| SEPTEMBER 18 - BIRTHS | |
| John Clark | |
 Born 18
Sep 1951; died 12 Aug 2004.
English molecular biologist who was a founder of applying molecular technology to farm animals. In 1985, he began work in genetic modification (at what is now the Roslin Institute) to produce a sheep giving milk with human proteins. He was successful within five years. Tracy, the result of five year's work, produced 35g of the alpha-1-antitrypsin (used in treatment of cystic fibrosis) in each litre of her milk. During the 1990's, Clark continued to develop transgenic techniques on large animals. With his colleagues, he a produced a sheep from which a prion protein gene had been removed. Clark's work set the stage for Ian Wilmut's team at Roslin to clone a sheep, Dolly (1996), the result of transplanted the DNA of an adult sheep to an unfertilised egg cell.« |
|
| Edwin McMillan | |
1958 (source) |
Born 18
Sep 1907; died 7 Sep 1991.
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1951 (with Glenn T. Seaborg) for his discovery of element 93. Just as the planet Neptune is beyond Uranus, this new element was named neptunium, the first element beyond uranium, thus called a transuranium element. By irradiating uranium with rapid neutrons or with heavy-hydrogen nuclei (deuterons), other neptunium isotopes were soon produced in Berkeley. By 1940, McMillan with his colleagues working with Seaborg found that the radioactive decay of neptunium disintegrates yields element 94, called plutonium, after the planet Pluto beyond Neptune. During WW II he was engaged in national defence nuclear research.«. |
| Clark Wissler | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1870; died 25 Aug 1947.
American anthropologist who devised the age-area concept which held that the age of cultural traits could be found by correlating the diffusion of those traits throughout their associated area. (It is not presently regarded as practical.) He contributed much research on Native Americans, beginning (1902-05) with the Blackfoot, and various Siouan tribes of Montana and the Dakotas. He wrote many articles, and six books. Wissler's theories on culture diverged from those of his contemporaries, such as Franz Boas. Wissler believed that culture was biologically innate in humans. He held the position of Curator of Ethnology, and with the American Museum of Natural History for 40 years.« |
| Sir John Graham Kerr | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1869; died 21 Apr 1957.
English embryologist whose research advanced knowledge of the evolution of vertebrates. He also promoted ideas in naval camouflage for WWI. Early in his career, pursuing his zoological interests, Kerr went on two expeditions to the Pilcomayo River in South America. Much of his subsequent research was based on samples collected during these expeditions. In a letter to Winston Churchill, dated 24 Sep 1914, he referred to observing animal camouflage in South America, and recommended painting war ships with graduated shading. He also communicated with Ernest Bevin and Clement Atlee and others concerning camouflage. Although sometimes credited with invention of the dazzle scheme of camouflage, his ideas were less extreme.« |
| Richard Thurnwald | |
1930 (source) |
Born 18
Sep 1869; died 19 Jan 1954.
German anthropologist and sociologist whose comparative studies of social institutions, were made based on research expeditions included the Solomon Islands and Micronesia (1906-09, 1932), New Guinea (1912-15), and East Africa (1930). During the first Melanesian expedition (1906-09), he concentrated on South Bougainville (the Buins) and the Bismark Archipelago (Baining and New Ireland). His main objective was collecting objects of museum interest, and making sound and visual recordings. However, he also observed what he regarded as the negative effects of colonization. The plantation policy there was distributing lands to settlers, but Thurwald was particularly concerned that the settlers engaged labour on a more or less forced basis.« [Image: Thurnwald making field recordings in 1930.]  Economics
in Primitive Communities, by Richard Thurnwald. |
| Sir Richard Tetley Glazebrook | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1854; died 15 Dec 1935.
English physicist who was the first director of the UK National Physical Laboratory, from 1 Jan 1900 until his retirement in Sep 1919. At first, the laboratory's income depended on much routine, commercial testing, but Glazebrook championed fundamental, industrially oriented research. With support from individual donors, buildings were added for electrical work, metrology, and engineering. Data useful to the shipbuilding industry was collected in pioneering experimental work on models of ships made possible by a tank funded by Alfred Yarrow (1908). From 1909, laboratory began work benefitting the embryonic aeronautics industry, at the request of the secretary of state for war. The lab to contributed substantially to military needs during WW I.« |
| Charles Valentine Riley | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1843; died 14 Sep 1895.
British-born American entomologist who pioneered the scientific study of insects for their economic impact in agriculture. He was a keen observer of relationships in nature, and enhanced his written observations with drawings. He initiated biological control. After studying the parasites and predators of the cottony cushion scale, which was destroying the citrus industry in California, he introduced (1888) a natural enemy of the scale from Australia. The effectiveness of the Vedalia cardinalis beetle in reducing the populations of the cottony cushion scale promoted the study of biological control of pests. He helped establish the Division of Entomology of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.« |
| John Aitken | |
| Born 18
Sep 1839; died 14 Nov 1919.
Scottish physicist and meteorologist who, through a series of experiments and observations in which he used apparatus of his own design, elucidated the crucial role that microscopic particles, now called Aitken nuclei, play in the condensation of atmospheric water vapour in clouds and fogs. Ill health prevented Aitken from holding any official position; he worked instead in the laboratory in his home in Falkirk. Much of his work was published in the journals of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he was a member. |
|
| Siegfried Marcus | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1831
Inventor who built four of the world's earliest gasoline-powered automobiles. Marcus held about 76 patents in about a dozen countries, including an electric lamp (1877) and an igniter for explosives. He installed the first electric bell in the bedroom of Empress Elisabeth, and he became an instructor in physics to the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolf. He built and marketed internal combustion engines. Marcus first started working on a self-propelled vehicle about 1860, making significant contributions in the course of further development. Photographs of his first car, built about 1864, were taken in 1870. The second car - the landmark - was built about 1875 in his Vienna factory. It was first equipped with a two-cycle engine, and later, a four-cycle engine. |
| Jean Bernard Léon Foucault | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1819; died 11 Feb 1868.
French physicist whose Foucault Pendulum experimentally proved that the Earth rotates on its axis (6 Jan 1851). Using a long pendulum with a heavy bob, he showed its plane rotated at a rate related to Earth's angular velocity and the latitude of the site. He studied medicine and physics and became an assistant at the Paris Observatory (1855). He invented an accurate test of a lens for chromatic and spherical aberations. Working with Fizeau, and also independently, he made accurate measurements of the absolute velocity of light. In 1850, Foucault showed that light travels slower in water than in air. He also built a gyroscope (1852), the Foucault's prism (1857) and made improvements for mirrors of reflecting telescopes.« Pendulum:
Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science, by Amir D.
Aczel. |
| Adrien-Marie Legendre | |
(source) |
Born 18
Sep 1752; died 10 Jan 1833.
French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions. In 1794, he was put in charge of the French government's department that was standardizing French weights and measures. In 1813, he took over as head of the Bureau des Longitudes upon the death of Lagrange, its former chief. It was in a paper on celestial mechanics concerning the motion of planets (1784) that he first introduced the Legendre Polynomials. His provided outstanding work on elliptic functions (1786), and his classic treatise on the theory of numbers (1798) and also worked on the method of least squares.« |
|
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| SEPTEMBER 18 - DEATHS | |
| Archer Gordon | |
 Died
18 Sep 1994 (born 8 Jan 1921)
American physician who contributed to the acceptance of the lifesaving CPR technique. In 1949-50, he evaluated the various methods of artificial ventilation with arm maneuvers and chest compressions used at the time, and found them to be of marginal benefit. Dr. James Elam published the first scientific paper (1956) showing that oxygen could be delivered into a non-breathing patient's lungs from a rescuer's exhaled breath, using a tube. Dr. Peter Safar followed with a simple gadget-free method, exhaling air directly into the mouth of a non-breathing person (1957). At the University of Southern California, quickly repeated the experiments in children. Within a year, these three doctors convinced the world to change artificial breathing methods.« |
|
| Paul Bernays | |
(source) |
Died
18 Sep 1977 (born 17 Oct 1888)
Paul Isaak Bernays was a Swiss mathematician and logician who is known for his attempts to develop a unified theory of mathematics. Bernays, influenced by Hilbert's thinking, believed that the whole structure of mathematics could be unified as a single coherent entity. In order to start this process it was necessary to devise a set of axioms on which such a complete theory could be based. He therefore attempted to put set theory on an axiomatic basis to avoid the paradoxes. Between 1937 and 1954 Bernays wrote a whole series of articles in the Journal of Symbolic Logic which attempted to achieve this goal. In 1958 Bernays published Axiomatic Set Theory in which he combined together his work on the axiomatisation of set theory. |
| Sir John Cockcroft | |
(source) |
Died
18 Sep 1967 (born 27 May 1897)
Sir John Douglas Cockcroft was a British physicist, who shared (with Ernest T.S. Walton of Ireland) the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering the use of particle accelerators to study the atomic nucleus. Together, in 1929, they built an accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator, that generated large numbers of particles at lower energies - the first atom-smasher. In 1932, they used it to disintegrate lithium atoms by bombarding them with protons, the first artificial nuclear reaction not utilizing radioactive substances. They conducted further research on the splitting of other atoms and established the importance of accelerators as a tool for nuclear research. Their accelerator design became one of the most useful in the world's laboratories.« |
| Armand Hippolyte Fizeau | |
(source) |
Died
18 Sep 1896 (born 23 Sep 1819)
French physicist. He was the first to measure the speed of light successfully without using astronomical calculations (1849). Fizeau sent a narrow beam of light between gear teeth on the edge of a rotating wheel. The beam then traveled to a mirror 8 km/5 mi away and returned to the wheel where, if the spin were fast enough, a tooth would block the light. Knowing this time from the rotational speed of the wheel, and the mirror's distance, Fizeau directly measured the speed of light. He also found that light travels faster in air than in water, which confirmed the wave theory of light, and that the motion of a star affects the position of the lines in its spectrum. With Jean Foucault, he proved the wave nature of the Sun's heat rays by showing their interference (1847). |
| James Bicheno Francis | |
c.1887 (source) |
Died
18 Sep 1892 (born 18 May 1815)
British-American engineer who originated the scientific method of testing hydraulic machinery and invented the Francis mixed-flow reaction turbine (combining radial- and axial-flow) for low-pressure installations. Shortly emigrating to the U.S. at age 18, he joined the Locks and Canal Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, where he became Chief Engineer (1837) and remained there for his entire career. The company owned and operated Lowell’s canal system providing waterpower for the textile industry's mills there. Francis designed a more efficient successor to the Boyden turbine of the Boston-based consulting engineer Uriah A. Boyden. He was a founding member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and its president in 1880.« |
| Joseph Locke | |
(source) |
Died
18 Sep 1860 (born 9 Aug 1805)
English civil engineer who build many significant early main-line railways. In 1823, he began learning his trade while surveying railways and working with Robert Stephenson at his locomotive factory. Within three years, Locke became a railway construction engineer under George Stephenson, and by 1835 was a Chief Engineer building the Grand Junction Railway. Locke put double-headed rails into use that were secured in chairs on wooden sleepers. These developed into the standard bullhead track used for a century afterwards for railways throughout Britain. In addition to a number of main lines in England, he undertook engineering for several early main lines in France. In 1847, he won election to serve as Member of Parliament for Honiton.« |
| Constantine Samuel Rafinesque | |
(source) |
Died
18 Sep 1840 (born 22 Oct 1783)
Naturalist, traveler, and writer who made major and controversial contributions to botany and ichthyology. Rafinesque believed that each variety of a species is a "deviant," which, through reproduction, may become a permanent species; thus, he anticipated, to some extent, part of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Although Rafinesque's scientific abilities were recognized in his lifetime, he was also severely criticized for sometimes doing careless work and for his tendency to establish new genera and species. Throughout his life he traveled extensively, collected specimens wherever he went, and wrote and published constantly. |
| Leonhard Euler | |
| Died
18 Sep 1783 (born 15 Apr 1707)
Swiss mathematician and physicist, one of the founders of pure mathematics. He not only made decisive and formative contributions to the subjects of geometry, calculus, mechanics, and number theory but also developed methods for solving problems in observational astronomy and demonstrated useful applications of mathematics in technology. At age 28, he blinded one eye by staring at the sun while working to invent a new way of measuring time. Euler:
The Master of Us All, by William Dunham |
|
| SEPTEMBER 18 - EVENTS | |
| First Latin American in space | |
(source) |
In 1980, Cuban cosmonaut
Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendéz became the first person of color and the first
Latin American sent
into space on board Soyuz 38 (for 188.7 hours), one of a two men
comprising the seventh international crew under the Intercosmos programme.
Tamayo-Mendéz spent several days aboard the Soviet space laboratory
Salyut
6. He engaged in several experiments and measured the speed at which
sugar crystals grow in space. He was born 29 Jan 1942. |
| CBS | |
|
In 1927, Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 47
radio stations. However, the radio network
lost money in its first year, and on 18 Jan 1929 Columbia Records sold
out to a group of private investors for $400,000, headed by William S.
Paley, a Philadelphia cigar manufacturer. The radio network was renamed
The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). |
|
| Chiropractic | |
|
In 1895, Daniel David Palmer gave the first chiropractic adjustment to
Harvey Lillard in Davenport, Iowa - now the home of Palmer Chiropractic
College. |
|
| Loco-horse race | |
|
In 1830, B&O locomotive Tom
Thumb, the first locomotive built in America, lost in a 14-km race
with a horse due to a boiler leak. |
|
