| SEPTEMBER 6 - BIRTHS | |
| Richard J. Roberts | |
(source) |
 Born 6
Sep 1943
English molecular biologist, co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with Phillip A. Sharp, for their discovery of "split genes." In 1977, each independently discovered that genes could be discontinuous, that is, a given gene could be present in the genetic material (DNA) as several, well-separated segments. This discovery has changed our view on how genes in higher organisms develop during evolution. It also led to the prediction of a new genetic process - splicing - which is essential for expressing the genetic information. Their discovery has also been of fundamental importance for today's basic research in biology, as well as for more medically oriented research concerning the development of cancer and other diseases. |
| Louis Essen | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1908; died 24 Aug 1997
English physicist who invented the quartz crystal ring clock and the first practical atomic clock. These devices were capable of measuring time more accurately than any previous clocks. He built a cesium-beam atomic clock, a device that ultimately changed the way time is measured. Each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. The cesium atom's natural frequency was formally recognized as the new international unit of time in 1967: the second was defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations or cycles of the cesium atom's resonant frequency, replacing the old second defined in terms of the Earth's motion.  Splitting
the Second: the Story of Atomic Time, by Tony Jones. |
| Luis Federico Leloir | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1906; died 2 Dec 1987.
Argentine biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1970 for "his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates" (investigations of the processes by which carbohydrates are converted into energy in the body). Leloir, working in simple circumstances, isolated uridine diphosphate glucose and showed that it was incorporated into glycogen in the presence of a liver enzyme. He also worked out the mechanism of synthesis of starch. Leloir's discoveries - that the sugar nucleotides are principal actors in interconversion of sugars and polysaccharide formation - led to additional research in carbohydrate metabolism and on the medical implications of the discoveries. |
| Ernst Weber | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1901; died 16 Feb 1996.
Austrian-born American electrical engineer who contributed to the development of microwave technology, applied in radar and communications systems. During WWII, he led researchers solving the problems of accurately measuring very high frequency microwaves, essential for the calibration of radar. (This involved learning how to coat glass tubes with a very thin layer of conducting metal, which Weber derived from the ancient skill of decorating chinaware with gold and silver, followed by success using a mixture of platinum and palladium.). The team created other designs and production techniques that helped the overall development of radar during the war. His expertise later guided the growth of the Polytechnic Institute in New York City.«
The
Evolution of Electrical Engineering: A Personal Perspective,
by Ernst Weber. |
| Walter Robert Dornberger | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1895; died 27 Jun 1980.
German-American engineer who successfully a series of designs of rockets culminating in becoming commander of the entire Nazi guided missile program aand responsible for the manufacture of the V2 flying bombs. In 1944-45, 1,500 of these 46-foot 14-ton rockets were armed with explosive warheads and launched against Britain. Another 2,000 were fired into Antwerp, Belgium. After the Allied victory, he was held as a prisoner of war in England for three years (1945-47), then was moved to the U.S. to act as a civilian consultant to the American air force. From 1950, he worked for Bell Aircraft Corporation on their Rascal air-to-surface missile, and the Dyna-Soar manned Space Glider programme. His book, V2 (1952) tells of his contributions to the development of jet propulsion.« |
| Sir Edward Appleton | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1892; died 21 Apr 1965.
Sir Edward (Victor) Appleton, was an English physicist who won the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the Appleton layer of the ionosphere. From 1919, he devoted himself to scientific problems in atmospheric physics, using mainly radio techniques. He proved the existence of the ionosphere, and found a layer 60 miles above the ground that reflected radio waves. In 1926, he found another layer 150 miles above ground, higher than the Heaviside Layer, electrically stronger, and able to reflect short waves round the earth. This Appleton layer is a dependable reflector of radio waves and more useful in communication than other ionospheric layers that reflect radio waves sporadically, depending upon temperature and time of day.«
Sir
Edward Appleton, by Ronald William Clark. |
| Yrjo Vaisala | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1891; died 21 Jul 1971.
Finnish meteorologist and astronomer regarded as the "father of space research in Finland," As early as 1946, he had suggested that geodetic triangulation at that time being done with rockets or balloons with onboard flashes could better be accomplished by artificial satellites. By the next year he was talking about artificial satellites being used for solar system exploration. In the 1950's he founded Tuorla Observatory and went on to build a tunnel under the hill at Tuorla Observatory to enable making interference measurements to accurately define the length standard for geodesy. He was outstanding in his ability to produce excellent optics for telescopes. Vaisala, together with Liisa Oterman at Tuorla, outpaced the rest of the world in their discovery of minor planets.« |
| J.J.R. Macleod | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1876; died 16 Mar 1935.
J(ohn) J(ames) R(ickard) Macleod, was a Scottish physiologist, born New Clunie, Tayside, noted as a teacher and for his work on carbohydrate metabolism. Together with Sir Frederick Banting (with whom he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1923) and Charles H. Best, he achieved renown as one of the discoverers of insulin.
Physiology
and Biochemistry in Modern Medicine, by John James Rickard
Macleod. |
| John Henry Dallmeyer | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1830; died 30 Dec 1883.
German-born British inventor and manufacturer of lenses and telescopes. He introduced improvements in both photographic portrait and landscape lenses, in object glasses for the microscope, and in condensers for the optical lantern. Dallmeyer made photoheliographs (telescopes adapted for photographing the Sun) for Harvard observatory (1864), and the British government (1873). He introduced the "rapid rectilinear" (1866) which is a lens system composed of two matching doublet lenses, symmetrically placed around the focal aperture to remove many of the aberrations present in more simple constructions. He died on board a ship at sea off New Zealand. [Image: Dallmeyer 10x8 Rapid Rectilinear Brass Lens for a large format camera.] |
| Aleksandr Butlerov | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1828; 17 Aug 1886
Russian chemist whose theory of organic chemistry structure was an important step towards the modern understanding of organic chemistry. In 1861, he read a paper to a congress of German scientists in which he defined "chemical structure" as the "chemical bond of capicity for the mutual union of atoms into a complex substance." Furthermore, "the chemical nature of a compound molecule is determined by the nature of its component parts, by their quantity and their chemical structure." In his rules for determining the chemical structure of molecules, he recognized the character of radicals to retain their own structure. In his investigation of unsaturated compounds, he supported the idea of multiple bonds. He also worked distinguishing isomers.« |
| James Melville Gilliss | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1811; died 9 Feb 1865.
U.S. naval officer and astronomer who founded the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., the first U.S. observatory devoted entirely to research. Gilliss joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 15. He taught himself astronomy, at a time when there was no fixed astronomical observatory in the U.S., and very little formal instruction. In 1838, when Charles Wilkes left on the famous South Seas Exploring Expedition, Gilliss became officer-in-charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments, forerunner of the U. S. Naval Observatory. Gilliss's astronomical observations made during this time in connection with determining longitude differences with the Wilkes Expedition, resulted in the first star catalogue published in the United States.  |
| Alcide Dessalines d' Orbigny | |
(source) |
Born 6
Sep 1802; died 30 Jun 1857.
French paleontologist and zoologist who founded the science of micropaleontology. From 1826-33, on commission for the Musée d' Histoire Naturelle, he travelled for eight years in South America, then produced a 10-volume report (1834-47) on its zoology, botany, paleontology and antrhropology. He made detailed studies of tiny marine fossils, pollen, grain and spores found in sedimentary rocks. In 1926, he established the classification Foraminifera for microscopic cephalopods. Because of their evolutionary changes through geological time, they are very helpful for the purpose of dating rock strata. In particular, this now has great practical value in petroleum exploration when inspecting core samples.« |
| John Dalton | |
1825 (source) |
Born 6
Sep 1766; died 27 Jul 1844.
English teacher who, from investigating the physical and chemical properties of matter, deduced an Atomic Theory (1803) whereby atoms of the same element are the same, but different from the atoms of any other element. In 1804, he stated his law of multiple proportions by which he related the ratios of the weights of the reactants to the proportions of elements in compounds. He set the atomic weight of hydrogen to be identically equal to one and developed a table of atomic weights for other elements. He was the first to measure the temperature change of air under compression, and in 1801 suggested that all gases could be liquified by high pressure and low temperature. Dalton recognised that the aurora borealis was an electrical phenomenon.«
Memoir
of John Dalton, and History of the Atomic Theory up to His Time,
by Robert Angus Smith. |
| SEPTEMBER 6 - DEATHS | |
| Arthur William Sidney Herrington | |
(source) |
 Died
6 Sep 1970 (born 30 Mar 1891)
American engineer and manufacturer who developed a series of military vehicles, the best known of which was the World War II jeep. During World War I, he started to work on a new design for military trucks for rough terrain, the smallest of which was the quarter-ton jeep with four-wheel drive that became the prototype for various models built in the 1930s and 1940s. The Jeep served in WW II as a litterbearer, machine gun firing mount, reconnaissance vehicle, pickup truck, front line limousine, ammo bearer, wire-layer and taxi. |
| William Francis Gibbs | |
(source) |
Died
6 Sep 1967 (born 24 Aug 1886)
American naval architect, one of the most renowned in his time, having designed over 6,000 ships from a fireboat, to freighters, ocean liners and warships. Early in his life, he began building self-taught skills by studying blueprints and existing vessels. In 1915, Gibbs and his brother Frederic H., joined the International Mercantile Marine Company, but had their own firm by 1922 which converted an ex-German liner into the American luxury liner SS Leviathan. The Gibbs firm oversaw the design of 74% of all naval vessels built during WW II, making Gibbs an outstanding contributor to the American war effort. Postwar, he realized his lifelong dream: the 1,000 foot superliner, the SS United States, the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic.« |
| Margaret Sanger | |
(source) |
Died
6 Sep 1966 (born 14 Sep 1879)
(neé Maragret Louisa Higgins) American birth-control champion who founded the first U.S. birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York (1916), where she had witnessed firsthand the interaction of poverty, uncontrolled fertility, and deaths from botched abortions, together with high rates of infant and maternal mortality. She became an international leader, and is thought to be the first to use the term "birth control." |
| Phoebus Levene | |
 |
Died
6 Sep 1940 (born 25 Feb 1869)
Phoebus (Aaron Theodor) Levene was a Russian-born American chemist and pioneer in the study of nucleic acids. In 1909, he found that the carbohydrate present in nucleic acid from yeast is the pentose sugar ribose. In 1929, he succeeded in identifying the carbohydrate in the nucleic acid from the thymus of an animal. It is also a pentose sugar but lacks one oxygen atom of ribose and was therefore called deoxyribose. These were named ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acids (RNA and DNA). Levene also determined how the nucleic acid components combine to form the nucleotides and how the nucleotides combine in chains. Later discoveries showed DNA and RNA to be key elements in the maintenance of life. |
| Sir Frederick Abel | |
(source) |
Died 6 Sep 1902 (born 17 July 1827)
Sir Frederick (Augustus) Abel was an English chemist and military explosives specialist who, with the chemist Sir James Dewar, invented cordite (1889). This smokeless gunpowder was later adopted as the standard explosive of the British army, and proved vital in WWI. Battles could now be fought without the obscuring smoke clouds of gunpowder weapons. Cordite was mixed from purified ingredients of nitroglycerine, nitrocellulose and petroleum jelly then extruded as cords. When dried, this explosive could be measured more precisely and handled more safely than gunpowder. Abel also studied dust explosions in coal mines, invented a device for testing the flash point of petroleum, and found a way to prevent guncotton from exploding. [Image right: Cordite mill (1942) Dynamite Company Museum, Zaire (source) ] |
| G. Brown Goode | |
(source) |
Died
6 Sep 1896 (born 13 Feb 1851)
G(eorge) Brown Goode was an American zoologist who directed the scientific reorganization and recataloging of the collection at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. During the 1880's he edited two volumes of atlases of illustrations of "The Fisheries and Fisheries Industries of the United States" while Deputy Commissioner of the United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries. The study captured the state of the American fisheries at that time. They describe a significant part of the marine environment with 532 etchings of marine mammals, fish, and shellfish and also illustrated the state of fishing vessels, gear, methods, and processing. |
| Johann Salamo Christoph Schweigger | |
(source) |
Died
6 Sep 1857 (born 8 Apr 1779)
German physicist who invented the galvanometer (1820), a device to measure the strength of an electric current. He developed the principle from Oersted's experiment (1819) which showed that current in a wire will deflect a compass needle. Schweigger realized that suggested a basic measuring instrument, since a stronger current would produce a larger deflection, and he increased the effect by winding the wire many times in a coil around the magnetic needle. He named this instrument a "galvanometer" in honour of Luigi Galvani, the professor who gave Volta the idea for the first battery. Seebeck (1770-1831) named the innovative coil, Schweigger's multiplier. It became the basis of moving coil instruments and loudspeakers. |
| SEPTEMBER 6 - EVENTS | |
| Insulin by genetic engineering | |
(source) |
In 1978, U.S. scientists announced
the production of human-type insulin by a strain of E. coli bacteria,
that had been genetically engineered after months of creative use of gene-splicing
techniques. The work was a joint effort by research teams in California
at the biochemical firm, Genentech Inc, San Francisco and the City of Hope
National Medical Center, Los Angeles. A normal body's production of insulin
takes place within cells of the pancreas, programmed by certain genes (segments
of DNA). The scientists synthesized copies of these genes and inserted
them into a weakened lab strain of the intestinal microbe Escherichia
coli. In 1982, insulin was the first
recombinant DNA drug to be marketed,
Humulin
by Eli Lilly & Co.« [Image:
graphic suggesting recombinant DNA cell culture.] |
| Ethylene pipeline | |
(source) |
In 1958, The first U.S. interstate pipeline for the transport of ethylene
was placed in service between Lake Charles, Louisiana and Orange, Texas.
The 6-5/8" pipeline ran 30 miles, providing ethylene to the E.I. duPont
de Nemours & Company at Orange for the manufacture of synthetic rubber.*
There are now many hundreds of miles of ethylene pipelines
stretching across 14 counties in Texas and two parishes in Louisiana. They
link the ethylene producer with a number of chemical manufacturers and
storage facilities utilizing underground salt domes or wells. Ethylene
is also manufactured into polyethylene products for many uses, including
consumer goods, housing components or vehicle parts. |
| Atomic electricity generator | |
(source) |
In 1954, ground breaking took place at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, for
the first U.S. full-scale atomic electricity generating station devoted
exclusively to peaceful uses. Televised
from Denver, Colorado, President Eisenhower remotely signalled a radio-controlled
bulldozer. On 2 Dec 1957, the reactor reached critical power. It produced
its full rated net capacity of 60 megawatts about 3 weeks later on 23 Dec.
This would be sufficient to supply a city of 250,000 homes. The plant
consisted of a single pressurized water-type reactor which heated steam
to drive an electrical turbine-generator. The plant was formally dedicated
by the same president on 25 May 1958, by remote control from Washington,
D.C.*
It operated until 1982. |
| First U.S. long-range rocket launch at sea | |
(source) |
In 1947, the aircraft-carrier Midway became the first U.S. vessel
from which a long-range rocket was launched. As part of Operation Sandy,
accompanied by scientific observers, a captured German V-2
rocket was fired from the flight deck from a position at sea several hundred
miles of the east coast of the U.S. the rocket travelled about 6 miles.
A ship launch test was only conducted once. There were prior tests
carried out at White Sands on a simulated aircraft carrier deck to see
what effects the rocket would have if it were to explode on the deck. The
Midway,
launched 20 Mar 1945, was commanded by Captain Albert Kellogg Morehouse,
and was the flagship of the task group commanded by Rear Admiral John Jennings
Ballentine.« |
| First U.S. gasoline tractor sold | |
(source) |
In 1892, the first gasoline
tractor to be sold in the U.S. was shipped by its builder, John
Froelich of Froelich, Iowa. It was sent to Langford, South Dakota,
which lacked easy access to a wood or coal supply for steam-powered units.
There, it spent a season threshing from 24 Sep to 16 Nov of the same year.
His 16-horsepower
machine
was geared for both forward and reverse motion. It was powered by a Van
Duzen vertical single-cylinder gasoline engine mounted on wooden beams
upon a Robinson running gear. This both powered a J.I. Case threshing machine
and propelled the vehicle. Froelich formed
the Waterloo Gasoline Tractor Engine Company on 10 Jan 1893, which was
was taken over in 1918 by the John Deere Plow Co.* |
| Heart surgery | |
(source) |
In 1891, the first operation
to suture the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the heart muscle)
took place at the City Hospital in St. Louis. Henry C. Dalton, professor
of abdominal and clinical surgery at the Marion Sims College of Medicine
repaired a 2" tear of the pericardium of James Cornish a 22-yr-old black
man,
caused by a stab wound in a fight. It was a daring operation since it involved
opening the thoracic cavity at a time when contemporary medical opinion
disapproved of surgical treatment of heart wounds. Dalton later recorded
his procedure in Annals of Surgery (Feb 1895). In 1893, Daniel
Hale Williams, a black American surgeon, performed a similar operation
and published his report in Medical Record.« |
| First UK telephone exchange | |
(source) |
In 1879, Telephone Company Ltd opened
the first public British telephone
exchange in Lombard Street, London using Edison's system. The service
was in effect an exclusive club, to which members paid a subscription -
hence the origin of the term "subscriber". The exchange served just eight
subscribers with a two-panel Williams
switchboard. Between the connected offices, private conversations could
be made in either a loud or a low tone. By the end of the year, with about
200 subscribers, a further two exchanges had been opened at Leadenhall
Street in the City, and at Westminster. The same year, the company also
opened telephone exchanges in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield,
Edinburgh, Birmingham and Bristol. |
| Lathe | |
(source) |
In 1819, a U.S. patent for a profile lathe
was issued to Thomas Blanchard
of Middlebury, Connecticut. It was capable of manufacturing irregular forms,
such as gun stocks. His machine used a friction-wheel to follow the surface
of a sample pattern and a cutting wheel on the same shaft which would thus
carve the workpiece to the same contour. It could produce the work of 13
operators, and thus provided the finished materials at much less cost.*
After inventing a tack-making machine at his brother's factory, Blanchard
was recruited by the U.S. Armory at Springfield, Mass. to build machines
to efficiently produce gun parts. Congress twice extended
this patent, first to 1834, then to 1848, giving a total of 42 years in
force. |
