November 25 - Today in Science History

NOVEMBER 25 - BIRTHS

Lewis Thomas
(source)	Born 25 Nov 1913; died 3 Dec 1993. American physician, researcher, author, and teacher best known for his reflective essays on a wide range of topics in biology. While his specialities are immunology and pathology, in his book, Lives of a Cell, his down-to-earth science writing stresses that what is seen under the microscope is similar to the way human beings live, and he emphasizes the interconnectedness of life. As a research scientist, Thomas made an impact by suggesting that an immunosurveillance mechanism protects us from the possible ravages of mutant cells, an idea later championed by Macfarlane Burnett. He also proposed that viruses have played a major role in the evolution of species by their ability to move pieces of DNA from one individual or species to another. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas Booklist for Lewis Thomas
Athelstan Frederick Spilhaus
(1955) (source)	Born 25 Nov 1911; died 29 Mar 1998. South African-born American geophysicist and inventor. As a student at the University he built a sand yacht out of an old automobile and sailed it on nearby salt flats, much like an ice boat with wheels. By 1937, he invented the bathythermograph (or BT), a temperature measuring device. Initially it was used by biologists and oceanographers, but during WW II in conjunction with sonar it played a major role in the detection of German submarines. In 1954, he became the first U.S. ambassador to UNESCO. He launched a weekly science-oriented comic strip called "Our New Age," seen in 100 newspapers worldwide (1957-73). As a futurist, Spilhaus suggested covered skyways and tunnels connecting city buildings, useful in bad weather. [Image right: bathythermograph]
Joseph Wood Krutch
	Born 25 Nov 1893; died 22 May 1970. American naturalist, conservationist, writer, and critic. His fame began with The Modern Temper (1929), a book in which he described how science replaced religious certainties with rational skepticism, leaving man in a meaningless world. But Krutch later discovered profound meaning in Nature. On doctor's orders, in 1950 he had to leave New York and New England, where he had been teaching, for the dry desert air of the Southwest. In the beauty of the Sonoran Desert, he wrote masterpieces of natural history, including The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year, (which won the John Burroughs Medal in 1954). Dr. Krutch lived his retirement years in Tucson, Arizona, and was a co-founder of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
Nikolai Vavilov
(source)	Born 25 Nov 1887; died 26 Jan 1943. Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov was a Russian plant geneticist who established 400 research institutes and made expeditions throughout the world (1916-33), leading Russian plant hunters on the first attempt to "cover the globe" in search of wild plants and primitive cultivators. He brought back a huge collection of plants samples for experiments in plant breeding in order to improve the productivity of cereal grains, as well as some other types of crops.Trofim Lysenko, the official Soviet biology spokesman, denounced Vavilov's Mendelevian genetics as counter to the dogmas of communism. He was arrested in 1940 and imprisoned at a concentration camp at Saratov, where he spent his final years. He died there of malnutrition.
Karl Benz
(source)	Born 25 Nov 1844; died 4 Apr 1929. Karl (Friedrich) Benz was a German mechanical engineer who designed and in 1885 built the world's first practical automobile to be powered by an internal-combustion engine. The earliest engine he built was a two-stroke engine, which after two years' work first ran on 31 Dec 1879. He took out various patents on this machine, and opened a factory. After developing financial backing, Benz designed a "motor carriage", with an engine based on the Otto fourstroke cycle. Unlike Daimler, who installed his engine in an ordinary carriage, Benz designed not only his engine, but the whole vehicle as well. On 29 Jan 1886, he was granted a patent on it and on 3rd Jul 1886, he introduced the first automobile in the world, produced for public sale from 1888.
Andrew Carnegie
(source)	Born 25 Nov 1835; died 11 Aug 1919. Scottish-born American steel industrialist and humanitarian who began his career in the iron and steel business in 1865, focussed on steel from 1873, owned Homestead Steel Works in 1888, and by 1899 had founded the Carnegie Steel Co., which merged with United States Steel Corp. in 1901. He then devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, especially as a benefactor of over 1700 libraries. He also supported public education, and international peace. His parents were handloom weavers in Scotland, made poor by the advent of mechanized factories, and the family emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., in 1848. At age 17, he became a telegraph operator, and by 1859 was vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.«
Lewis Morris Rutherfurd
16 Sep 1870(source)	Born 25 Nov 1816; died 30 May 1892. American spectroscopist, astrophysicist and photographer, born in Morrisania, NY, who made the first telescopes designed for celestial photography. He produced a classification scheme of stars based on their spectra as similarly developed by the Italian astronomer. Rutherfurd spent his life working in his own observatory, built in 1856, where he photographed (from 1858) the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and stars down to the fifth magnitude. While using photography to map star clusters, he devised a new micrometer to measure distances between stars with improved accuracy. When Rutherford began (1862) spectroscopic studies, he devised highly sophisticated diffraction gratings.
Robert Mayer
(source)	Born 25 Nov 1814; died 20 Mar 1878. (Julius) Robert Mayer was a German physicist. While a ship's doctor sailing to Java, he considered the physics of animal heat. In 1842, he measured the mechanical equivalent of heat. His experiment compared the work done by a horse powering a mechanism which stirred paper pulp in a caldron with the temperature rise in the pulp. He held that solar energy was the ultimate source of all energy on earth, both living and nonliving. Mayer had the idea of the conservation of energy before either Joule or Helmholtz. The prominence of these two scientists, however, diminished credit for Mayer's earlier insights. James Joule presented his own value for the mechanical equivalent of heat. Helmhotlz more systematically presented the law of conservation of energy.
Claude-Louis Mathieu
	Born 25 Nov 1783; died 5 Mar 1875. French astronomer and mathematician who worked particularly on the determination of the distances of the stars. He began his career as an engineer, but soon became a mathematician at the Bureau des Longitudes in 1817 and later professor of astronomy in Paris. For many years Claude Mathieu edited the work on population statistics L'Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes produced by the Bureau des Longitudes. His work in astronomy focussed on determining the distances to stars. He published L'Histoire de l'astronomie au XVIII siècle in 1827.

Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Custom Quotations Search - custom search within only our quotations pages:

Today in Science History Science Store
Click here to browse a selection of Bargain Science and Nature Books



NOVEMBER 25 - DEATHS

Kenneth C. Brugger
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1998 (born 1918?) American amateur naturalist who on 2 Jan 1975, discovered the long-sought winter home of the monarch butterfly in the mountains of Mexico. From 1937, for 38 years, Canadian zoologist Freud Urquhart patiently investigated to establish the route and destination of the insects. Using tags on the wings of some butterflies, he followed their trails to Mexican territory. Kenneth C. Brugger, one of Urquhart's helpers, after a long period of traveling in the center of Mexico, found the first butterfly refuge. Within the territory of only 200 square meters, there are around 20 million butterflies. The area was cold and covered with oyamel trees and pine trees, a few kilometers from rural towns. Brugger died in Austin, Texas.
Charles F. Kettering
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1958 (born 29 Aug 1876) Charles Franklin Kettering was an American engineer whose 140 patents included the electric starter, car lighting and ignition systems. In his early career, with the National Cash Register Co., Dayton (1904-09), he created the first electric cash register with an electric motor that opened the drawer. When he co-founded the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO, with Edward A. Deeds) he invented the key-operated self-starting motor for the Cadillac (1912) and it spread to nearly all new cars by the 1920's. As vice president and director of research for General Motors Corp. (1920-47) he developed engines, quick-drying lacquer finishes, anti-knock fuels, and variable-speed transmissions.« Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering, by T. A. Boyd.
Wilfred Trotter
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1939 (born 3 Nov 1872) Wilfred (Batten Lewis) Trotter was an English surgeon, who was an authority on cancers of the neck and head and recognized as a pioneer in neurosurgery. He took an interest in sociology and originated the term "herd instinct" in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1914), referring to human behaviour. He was the first to study the psychology of animals, investigating gregariousness as an instinct, in a beehive, a flock of sheep and a wolf pack. He related how herd membership created a homogeneity whereby individuals would instead act together as one. Within humanity, he distinguished two disparate types of people: resistive and sensitive, which came into conflict as the former resisted change, while the latter embraced change.« Instincts of the Herd in Peace And War, by Wilfred Trotter
Édouard (-Jean-Baptiste) Goursat
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1936 (born 21 May 1858) French mathematician and theorist whose contribution to the theory of functions, pseudo- and hyperelliptic integrals, and differential equations influenced the French school of mathematics. The Cauchy-Goursat theorem states the integral of a function round a simple closed contour is zero if the function is analytic inside the contour. Cauchy had established the theorem with the added condition that the derivative of the function was continuous. In 1891, he wrote Leçons sur l'intégration des équations aux dérivées partielles du premier ordre. Goursat's best known work is Cours d'analyse mathématique (1900-10) which introduced many new analysis concepts.
Johann Jakob Bachofen
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1887 (born 22 Dec 1815) Swiss jurist and cultural anthropologist best known for his study of ancient matriarchies, Das Mutterrecht (1861; "Mother Right"), in which he desribed his finding that the matriarchy existed among all primitive peoples. He studied ancient civilizations in Italy, Greece, and Spain with a particular interest in the laws, customs, and rituals of ancient societies. He interpreted the spiritual and social worlds of ancient societies not only through analysis of myths, but also by the archaeological artifacts, and the information he drew from the iconography of funeral urns (though in this latter skill, his exactness may have sometimes strayed with his imagination).« Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, by Johann Jakob Bachofen.
Hermann Kolbe
(source)	Died 25 Nov 1884 (born 27 Sep 1818) Adolphe Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was the German chemist who accomplished the first generally accepted synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic materials. While working on his doctorate he also succeeded in producing acetic acid from inorganic compounds, which was impossible, according to the doctrines of vitalism. In 1859, he succeeded using phenol and carbon dioxide to produce salicylic acid, which led to the cheaper production of acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin. The two reactions came to be called Kolbe's synthesis.



NOVEMBER 25 - EVENTS

CAT scan patent
Ledley (source)	In 1975, the first U.S. patent for a whole-body X-ray scanner was issued to Robert S. Ledley (No. 3,922,552). The ACTA (Automatic Computerized Transverse Axial) diagnostic X-ray scanner revolutionized medical diagnosis. The ACTA can make a three-dimensional analysis of all organs and parts of the body in a series of cross-section images using thin X-ray beams and high power computer processing of the collected data. Using the ACTA, diagnosis of tumours, infection or bleeding is possible even deep within large organs, and it can give improved radiation therapy for cancer.« [Image right: The first model of the Whole Body Computerized Tomograph used at Georgetown University Hospital 1974-1978. (source)] Cross-sectional anatomy: An atlas for computerized tomography, by Robert Steven Ledley.
Atomic research
	In 1960, the first atomic reactor for research and development began operation at Richland, Wa. The plant was built to determine the suitability of plutonium as a reactor fuel. There was a need to recycle plutonium resulting from weapons production. Plutonium-239 enriched uranium-235 was expected to give increased energy output, with less need for the expensive uranium-isotope separation facilities. The Hanford Atomic Products Operation was operated by the General Electric Company for the Atomic Energy Commission.«
Birth of cable TV
(source)	In 1948, cable television was invented by Leroy "Ed" Parsons, (1907-89), who sold electronics and ran a radio station in Astoria, Oregon. On Thanksgiving Day, the Parsonses watched KRSC’s inaugural broadcast from the TV station 150 miles away in Seattle. He picked up a usable signal with a large antenna on the roof of the John Jacob Astor Hotel, and strung a coaxial cable across the street to his living room. He placed a TV in the hotel lobby and a TV in a store window. As others in town wanted the same service, Parsons helped them hook into a system using a community antenna on Coxcomb Hill completed Feb 1949. He moved to Alaska in 1953, and by 1967 had installed the state's first cable system in Barrow, Alaska.« CATV: A History of Community Antenna Television, by Mary Alice Mayer Phillips.
Tut's tomb approached
(source)	In 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter opened the first of two doorways to the tomb of King Tutankamun. In his diary, Carter recorded, "Noted seals. ... Opened the first doorway; which comprised rough stones built up from the threshold to the lintel, plastered over on the outside face, and covered with numerous impressions from various seals of Tut.ankh.Amen and the Royal Necropolis seal. ... As we cleared the passage we found mixed with the rubble broken potsherds, jar seals, and numerous fragments... These were disturbing elements as they pointed towards plundering." The next day, the second doorway was opened. [Image: Carter and his backer Lord Carnavon by the wall leading to burial chamber of King Tut.] The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen, by Howard Carter and A. C. Mace.
American College of Surgeons
(source)	In 1910, the American College of Surgeons was incorporated "to elevate the standard of surgery, to establish a standard of competancy and character for practioners of surgry, and to educate the public and the profession to understand that the practice of surgery calls for special training." The first medical society in the U.S. was a short-lived, somewhat ineffective, local organization in Boston, Mass. (1735-41). The Massachusetts Medical Society was the first effective, state-charter medical society, incorporated on 1 Nov 1781. No permanent, national medical society existed in the U.S. until the American Medical Association was organized on 5 May 1847. Other specialties formed societies in the U.S. before the ACS.« Fellowship of surgeons: A history of the American College of Surgeons, by Loyal Davis.
First Audion tube
(source)	In 1906, the first triode was ordered by Lee de Forest who instructed the New York automobile lamp maker, H. W. Candless, to make a glass bulb containing a "grid" wire between a filament and an electrode plate. These specifications extended the Fleming two-element diode valve design previously published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The third element - the grid wire - regulated the flow of electrons between the filament and the anode plate, producing an amplification of the variations in a signal voltage applied to the grid. De Forest named his invention the "Audion." Within a few years (1913-1917) he was able to profit from his patents that he sold to AT&T for a total of $390,000.« [Image: A de Forest Audion tube, circa 1912.]
First U.S. advertisement for a radio receiver
(source)	In 1905, the first U.S. advertisement for a radio receiver appeared in this day's issue of the Scientific American. The one-inch advertisement was for the Telimco, which offered for $8.50 a "Complete Outfit comprising 1-inch Spark Coil, Strap Key, Sender, Sensitive Relay, Coherer, with Automatic Decoherer and Sounder, 4 ex. Strong Dry Cells, all necessary wiring, including send and catch wires, with full instructions and diagrams." This system was suitable for sending dots and dashes (not full audio). The advertisement also said, "Guaranteed to work up to one mile. Send for Illust. pamphlet." It was offered by Hugo Gernsback of The Electro Importing Company. The product name was an acronym of the company name.
Richardson's law
©1995	In 1901, Owen Willans Richardson read a paper before the Cambridge Philosophical Society which first announced his work on thermionic emission (the release of electrons from hot metals) and in particular a law which mathematically described how the amount of electron current increased as the temperature of the hot surface was raised. (He had been working at the Cavendish Laboratory only one year since his graduation from Cambridge University.) As recorded in the published Proceedings, in Richardson's words: "If then the negative radiation is due to the corpuscles coming out of the metal, the saturation current s should obey the law s = AT^1/2e^-b/T." The discovery of Richardson's law earned him the 1928 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Evaporated milk
(source)	In 1884, the first U.S. patent for the process of evaporated milk was issued to John Meyenberg, a Swiss immigrant, of St Louis, Missouri (No. 308,422). Gail Borden had already been marketing condensed milk, but that was sweetened as part of the preserving process. Evaporated milk is not sweetened, and has up to 75% of the water removed from the cow's milk. Meyenberg's process began by heating the milk with external steam heat, while being stirred, followed by cooling, straining, then condensing in vacuo, cooling further and sealing in hermetically sealed cans. The cans were sterilized by being turned in a frame inside a large steam heated cylinder. That apparatus was also patented (issued on the same day, No. 308,421).«
Power loom
	In 1837, the first U.S. patent for a silk figure power loom was issued to William Crompton of Taunton, Massachusetts (No. 491). The figure or pattern of the cloth was made on a chain.
U.S. theatre gas-lights
	In 1816, the Chestnut Street Theatre at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was illuminated with gas lights. Impressed with Dr. Charles Kugler's demonstration at Peale's Museum of lights "burning without wick or oil," the managers, Warren and Wood, had Kugler install a plant to generate gas at their theatre. Although the managers announced that audiences could expect their gas lights gave "superior safety, brilliance and neatness," there was some considerable opposition from some quarters. The works were denounced as a menace to public health and safety, emitting an unpleasant stench, with a potential for an explosion causing death and destruction*. [Image top: gas-light fixture from another building; bottom: reconstruction elevation drawing of Theatre.]
First English patent to an American
	In 1715, the first British patent be granted to an American was G.B. No. 401 (1715) to "Thomas Masters, Planter of Pennsylvania, for an invention foundout by Sibylla his wife for cleaning and curing the indian Corn growing in several colonies in America.* The first patent issued within the colonies was for a new method of extracting salt, granted to Samuel Winslow by Massachusetts in 1641. It was not until 31 Jul 1790 that a patent was issued by the federal government. Samuel Hopkins was granted a patent for his process of making potash and pearl ashes. This was a document signed by President George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Edmund Randolph as the Patent Office was not formed until 1801.«