26 Aug 1723 (born 24 Oct 1632) Dutch scientist, microscopist and zoologist who was the first to observe bacteria and protozoa. His researches on lower animals refuted the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and his observations helped lay the foundations for the sciences of bacteriology and protozoology.



AUGUST 26 - EVENTS

Tape recording
	In 1938, a tape recorder was used for the first time in the U.S. to send a radio broadcast. A sapphire stylus engraved Millertape, an invention by James Arthur Miller of the Miller Broadcasting Company. A 1,000 foot section of this tape could carry a 15-min program, which could be editted by cutting. This first program using this sound tape was transmitted by WQXR, the Interstate Broadcasting Company, in New York City from 6:30pm to 7 pm.
Cro-Magnon man
(source)	In 1909, an almost perfectly preserved Cro-Magnon man skeleton was discovered by Swiss paleontologist Otto Hauser. He was one member of a party hunting fossils in the Combe-Capelle rockshelter, France. At 34,000 years old, the remains provided an example of man's development leading towards the emergence of Homo sapiens. The following year, Hauser sold this and and earlier discovery of skeletal remains from Le Moustier (1908) to the Berlin Völkerkunde-Museum. Because Hauser was debt-ridden, he demanded the extraordinary sum of 160,000 Marks as the sale price. Most of the skeleton itself is believed to have been destroyed during WW II.
Niagara Falls
	In 1895, electricity was first transmitted commercially from the first large-scale utilization of Niagara Falls power, the current being used by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company in the electrolytic production of aluminium metal from its ore. Buffalo subsequently received power for commercial use on 15 Nov 1896. The equipment was the result of a contract made on 24 Oct 1893 whereby Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, Pa., would install three 5,000-hp generators producing two-phase currents at 2,200 volts, 25 hertz. The first such tuboalternator unit was completed within 18 months. Prior capacity had been limited to generators no larger than 1,000 hp.
Krakatoa
	In 1883, Mount Krakatoa, an island volcano in the Dutch Indies (now Indonesia) erupted with violent explosions that destroyed two thirds of the island and produced huge tsunami waves that swept across the immediate region, killing an estimated 36,000 people. The waves were powerful enough to cross the Indian Ocean and travel beyond Cape Horn. The most powerful blast was the most violent known in human history, was loud enough to be heard in Australia, and the shockwave was registered by barometers England. The huge amount of volcanic dust thrust high into the stratosphere eventually travelled around the world. The dust blocked sunlight causing temperature drops and chaotic weather patterns for several years afterwards.«
Typesetting machine patent
	In 1884, the first U.S. patent for the Linotype typesetting machine was issued to Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore, Maryland. His patent No. 304,272 was for a "matrix making machine." It was first used commercially on 3 Jul 1886. (An earlier U.S. design of typesetting machine that actually operated received a patent on 15 Sep 1857, though the machine invented by Timothy Alden of New York City was designed to pick up type from cells in a horizonatal rotating wheel, and drop it into a line for composition. The first U.S. patent for a typesetting machine was issued even earlier, to Adrien Delcambre and James Haddon Young of Lisle, France, on 22 Jun 1841, for a machine with piano-style keys to operate push-type levers that released type to fall by gravity.)
Perkin patent for aniline dye
	In 1856, William Henry Perkin, an English chemist, applied for a British patent titled "Dyeing Fabrics" for his invention of aniline dye "producing a new coloring matter for dyeing with a lilac or purple color stuffs of silk, cotton, wool or other materials." It was sealed on 20 Feb 1857. This was the first synthetic dye, which he obtained at first unintentionally from coal tar (a by-product of coal gas production) while seeking a method to prepare the anti-malarial drug quinine from that source. Perkin was just 18 years old. With help from his father and brother, he began manufacturing the dye, which he called Tyrian purple. Within a few years, he was wealthy and in in 1873 sold the business to turn to chemistry full-time.«
Typewriter
1843 (source)	In 1843, the first U.S. design of a typewriter that successfully typed was issued a patent to Charles Thurber of Norwich, Conn. (No. 3,228) as a "machine for printing by hand by pressing upon keys which contain the type, called 'Thurber's Patent Printer.'" He was the first to place the paper on a roller and give it longitudinal motion with provision for accurate letter and word spacing. It had a wheel carrying the keys around its circumference. A roller provided inking. However, the machine was slow to use, and only a concept model. Two years later, he patented a different design of typing machine, which he called a Chirographer (18 Nov 1845, No. 4,271). On 27 Jun 1857, British Letters Patent were sealed (No. 1805) on Thurber's invention of "An improved caligraph."« [Image: Thurber's Patent Printer of 1843.]
Steam power patents
	In 1791, there were U.S. patents issued severally to James Rumsey, John Fitch, Nathan Read, John Stevens and Englehart Cruse for their various uses of steam power. Several of the patentees had previously obtained exclusive priviledges from some of the State Legislatures.*« As the original applications had not satisfied the patent board with the precision of their descriptions of the inventions, a hearing was held with the inventors in Feb 1791. Fitch and Rumsey were in bitter dispute for priority using steam as a motive power to navigation. Jefferson said that they could make no distinction among all the patents, nor give one preference, and decided all patents should be issued on the same day.«
Cannon
	In 1346, the cannon, firing a round ball carved from rock, was first used in battle in France. Edward III of England reportedly used 22 cannon during the defeat of Philip VI of France at Crécy. The earliest cannons, having no more power than the trebuchet, could not bring down the walls by themselves. Their chief effect, in the beginning, was psychological: the burst of fire and loud noise were effective in getting the enemy's attention, making it impossible for them to forget that their lives were in danger. Their effect is recorded in a well known manuscript - Froissart's Chroniques of the battle of Crécy: "The English fired of some cannons which they had brought to the battle to frighten the Genoese." The victory is attributed to the longbowmen.