| AUGUST 29 - BIRTHS | |
| Nathan Pritikin | |
(source) |
 Born 29
Aug 1915; died 21 Feb 1985
Scientist and nutritionist. Pritikin believed that moderate exercise combined with a diet low in fat and high in unrefined carbohydrates reversed his own heart disease discovered in the late 1950's. He opened the Pritikin Longevity Center in 1976 in Santa Barbara, Cal. to treat others with diet and exercise in a clinical setting. |
| Charles F. Kettering | |
(source) |
Born 29
Aug 1876; died 25 Nov 1958
Charles Franklin Kettering was an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. In his early career, with the National Cash Register Co., Dayton (1904-09), he created the first electric cash register with an electric motor that opened the drawer. When he co-founded the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO, with Edward A. Deeds) he invented the key-operated self-starting motor for the Cadillac (1912) and it spread to nearly all new cars by the 1920's. As vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47) he developed engines, quick-drying lacquer finishes, anti-knock fuels, and variable-speed transmissions.« 
Professional
Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering,
by T. A. Boyd. |
| Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet | |
| Born 29
Aug 1821; died 25 Sep 1898
French anthropologist who was the first to organize man's prehistoric cultural developments into a sequence of epochs. Based on the idea that older specimens of man were more primitive structurally and culturally, he created a ladder-like model of the evolution of man. This model was the basis for the idea of linear evolution of men. This classification system was further detailed in 1882, in Le Prehistorique: antiquite de l’homme (The Prehistoric: Man's Antiquity). His classification system continued to be the basis for anthropological classification into the 1900’s. For example, he ordered the Paleolithic (Stone Age) epochs into Chellean, Acheulian, Mousterian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and so on. |
|
| Oliver Wendell Holmes | |
| Born 29
Aug 1809; died 7 Oct 1894
American physician who discovered the contagious nature of childbed fever, and coined the term "anesthesia" (from Greek words meaning "no feeling").His position on the contagiousness of childbed fever, similar to that of Semmelweiss took a few year later, caused both some professional abuse, but Holmes lived long enough to see himself justified. He was best-known as an essayist-poet, and was the father of the Supreme Court judge of the same name. |
|
| Sir Gilbert Blane | |
(source) |
Born 29
Aug 1749; died 26 June 1834.
Scottish physician who, when head of the Navy Medical Board, required (1795) a diet including lemon juice on navy vessels, which vitually eliminating scurvy and its significant lost manpower due to sickness of sailors. The value of citrus juice had been established by James Lind, with his Treatice on Scurvy (1754). Blane also improved sanitary conditions in the Navy by providing supplies of soap and medicines, and was involved with designing rules that were precursors to modern quarantine conditions. He required every surgeon in the service to make regular returns or journals of the state of health and disease onboard their ship. In 1829, he established a prize medal as an incentive for the surgeon producing the best journal.« Scurvy:
How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentlemen Solved...,
by Stephen Bown. |
| John Locke | |
(source) |
Born 29
Aug 1632; died 28 Oct 1704.
English physician who was the most important philosopher during the Age of Reason. He spent over 20 years developing the ideas he published in most significant work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) which analysed the nature of human reason, and promoted experimentation as the basis of knowledge. He established primary qualities, (ex. solidity, extension, number) as distinct from secondary qualities identified by the sense organs (ex. colour, sound). Thus the world is otherwise silent and without colour. Locke recognised that science is made possible when the primary world mechanically affects the sense organs, thereby creating ideas that faithfully represent reality. He was an acquaintance of Robert Boyle.« |
|
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| AUGUST 29 - DEATHS | |
| Charles Darrow | |
(source) |
 Died
29 Aug 1967 (born 10 Aug 1889)
Charles Brace Darrow was an American inventor who designed the board game Monopoly. He had invented the game on 7 Mar 1933, though it was preceded by other real-estate board games. On 31 Dec 1935, a patent was issued for the game of Monopoly assigned to Parker Brothers, Inc., by Charles Darrow of Pennsylvania (No. 2,026,082). The patent titled it a "Board Game Apparatus" and described it as "intended primarily to provide a game of barter, thus involving trading and bargaining" in which "much of the interest in the game lies in trading and in striking shrewd bargains." Illustrations included with the patent showed not only the playing board and pieces, cards, and the scrip money. Monopoly,
game by Parker Brothers. |
| Christian Friedrich Schönbein | |
(source) |
Died
29 Aug 1868 (born 18 Oct 1799)
German-Swiss chemist who discovered and named ozone (1840) and was the first to describe guncotton (nitrocellulose). He noted ozone appeared during thunderstorms and named the gas ozone for its peculiar smell (ozo is Greek for smell). Later experiments showed that sending an electric current through pure, dry oxygen (O2) creates ozone (O3). His discovery of the powerful explosive called cellulose nitrate, or gun cotton, was the result of a laboratory accident. One day in 1845 he spilled sulfuric and nitric acids and soaked it with a cotton apron. After the apron dried, it burst into flame - he had created nitrated cellulose. He found that cellulose nitrate could be molded and had some elastic properties. It eventually was used for smokeless gun powder. |
| Robert Remak | |
(source) |
Died
29 Aug 1865 (born 26 Jul 1815)
Polish-German physician, neurologist and embryologist. While in medical practice, he researched unpaid at university. (As a Jew, he was barred from teaching.) He discovered the fibres of Remak (1830), nonmedullated nerve fibres (1838), and named the three germ layers he discovered of the early embryo: the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm (1842). In 1844 he discovered the nerve cells in the heart now called Remak's ganglia and provided the first illustration of the 6-layered cortex. He was a pioneer in the use of electrotherapy for the treatment of nervous diseases. He finally became the first Jew to teach at university (1847), but even promotion to assistant professor in 1859 did not reflect his eminence. |
| AUGUST 29 - EVENTS | |
| Element 109 | |
In 1982, an atom of a new element was made. It has been given the proposed
name of Meitnerium, symbol Mt. Physicists at the Heavy Ion Research Laboratory,
Darmstadt, West Germany made
and identified element 109 by bombing a target of Bi-209 with accelerated
nuclei of Fe-58. After a week of target bombardment a single fused nucleus
was produced. The combined energy of two nuclei had to be sufficiently
high so that the repulsive forces between the nuclei could be overcome.
The team confirmed the existence of element 109 by four independent measurements.
The nucleus started to decay 5 ms after striking the detector. This experiment
demonstrated the feasibility of using fusion techniques as a method of
making new, heavy nuclei. |
|
| Transglobe | |
|
In 1982, the 52,000-mile "Transglobe" expedition completed the first circumnavigation
of the world's polar axis. Beginning in 1979, British explorer Ranulph
Fiennes with Charles Burton had travelled for three years around the
Earth via the Poles circling the earth on longitude 0, the Greenwich Meridian.
They had reached the North Pole on 11 Apr 1982, and the South Pole sixteen
months before that. Their journey across Antarctica
took 67 days, despite the advantages
of motorised skidoos. The ocean voyage was undertaken in a craft named
Benjamin
Bowring. The expedition cost an estimated $18 million.
(source) |
|
| Astronaut speaks to aquanaut | |
|
In 1965, astronaut Gordon Cooper in orbit 100 miles above the Earth aboard
Gemini
5 held a conversation with aquanaut M. Scott Carpenter in
Sealab
II which was 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It was
was first time an astronaut in space spoke with an aquanaut.
Gemini
5 splashed down later in the day. |
|
| DDT | |
|
In 1962, the dangerous long-range side-effects of DDT and other pesticides
was the subject of a press-conference question to President John F. Kennedy.
In his reply, he acknowledged Rachel Carson's ground-breaking environmental
book on the subject (Silent Spring) and stated that the government
was taking a closer look at this. Eventually DDT was banned in the U.S. |
|
| USSR's first atomic bomb | |
(source) |
In 1949, the USSR tested
their first atomic
device, "First Lightning." It was an an implosive type plutonium bomb,
detonated at the Semipalatinsk test range, giving up to a 20 kiloton yield.
In the U.S. it was calledJoe
No. 1 ("Joe" was nickname for Y. Stalin.) This event came five years
earlier than anyone in the West had predicted, largely
due to one man, the spy Klaus Fuchs.
As a Los Alamos physicist, Fuchs had passed detailed blue prints of the
original American Trinity bomb design to the Russians. With the emergence
of the USSR as a nuclear rival, America's monopoly of atomic weaponry was
ended giving the U.S. strong motivation for intensifying its program of
nuclear testing. Thus the Cold War was launched. [Image
right: from RFNC-VNIIEF Nuclear Weapons Museum (source)
] |
| World War II cooperation | |
|
In 1940, Sir Henry Tizard led a mission of leading British and Canadian
scientists to the USA 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. |
|
| Zipper patent | |
(USPTO) |
In 1893, U.S. patent No. 504,038 was issued to Whitcomb L. Judson for a
"Zipper Clasp Locker or Unlocker for Shoes." |
| Mount Washington Cog Railway | |
(source) |
In 1866, a public demonstration was given of the first cog
railway in the world to show the first half-mile of track at the base
of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast U.S. The Mount Washington
Cog Railway eventually ran to the summit of Mount Washington, N.H. giving
views of four states, Canada, and the Atlantic Ocean. Invented
by Sylvester Marsh of Littleton, N.H., work began on the railway in May
1866 and finished in July 1869 at a cost of $139,500. In 1869, the
Cog Railway was an engineering marvel, a new technology of toothed cog
gears, rack rails and tilted boilers. A third toothed rail was laid between
the steel rails for the wheels. In the present day, it remains in use,
the only cog railway still powered by steam. |
| Design patent | |
|
In 1842, the design patent, a new form of patent was authorized by Act
of Congress. The first
U.S. design patent was issued for typefaces and borders to George Bruce
of New York City on 9 Nov 1842. |
|
| Darwin invited as Beagle naturalist | |
(source) |
In 1831, Charles Darwin returned
home from a geology field trip in North Wales to find letters
from Revd. John Henslow and George Peacock informing him that he will soon
be invited on a scientific voyage of HMS Beagle. He was 22 years
old, and had just graduated from Cambridge University. The offer was to
be a naturalist on H.M.S. Beagle for a two year survey of South
America, leaving on 25 Sep. Although he immediately accepted the offer,
his father and sisters were opposed. They regarded it as an idle pursuit
that would delay his expected career in the clergy. His father, however,
was prepared to change his mind, but only if Darwin could find a qualified
man who viewed the exploit as worthwhile. Darwin spent the next two days
doing just that.« 
 From
So Simple a Beginning: Darwin's Four Great Books, by
Charles Darwin, Edward O. Wilson. |
| Faraday experiment | |
 |
In 1831, Michael Faraday wound a thick iron ring on one side with insulated
wire that was connected to a battery. He then wound the opposite side with
wire connected to a galvanometer. He found that upon closing the battery
circuit, there was a deflection of the galvanometer in the second circuit.
Then he was astonished to see the galvanometer needle jump in the opposite
direction when the battery circuit was opened. He had discovered that a
current was induced in the secondary when a current in the primary was
connected and an induced current in the opposite direction when the primary
current was disconnected. eb |
| Brake patent | |
|
In 1828, the first U.S. patent for a brake of any kind was issued to Robert
Turner of Ward (now Auburn), Mass. This was for a "self-regulating wagon
brake." |
|
