| SEPTEMBER 12 - BIRTHS | |
| Alexander Langmuir | |
(source) |
 Born 12
Sep 1910; died 22 Nov 1993
Alexander Duncan Langmuir was a US epidemiologist who created and led the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) for the U.S. government and was credited with saving thousands of lives with his revolutionary work. In 1949, he became director of the epidemiology branch of the National Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta, a position he held for over 20 years. His efforts contributed to the virtual elimination of polio in the U.S. and to a better understanding of other infectious disease dilemmas of the last 50 years. He emphasized surveillance with regard to disease wherever it occurred, analyzing it and looking at it, and acting if appropriate. Langmuir wrote extensively on all phases of epidemiology on a global basis and was recognized internationally as a leader. |
| Haskell Brooks Curry | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1900; died 1 Sep 1982
American mathematician who was a pioneer of modern mathematical logic. His research in the foundations of mathematics led him to the development of combinatory logic. Later, this seminal work found significant application in computer science, especially in the design of programming languages. Curry worked on the first electronic computer, called ENIAC, during WW II. He also formulated a logical calculus using inferential rules. In 1942, he published Curry's paradox, which occurs in naive set theory or naive logics, and allows the derivation of an arbitrary sentence from a self-referring sentence and some apparently innocuous logical deduction rules.«  Foundations
of Mathematical Logic, by Haskell Brooks Curry. |
| Irène Joliot-Curie | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1897; died 17 Mar 1956
French physical chemist, wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who were jointly awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for their discovery of artificially produced radioactive elements. She was the daughter of Nobel Prize winners Pierre and Marie Curie. |
| Géza Róheim | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1891; died 7 June 1953.
Hungarian-American psychoanalyst who was the first ethnologist to utilize a psychoanalytic approach to interpreting culture, especially to tribes of Australia, New Guinea, and southwestern U.S. He was also among the earliest anthropologists to work within Freudian theory, his earliest works being largely the application of Freudian theory to data gathered from readings. From 1928-30 he carried out field work with the Somali, Aranda, Lirittja, Duau, Dobu, and Yuma. In 1938, Róheim took up residence in the U.S. and shortly was in private psychoanalytical practice in New York. In 1947, he worked with the Navaho. |
| Arthur von Auwers | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1838; died 24 Jan 1915
(Georg Friedrich Julius) Arthur von Auwers was a German astronomer known for his life's work making extremely accurate catalogs of stellar positions and motions. He also researched solar and stellar parallaxes, making a new reduction of James Bradley's 18th century Greenwich observations and measurements of star distances. Auwers also observed double stars, and accurately calculated the orbits of the Sirius and Procyon systems before the faint companions to the bright stars were seen. He redetermined the distance to the sun several times, making use of transits of Venus and an approach of a minor planet. |
| Richard Jordan Gatling | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1818; died 26 Feb 1903
U.S. inventor, whose Gatling gun (1861) was first successful machine gun, a crank-operated, rapid-fire multibarrel design combining reliability, high firing rate and ease of loading into a single device. His father was also an inventor, and while young, Richard helped him create machines for sowing cotton seeds and thinning cotton plants. In 1839, he designed a screw propeller for steamboats, but found a similar one had been previously patented. From 1844, he continued to invent improved agricultural machines, including one to plant grains, like rice and wheat (adapted from the cotton-sowing machine); a hemp-breaking machine (1850); and a steam plow (1857). The outbreak of the American Civil War spurred him to design firearms (1861).« 
Gatling:
A Photographic Remembrance, by E. Frank Jr. Stephenson. |
| Richard March Hoe | |
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1812; died 7 June 1886
American inventor who developed and manufactured the first successful rotary printing press (1846). A cylinder rolled over stationary plates of inked type and the cylinder made an impression on paper. This eliminated the need for making impressions directly from the type plates themselves, which were heavy and difficult to manoeuvre. By constantly turning in only one direction, Hoe's revolving press increased the number of pages that could be printed per hour. |
| James Hall | |
|
(source) |
Born 12
Sep 1811; died 7 Aug 1898
U.S. geologist and paleontologist who is considered one of the founders of American geology. He invented the term geosyncline and the geosyncline theory for mountain building, which proposed that as sediment is increasingly deposited in a shallow basin, the basin will sink, causing the adjacent area to rise. (This was superseded in the 1960's by the new theories of Plate Tectonics.) In paleontology, he studied the Silurian and Devonian fossils (345 million - 430 million years old) found in New York, and recorded his results in a 13-volume series, The Paleontology of New York (1847-94). Hall was a charter member of the Academy of Sciences.« |
| Guillaume Le Gentil | |
| Born 12
Sep 1725; died 22 Oct 1792
Guillaume-Joseph-Hyacinthe-Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaziere was a French astronomer who attempted to observe the transit of Venus across the sun by travelling to India in 1761. He failed to arrive in time due to an outbreak of war. He stayed in India to see the next transit which came eight years later. This time, he was denied a view because of cloudy weather, and so returned to France. There, he found his heirs had assumed he was dead and taken his property. |
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| SEPTEMBER 12 - DEATHS | |
| Sir Grahame Douglas Clark | |
 Died
12 Sep 1995 (born 28 Jul 1907)
Sir (John) Grahame Douglas Clark was a British archaeologist and authority on the prehistoric age in northwestern Europe known as the Mesolithic Period (8000-2700 BC) |
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| Boris Borisovich Yegorov | |
| Died
12 Sep 1994 (born 26 Nov 1937)
Soviet physician who was the first practicing doctor in space. He travelled on Voskhod 1 ("Sunrise 1"), 12-13 Oct 1964 the first space flight with a crew of more than one man. He was an expert in the sense-of-balance mechanism of the inner ear. He collected medical information, including the effects of radiation, confinement and weightlessness on the crew. He began his training in the summer of 1964, a few months before the flight, but was not a long-term cosmonaut and afterwards returned to his medical practice. |
|
| John Garstang | |
| Died
12 Sep 1956 (born 5 May 1876)
English archaeologist who made major contributions to the study of the ancient history and prehistory of Asia Minor and Palestine. He is best known for excavating Ancient Jericho. |
|
| Hans Spemann | |
| Died
12 Sep 1941 (born 27 Jun 1869)
German embryologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine (1935) for his discovery of embryonic induction, an effect involving several parts of the embryo in directing the development of the early group of cells into specific tissues and organs. Working extensively on the early development of the newt, he showed that the in the earliest stage, tissues may be transplanted to different areas of the embryo, and it then develops based on the new location and not from where it came. For example, early tissue cut from an area of nervous tissue might be moved to an area of skin tissue where it then grows into the same form as the surrounding skin. |
|
| Henry Chandler Cowles | |
(source) |
Died
12 Sep 1939 (born 27 Feb 1869)
American botanist who was a pioneer in the field of plant ecology, especially the concept of dynamic ecology, which he devised in the 1890's through a study of sand dune vegation at the southern end of Lake Michigan. He observed ecological succession, whereby starting with a bare habitat, there is a sequence of biological communities, each providing modification of the habitat to favour successors, until a climax community is established, characteristic of the climatic conditions of the region. His field work there showed that the vegetation at any one point in the system is related to the distance the point lies from the lake, the kind of soil present at the location, and the time period over which seeds and spores have had a chance to germinate.« |
| Jules-Louis-Gabriel Violle | |
(source) |
Died
12 Sep 1923 (born 16 Nov 1841)
French physicist who made the first high-altitude determination of the solar constant, which he made in 1875 on Mont Blanc in the French-Swiss Alps. He also determined the fusion points of palladium, platinum and gold. Violle also was interested in the theory of geysers, the origin of hail, and atmospheric exploration through balloon soundings. For high-temperature radiation, he proposed a photometric unit, the violle or Violle's standard. His actinometer is one form of pyrheliometer, a device to measure the intensity of sunlight. It was modified from John Herschel's invention of 1825. It consists of two concentric hollow spheres containing water between them. Sunlight passes through an aperture and falls on a thermometer bulb in the hollow inner sphere. |
| Maxime Bôcher | |
| Died
12 Sep 1918 (born 28 Aug 1867)
American mathematician whose reputation was built upon both his teaching and his research in differential equations, series, and higher algebra. |
|
| Richard Anthony Proctor | |
(source) |
Died
12 Sep 1888 (born 23 Mar 1837)
English astronomer who first suggested (1873) that meteor impacts caused lunar craters, rather than volcanic action. He studied the motion of stars, their distribution, and their relation to the nebulae. In 1867 he prepared a map of the surface of Mars on which he named continents, seas, bays and straits (in the same manner that Riccioli used on his map of the moon). However, he did not perceive "canals" on the surface, which later Schiaparelli identified. Proctor participated in expeditions of 1874 and 1882 to observe the transit of Venus. He was very successful popularizing astronomy by his writings in books, periodicals, and lectures he gave as far abroad as Australia and America (where he stayed after 1881).«  |
| Peter Mark Roget | |
| Died
12 Sep 1869 (born 18 Jan 1779)
English physician who, in 1814, invented a "log-log" slide rule for calculating the roots and powers of numbers. After studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh, he helped establish a medical school at Manchester, and practiced in London (1808-40). Upon retirement, from age 61 to 73, he produced his famous Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852). He was a fellow of the Royal Society from 1815, and its secretary from 1827. |
|
| Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel | |
| Died
12 Sep 1854 (born 27 Mar 1776)
French botanist whose book Traité d'anatomie et de physiologie végétale, (2 volumes, 1802, "Treatise on Plant Anatomy and Physiology") was a founding work in plant cytology and plant physiology. He is best-known for his identification of the continuous membrane around each plant cell (1809) |
|
| Henry Palmer | |
 |
Died
12 Sep 1844 (born 1795)
Henry Robinson Palmer was an English civil engineer who invented and patented the first monorail transport (British patent 1821, No. 4,618). From 1816, for ten years, he was an assistant to the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford. In the early 1820's, monorails were built on his design in Deptford and Cheshunt. Wooden posts supported a single wooden beam surfaced with iron to carry the double-flanged wheels of a frame carrying pannier style wagons that hung on each side of the rail. A string of such wagons was hauled using a rope by a single horse on the ground. Palmer wrote a short book (1823) on his monorail ideas, in which he considered how friction could be reduced.« |
| SEPTEMBER 12 - EVENTS | |
| First African-American woman in space | |
 |
In 1992, the crew of the Shuttle Endeavour included the first African-American
woman in space, Mae C. Jemison, as a Science Mission Specialist aboard
Endeavour.
During the eight-day mission, she conducted space-sickness experiments
and conducted research on bone loss in zero gravity. The first married
couple, Mark Lee and Jan David, together with the first Japanese citizen
on a U.S. space mission were also members of the same crew. |
| Luna 16 | |
|
In 1970, Luna 16 was launched, another in a series of unmanned Soviet
lunar probes, which was the first unmanned spacecraft to carry lunar soil
samples back to Earth. It was followed by Luna 17, launched 10 Nov
1970, which soft-landed a robot exploration vehicle. |
|
| President Kennedy gives famous space speech | |
(source) |
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy delivered perhaps the most famous space
speech
ever given. Speaking at the stadium of Rice University, the text of his
speech included these memorable lines, "We choose to go to the moon. We
choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because
they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve
to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for
these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts
in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that
will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency."«
Webmaster's note: If you have never heard or read the speech in full, please click this link and do so now! Do it! Now! |
| Luna 2 | |
|
In 1959, Luna 2 was launched, one of a series of unmanned Soviet
lunar probes, was the first spacecraft to strike the Moon. It was followed
by Luna 3, launched the following month, on 4 Oct 1959, which made
the first circumnavigation of the Moon and returned the first photographs
of its far side. |
|
| Integrated circuit | |
(source) |
In 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated
his invention of a miniaturized electronic circuit to his supervisor at
Texas Instruments, now recognised as the first integrated circuit to be
built and operated. On 6 Feb 1959, he applied for a patent,
which was eventually issued on 23 Jun 1964. [Image:
Texas Instrument's first integrated circuit.] |
| Coal pipeline | |
|
In 1956, construction was completed on the first U.S. commercial coal pipeline,
which was placed in operation 4 Jun 1957. |
|
| Lascaux cave paintings | |
|
In 1940, five schoolboys exploring the Grotte de Lascaux, France, discovered
an astonishing display of prehistoric art depicting animals in a variety
of styles, which dated back to 15,000 BC. |
|
| Pellegra | |
|
In 1915, a prisoner developed a rash associated with the disease pellegra.
He was part of a study designed by Dr. Joseph Goldberger to provide a protein-deficient
diet for several months to 12 volunteer inmates of the state prison at
Jackson, Mississippi. For Goldberger, it meant a proof that the cause of
the deadly disease pellegra was a result of poor diet, and that it was
not contagious. For the inmates, it earned a pardon. |
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| First U.S. city quarantine | |
|
In 1793, due to an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the first
quarantine in the U.S. on a city was declared when the governor of
Maryland, Thomas Sim, stopped commerce from Philadelphia to Maryland. |
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