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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

20.  Lady of the Lamp


    About this time, the Crimean War between England and Russia broke out and a vicious battle was fought on the little Black Sea peninsula. The British were victorious but the joy at home was short-lived. Reports began to filter back to London of the terrific loss of life - not so much on the battlefield but in the military hospitals. In fact, over 400 out of every thousand in the hospitals were dying. Sidney Herbert, British Secretary at War and friend of the Nightingales, was at a loss as to just what to do until he thought of Florence. And she, in turn, saw this as just the chance for which she had been waiting. So, after carefully collecting a large store of supplies, she arrived at the battlefront in November 1854 with her 38 nurses just after the Battle of Balaklava.

Balaklava

The conditions on her arrival were much blacker than they had been painted in England. As she herself said, "The sanitary conditions of the hospital were inferior to the poorest homes in the worst section of any large city. Often the wounded men were left lying in their fighting clothes." And there was also the red tape that delayed and often prevented getting the simplest of medical supplies. Probably no one woman was ever faced with such a huge and disheartening task. In one hospital alone, the line of wounded stretched almost four miles.



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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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