| SEPTEMBER 25 - BIRTHS | |
| Columbus Iselin | |
(source) |
 Born 25
Sep 1904; died 1971.
Columbus O'D(onnell) Iselin was an American oceanographer, born in New Rochelle, N.Y. As director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (1940-50; 1956-57) in Massachusetts, he expanded its facilities 10-fold and made it one of the largest research establishments of its kind in the world. He developed the bathythermograph and other deep-sea instruments responsible for saving ships during World War II. He made major contributions to research on ocean salinity and temperature, acoustics, and the oceanography of the Gulf Stream. |
| Thomas Hunt Morgan | |
(source) |
Born 25
Sep 1866; died 4 Dec 1945.
American zoologist and geneticist, Nobel laureate (1933), born in Lexington, Kentucky. At Columbia University (1904-28), he began his revolutionary genetic investigations of the fruit fly Drosophila (1908). Initially skeptical of Gregor Mendel's research, Morgan performed rigorous experiments which demonstrated that genes were linked in a series on chromosomes and are responsible for identifiable, hereditary traits. In 1910 he discovered sex-linkage in Drosophila, and postulated a connection between eye color in fruit flies and human color blindness. With his "fly room" colleagues, he mapped the relative positions of genes on Drosophila chromosomes, then published his seminal book, The Mechanisms of Mendelian Heredity (1915).  Thomas
Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science, by Garland E. Allen. |
| Wladimir Koppen | |
(source) |
Born 25
Sep 1846; died 22 Jun 1940.
Wladimir (Peter) Köppen was a German meteorologist and climatologist best known for his delineation and mapping of the climatic regions of the world. He played a major role in the advancement of climatology and meteorology for more than 70 years. The climate classification system he developed remains popular because it uses easily obtained data (monthly mean temperatures and precipitation) and straightforward, objective criteria. He recognized five principal climate groups: (A) Humid tropical -winterless climates; (B) Dry - evaporation constantly exceed precipitation; (C) humid mid-latitude, mild winters; (D) humid mid-latitude, severe winters; and (E) Polar - summerless climates. |
| Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin | |
(source) |
Born 25
Sep 1843; died 15 Nov 1928.
U.S. geologist and educator, born in Mattoon, Illinois, known for his "planetesimal hypothesis". With Forest Ray Moulton in 1904, he proposed that the solar system formed after gas flares were ripped from the sun by the gravitational field of a passing star. The flares then condensed into "planetesimals," arrayed in a spiral extending from the sun, gradually accumulated material and became the planets we know today. From 1876, he was Wisconsin Geological Survey's chief geologist, moving to head the glacier division of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881). He was president of the University of Wisconsin (1887-92), and then for 26 years he was head of its geology department of the University of Chicago. He founded The Journal of Geology. |
| Melville Reuben Bissell | |
(source) |
Born 25 Sep 1843; died 15 Mar 1889.
U.S. inventor of the carpet sweeper. Melville Bissell and his wife, Anna, owned a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Mich. The dust from the packings was affecting Anna's health and, from a desperate need for self-preservation, he invented the carpet sweeper (issued a U.S. patent on 19 Sep 1876). They recognized the sweeper's marketing possibilities and began to assemble them in a room over the store. The inner workings and cases were made by women working in their homes. Tufts of hog bristles were bound with string, dipped in hot pitch, inserted in brush rollers and finally trimmed them with scissors. Anna Bissell gathered the parts together in clothes baskets and brought them back to the store for assembling. She grew the business after Melville's death. |
| William Le Baron Jenney | |
(source) |
Born 25 Sep 1832; died 15 Jun 1907.
American civil engineer and architect whose technical innovations were of primary importance in the development of the skyscraper. During the Civil War he served as an engineering officer. By 1868 he was a practicing architect who had designed a Swiss Chalet style home with an innovative open floor plan -- years before Frank Lloyd Wright worked with the concept. He also made a name for himself as a town planner. However, Jenney's greatest fame came from his large commercial buildings. His Home Insurance Building [above] in Chicago was one of the first buildings to use a metal skeleton for support, which became the standard for American skyscraper design. [Image right: (source] |
| Alfred Lewis Vail | |
(source) |
Born 25
Sep 1807; died 18 Jan 1859.
American telegraph pioneer and an associate and financial backer of Samuel F.B. Morse in the experimentation that made the telegraph a commercial reality. The final form of the Morse code was perfected by Vail who simplified the whole process by introducing the telegraph key. Vail is responsible for the efficiency of the code, using the principle that the most frequently sent letters should have the shortest code. |
| Jean B. Élie de Beaumont | |
(source) |
Born 25
Sep 1798, died 21 Sep 1874.
Jean-Baptiste-Armand-Louis-Léonce Élie de Beaumont was a geologist who, with French geologist Ours Pierre Dufrénoy, published the substantial geological map of France, Carte geologique generale de la France (1841). On 5 Jul 1847, he presented the first complete theory of metalliferous veins. He made a detailed study of European folded rocks, and concluded that these showed evidence of distinct mountain building episodes. His geometrically-based hypothesis that the directions of mountain systems were based on a pentagonal grid structure for the earth's crust found little support. However, his theory that the Earth is cooling, and therefore shrinking, was more warmly received.« |
| Agostino Bassi | |
B.bassiana fungus on soybean loopers (source) |
Born 25
Sep 1773, died 6 Feb 1856.
The pioneer Italian bacteriologist Agostino Bassi de Lodi (the "Father of Insect Pathology"), 10 years before Louis Pasteur, found disease-causing microorganisms. Bassi showed (1835-6) that a silk worm disease was contagious and could be transmitted naturally by direct contact or infected food, or experimentally by means of a pin previously sterilized in a flame. The causative agent was later shown to be a fungus that multiplied in and on the body of the insect. This was the first microorganism to be recognized as a contagious agent of animal disease. Indeed, the first animal pathogen to be understood was of insects, not humans! In 1844, he believed that "contagion by living organisms" also infected humans with measles, syphilis, and the plague. |
| Abraham Werner | |
(EB) |
Born 25
Sep 1750; died 30 Jun 1817.
Abraham Gottlob Werner was a German geologist who founded the Neptunist school, holding that all rocks have aqueous origins. This contrasts with the Plutonists, or Vulcanists, who maintain that granite among other rocks were of igneous origin. Werner also rejected the idea of uniformitarianism whereby geological evolution has been a uniform and continuous process.« |
| Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot | |
Born 25 Sep 1725; died 2 Oct 1804.
French military engineer who invented the world's first fuel-propelled vehicle, a huge, heavy, steam-powered tricycle. In 1769 he developed the first vehicle driven by a steam engine--a gun tractor commissioned by the French government. The following year he produced the first mechanically driven "horseless carriage"; his steam tricycle, driven by a steam engine, carried four passengers and was the forerunner of the modern motor car. It was the difficulty of carrying enough water to generate the steam and the cumbersome nature of a steam engine that gave Otto's internal-combustion engine the edge over steam for this purpose a century later. [Image right: Cugnot's vehicle showing the steam boiler at the front.] |
|
| Ole (Christensen) Rømer | |
| Born 25
Sep 1644; died 23 Sep 1710.
Astronomer who demonstrated conclusively that light travels at a finite speed. He measured the speed by precisely measuring the length of time between eclipses of Jupiter by one of its moons. This observation produces different results depending on the position of the earth in its orbit around the sun. He reasoned that meant light took longer to travel the greater distance when earth was travelling in its orbit away from Jupiter. |
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| SEPTEMBER 25 - DEATHS | |
| William Cumming Rose | |
(source) |
 Died
25 Sep 1985 (born 4 Apr 1887)
American biochemist who researched the role of amino acids in nutrition determining which were essential, and calculated the minimum daily requirement for each of them. Having found that the milk protein, casein, was essential in a healthy rat's diet, he discovered (1936) the threonine in the casein was an essential amino acid. Over several years he manipulated the rodent diet and finally established the primary importance of nine more amino acids: lysine, tryptophan, histidine, phenylalanine, leucine, isoleucine, methionine, valine, and arginine. In 1942, Rose began a ten-year research project on human diet. By persuading students to restrict their diet in various ways Rose eventually established that 8 of the above are essential amino acids for adults. |
| Paul Scherrer | |
| Died
25 Sep 1969 (born 3 Feb 1890)
Swiss physicist who collaborated with Peter Debye in the development of a method of X-ray diffraction analysis. The Debye-Scherrer method is widely used to identify materials that do not readily form large, perfect crystals. |
|
| John B(roadus) Watson | |
(source) |
Died
25 Sep 1958 (born 9 Jan 1878)
American psychologist whose ideas initiated behaviorism as a branch ofpsychology. Inspired by the recent work of Ivan Pavlov, he studied the biology, physiology, and behavior of animals. Watson viewed animals as extremely complex machines that responded to situations according to their "wiring," or nerve pathways that were conditioned by experience. When he continued with studies of the behavior of children, his conclusion was that humans, while more complicated than animals, operated on the same principles. Watson's behaviourism dominated psychology in the U.S. in the 1920s and '30s. Behaviorism,
by John B Watson. |
| Hieronymus Theodor Richter | |
(source) |
Died
25 Sep 1898 (born 21 Nov 1824)
German mineralogist who in 1863 was a co-discoverer of the element indium. He was an expert in metallurgy, essaying and an authority on blowpipe analysis. He was assistant to Ferdinand Reich who suspected a new element was present in the samples of zinc ore he had chemically processed. Reich was colourblind and turned over the job of making a spectroscopic analysis to his assistant. When Richter placed some of the sample in a loop of platinum wire and heated it in the flame of a Bunsen burner, he observed a brilliant indigo line characteristic of this as a new element - called indium after the colour of this line. After separating the hydrated oxide of indium, they reduced it to obtain a sample of the new metal. |
| Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet | |
| Died
25 Sep 1898 (born 29 Aug 1821)
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. |
|
| Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier | |
 |
Died
25 Sep 1877 (born 11 May 1811)
French astronomer who predicted the position of a previously unknown planet, Neptune, by the disturbance it caused in the orbit of Uranus. In 1856, the German astronomer Johan G. Galle discovered Neptune after only an hour of searching, within one degree of the position that had been computed by Le Verrier, who had asked him to look for it there. In this way Le Verrier gave the most striking confirmation of the theory of gravitation propounded by Newton. Le Verrier also initiated the meteorological service for France, especially the weather warnings for seaports. |
| Johann Heinrich Lambert | |
| Died
25 Sep 1777 (born 26 Aug 1728)
Swiss-German mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and philosopher who provided the first rigorous proof that pi ( the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) is irrational, meaning it cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers. He also devised a method of measuring light intensity. |
|
| SEPTEMBER 25 - EVENTS | |
| Spray cans and ozone | |
In 1974, scientists first reported that freon gases released from aerosol
spray cans were destroying the ozone layer. |
|
| Telephone transatlantic cable | |
|
In 1956, the world's first transatlantic telephone cable system began operating
(Clarenville, Newfoundland to Oban, Scotland). Previous cables had been
limited to telegraph transmissions. |
|
| Tobacco warning | |
(source) |
In 1878, warning
against the use of tobacco, the senior physician to the Metropolitan Free
Hospital wrote in The Times newspaper in Britain. Dr. Charles Drysdale
pointed to "the enormous consumption of tobacco in all European states."
He estimated that £15,000,000 was spent annually in Great Britain
on tobacco. He concluded "that the use of tobacco is one of the most evident
of all the retrograde influences of our time." Years earlier, in 1864,
he had published
in Med. Circular results of excessive use, such as cases of jaundice
in healthy young men smoking 3/4-oz daily, and a young man who smoked 1/2-oz
daily having "most distressing palpitation of the heart." In 1875, he wrote
a book,
Tobacco
and the Diseases It Produces. |
| Arago announces electromagnetism | |
(source) |
In 1820, Francois Arago announced
that a copper wire between the poles of a voltaic cell, could laterally
attract iron filings to itself (Ann. de Chim. et de Physique., xv.
p.93). His discovery
came in the same year that Oersted discovered that an electric current
flowing in a wire would deflect a neighbouring compass needle. Arago in
the same publication described how he had successfully succeeded in causing
permanent magnetism in steel needles laid at right angles to the copper
wire. Arago and André-Marie Ampère,
discussed and experimented with forming the copper wire into a helix to
intensify the magnetizing action. However, it was not until 1825 that the
electromagnet in its familiar form was invented by William
Sturgeon.« |
| First human blood transfusion | |
|
In 1818, the first transfusion using human blood, as opposed to animal
blood, took place at Guy's Hospital. |
|
![(source]](http://www.brynmawr.edu/Acads/Cities/imgb/nextone/med/1104.jpg){kind=link}
