What happened today in science history.

Tag: railroad

October 18th in Science and Engineering

Oct 18, 1616: English pharmacist, botanist and physician, Nicholas Culpeper, was born. He published the Complete Herbal in 1653, a comprehensive listing of English medicinal herbs and their uses. It’s still in print. While upper-class physicians withheld medical knowledge from the common people, Culpeper, of lower-class roots, did the opposite by spreading medical knowledge among the people and giving his time to charity patients. He wrote or translated a large number of medical works to give people access to a vast amount of health information. Culpeper died of tuberculosis at age 38.

Oct 18, 1787: U.S. engineer and ship designer, Robert Livingston Stevens, was born. He invented the inverted-T railroad rail and the railroad spike. He tested the first steamboat to use screw propellers, invented and built by his father, John Stevens. Robert Stevens invented a long list of designs and improvements for ships. He was the first to successfully burn anthracite coal in a cupola furnace.

Stevens found that steel rails laid on wooden ties, with crushed stone or gravel beneath, provided a roadbed superior to any known before. His rail and roadbed came into universal use in the United States and remains so to this day. He also invented the pilot (cowcatcher) for the locomotive and increased the number of locomotive drive wheels for better traction.

Oct 18, 1799: German-Swiss chemist, Christian Friedrich Schönbein, was born. He discovered and named ozone in 1840 and was the first to describe guncotton (nitrocellulose). He noted ozone appeared during thunderstorms and named the gas ozone for its peculiar smell (ozo is Greek for smell). Later experiments showed that sending an electric current through pure, dry oxygen (O2 molecules) creates ozone (O3 molecules).

His discovery of the powerful explosive called cellulose nitrate, or guncotton, was the result of a laboratory accident. One day in 1845 he spilled sulfuric and nitric acids and soaked it up with a cotton apron. After the apron dried, it burst into flame. He had created nitrated cellulose. He found that cellulose nitrate could be molded and had some elastic properties. It eventually was used for smokeless gun powder.

Oct 18, 1854: Swedish explorer, Salomon Auguste Andree, who led the ill-fated balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897, was born. He and two companions lifted off on July 11, 1897 from Danes Island, Spitsbergen in the balloon, Eagle, which he had built himself. This was the first ever attempt to explore the Arctic by air. They hoped to drift over the North Pole.

They disappeared, and nothing was known of them for 33 years, until Aug 6th, 1930, when Norwegian explorers on White Island (Kvitöa) found remains of a balloonist, a diary and photos. Just two days after the launch, the balloonists had to make an emergency landing on the ice, where they eventually died in the bitter cold, hundreds of kilometers from the North Pole.

Oct 18, 1859: Italian archaeologist, Paolo Orsi, was born. He pioneered the excavation and research of sites from the prehistoric to the Byzantine in Sicily and southern Italy. He was an expert in the pre-Greek Siculan period he named after the Siculi, or Sikels, a native group or groups which were said to have inhabited southern Italy and eastern Sicily.

In 1889 through 1893, he undertook excavations in the Pantalica Valley, which has five necropoli with thousands of burial chambers hewn in the steep limestone cliffs. He discovered the Neolithic village of Stentinello. In 1911, he uncovered the doric temple at Punta Stilo, and more excavation revealed the layout of some city walls and some houses. The archaeological museum in Sicily is dedicated to him.

Oct 18, 1870: Sandblasting was patented by Benjamin Chew Tilghman. Sandblasting uses compressed air to force an abrasive material like sand through the nozzle of a sandblasting gun. He’s also considered the father shotpeening. This is where small spheres of hardened steel are blasted against steel objects to give them a hardened and crack resistant surface. This is used to strengthen metal that is under great stress such as the connecting rods in high-performance piston engines.

In 1866, he found that sulphurous acid would dissolve the intercellular matter of wood, freeing the fibres for pulp, and became famous as the inventor of the sulphite process to make wood pulp for making of paper.

Oct 18, 1878: Thomas Edison made electricity available for household usage.

Oct 18, 1892: The first long-distance telephone line between Chicago and New York was formally opened as Chicago Mayor Hempstead Washburn greeted his New York counterpart, Hugh J. Grant.

Oct 18, 1898: English brothers Alexander and Francis Elmore applied for a British patent (No. 21,948) for their flotation process to separate valuable ore, such as copper, from the gangue (worthless rock) with which it is associated when mined. It was the first practical equipment to extract metals from low-content ore. Pulverized ore is mixed with water and brought into contact with thick oil. The oil entraps the metallic constituents, which are afterwards separated, and gangue passed away with the water. Today, flotation methods remain vital in the mining industry, processing millions of tons of ores each year.

Pascual Jordan Oct 18, 1902: Ernst Pascual Jordan, a German physicist, was born. In the late 1920s, Jordan co-founded with Max Born the field of quantum mechanics using matrix methods. Werner Heisenberg later joined the team. They showed how light could be interpreted as composed of discrete quanta of energy.

Later, with Wolfgang Pauli and Eugene Wigner, Jordan contributed to the quantum mechanics of electron-photon interactions, now called quantum electrodynamics. He also originated, with Robert Dicke, a theory of cosmology that proposed to make the universal constants of nature, such as the universal gravitational constant G, variable over time.

Oct 18, 1919: George Edward Pelham (“Pel”) Box, English-American engineer and statistician, was born. He began as a chemist. At age 19, he published his first paper, on an activated sludge process to produce clean effluent. In the army during WW II, at Porton Down Experimental Station, he taught himself statistics to get more reliable results from his experiments on the chemistry of poison gases. Thus, he became “an accidental statistician”, the title of his autobiography.

He developed several statistical tools that bear his name: the Box-Jenkins model, Box-Cox transformations, and Box-Behnken designs. Box wrote or co-authored major statistics texts on evolutionary operation, times-series, Bayesian analysis, the design of experiments, statistical control, and quality improvement.

Oct 18, 1922: The British Broadcasting Company was formed five years before it received its first Royal Charter and became the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the 1920s, John Reith, the BBC’s founding father, knew of America’s unregulated, commercial radio, and the fledgling Soviet Union’s rigidly controlled state system. Reith’s vision was of an independent British broadcaster able to educate, inform, and entertain, without political or commercial pressure. Listening to the wireless in the UK quickly became a social and cultural phenomenon as the BBC in London and its regional stations gave birth to radio mass communication.

Oct 18, 1952: The New York Times reported that a mechanical heart was used for the first time to maintain the blood circulation of a 41-year-old man during an 80-minute operation on his heart. The Dodrill-GMR Mechanical Heart was developed by Dr. Forest Dodrill and built by the General Motors Research Laboratories.

Oct 18, 1955: A new subatomic particle called a negative proton or antiproton was discovered at UC Berkeley in California. The hunt for antimatter began in earnest in 1932 with the discovery of the positron, a particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge. However, creating an antiproton would be far more difficult since it needed nearly 2,000 times the energy to accomplish.

In 1955, the most powerful “atom smasher” in the world, the Bevatron at Berkeley, could provide the required energy. Detection was accomplished with a maze of magnets and electronic counters through which only antiprotons could pass. After several hours of bombarding copper with protons accelerated to 6.2 billion electron volts (Gev) of energy, the scientists counted a total of 60 antiprotons.

Oct 18, 1962: Dr. James D. Watson of the U.S., Dr. Francis Crick, and Dr. Maurice Wilkins of Britain won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). DNA itself had first been identified and isolated almost a century before by Friedrich Miescher in 1869.

Oct 18, 1969: Cyclamates were banned in the USA. Sodium cyclamate is a non-caloric sweetener discovered in 1937. It has been widely used as a tabletop sweetener, in sugar-free beverages, in baked goods, and other low-calorie foods, particularly in combination with saccharin. The ban was based on concern raised by one experiment showing bladder tumors appearing in laboratory rats fed large doses of cyclamate. Following new experiments, in June 1985, the National Academy of Sciences affirmed the FDA’s Cancer Assessment Committee’s latest conclusion: “The totality of the evidence from studies in animals does not indicate that cyclamate or its major metabolite cyclohexylamine is carcinogenic by itself.” Cyclamate is approved for use in 130 countries.

Oct 18, 1971: In its first such action, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shut down heavy industries in Birmingham, Alabama, when air pollution on this day was reaching dangerous levels. It was an emergency action under the Clean Air Act (1970). The EPA asked a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order. Among others, U.S. Steel had been belching too much smoke into an atmospheric inversion (stagnant air mass). Among idled workers, one said, “We’re going to choke to death before we starve to death.” Six months before, the city had suffered a five-day crisis that spiked on April 20, 1971. At that time, while the state failed in enforcement, the EPA was not notified early enough to start emergency action. Days with high particulate counts in the air thereafter drew close EPA scrutiny.

Oct 18, 1989: The Galileo space orbiter was released from the STS 34 flight of the Atlantis Space Shuttle. Then the orbiter’s upper stage rocket pushed it into a course through the inner solar system. The craft gained speed from gravity assists in encounters with Venus and Earth before heading outward to Jupiter. During its six year journey to Jupiter, Galileo’s instruments made interplanetary studies using its dust detector, magnetometer, and various plasma and particle detectors. It also made close-up studies of two asteroids, Gaspra and Ida in the asteroid belt. The Galileo orbiter’s primary mission was to study Jupiter, its satellites, and its magnetosphere for two years. It released an atmospheric probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere on Dec 7, 1995.

September 19th in Science and Engineering

Sep 19, 1783: Jacques Etienne Montgolfier launched a duck, a sheep and a rooster aboard a hot-air balloon at Versailles in France.

Sep 19, 1838: Ephraim Morris patented the railroad brake.

Sep 19, 1839: George Cadbury, English businessman, Quaker, social reformer and chocolate manufacturer, was born in Birmingham, England. He joined his father’s chocolate business at the age of 21, along with his brother, Richard. When their father retired, the two brothers took over and built the famous business of Cadbury Brothers. They developed new cocoa bean processing methods. The resulting pure cocoa essence was a major breakthrough and resulted in new food laws prohibiting adulturation of foods.

Sep 19, 1848: Hyperion, the eighth moon of Saturn, was discovered in the U.S. by William Cranch Bond and his son George Phillips Bond and in England by William Lassell.

Sep 19, 1851: It can be said that Lever Brothers cleaned up the world. William Hesketh Lever (1st Viscount Leverhulme) was born on this day. He was a British manufacturer and philanthropist who formed the Lever Brothers soap manufacturing company. It was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils instead of animal tallow. In 1888, Lever established Port Sunlight, a model community providing housing for the company’s workers, who enjoyed conditions, pay, hours, and benefits far better than found in similar industries. By 1900 the factory was producing brands such as Lifebuoy, Lux, Monkey Brand, Vim, and Rinso.

Sep 19, 1876: On this day a patent was issued to American inventor Melville Bissell for the carpet sweeper (182,346). At his a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, his wife’s health was affected by dust from the packing materials. Out of desperate need for self-preservation, he invented the carpet sweeper. 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 then trimmed with scissors. Anna Bissell gathered the parts together in clothes baskets and brought them back to the store for assembly.

Sep 19, 1878: Charles-Victor Mauguin, French mineralogist and crystallographer was born. He was one of the first to make a systematic study of the silicate minerals. Using X-ray diffraction techniques, he determined the structure of a large number of micas. He also published the atomic structure of cinnabar, calomel, and graphite and devised a system of symbols to indicate the symmetry properties of crystals. It became an international standard.

Sep 19, 1888: James Waddell Alexander, American mathematician, was born. He founded the branch of mathematics now called topology. In 1912, he joined the faculty of the mathematics department at Princeton. Soon after, Alexander generalised the Jordan curve theorem and, in 1928, he discovered the Alexander polynomial which is much used in knot theory.

Sep 19, 1908: Viktor Frederick Weisskopf, Austrian-American theoretical physicist and administrator was born. He was a doctoral student of Max Born at Göttingen, and was a major contributor in the golden age of quantum mechanics. Weisskopf worked with Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr and Pauli. To escape Nazism, he moved to the U.S. in 1937. He joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, where he became associate head of the theoretical division. After the war he taught at MIT. Murray Gell-Mann was one of his students. Weisskopf developed the “clouded crystal ball” model of the atomic nucleus. He served as director-general of CERN from 1961 to 1965, then returned to MIT, retiring in 1973.

Sep 19, 1947: Torunn Atteraas “Teri” Garin, a Norwegian chemical engineer, was born. After attending university in Norway, she moved to the U.S. for degrees in chemical engineering (1971) and environmental engineering (1977). Garin helped develop aspartame sweetener as a sugar substitute while working for General Foods. Earlier in her career, she researched ways to minimize water pollution caused by food production. She co-patented an adsoption process to extract caffeine from coffee (4,113,887) and a method to derive food dyes from natural sources to replace possibly cancer-causing synthetic dyes (4,409,254), for example, non-toxic betanin, a natural red pigment from red beet. These patents were assigned to General Foods Corp. She died from lung cancer.

Sep 19, 1957: The United States conducted its first underground nuclear test, in the Nevada desert, at Area 12 of the Nevada Test Site. This was the Atomic Energy Commission’s first fully contained underground nuclear detonation named the Rainier event. It was detonated in a horizontal tunnel, drilled about 1600 feet into the mesa and 900 feet beneath the top of the mesa.

Sep 19, 1982: Streetcars stopped running on Market St. in San Francisco after 122 years of service.

Sep 19, 1988: Israel launched its first satellite, Offeq-1 aboard a Shavit rocket, launched from the Negev Desert over the Mediterranean, thus becoming the ninth country in space. The satellite carried scientific data collection instruments but it’s believed to have included experimental surveillance functions.

Sep 19, 1991: Ötzi, the Iceman, a Stone Age traveler and the most ancient human being ever found, was discovered in the Similaun glacier in the Ötzal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. His frozen body was found along with artifacts of his way of life. An examination of his gut contents showed the man took his last meal not long before setting out on a hike from which he never returned. The meal was a simple affair, consisting of a bit of unleavened bread made of einkorn wheat, one of the few domesticated grains in the Iceman’s part of the world at that time, some other plant, possibly an herb or other green, and meat. An Austrian reporter named him Ötzi.

Sep 19, 1994: The U.S. DNA Identification Act became law as part of comprehensive federal crime legislation. It authorized the FBI director to establish a national DNA database, but the system did not become operational until 1998. The Combined DNA Identification System (CODIS) was designed to enable the states to pool their crime-investigation resources. The central index includes identification records of criminals, and forensic analyses of DNA samples collected from crime scenes and unidentified human remains. The Act included requirements for proficiency testing and privacy protection requirements, with penalties for violations.

Sep 19, 2015: The Aerovelo Eta human-powered speedbike reached a top speed of 139.45 kmh or 86.65 mph on a highway outside of Battle Mountain, Nevada. The nearly-level and straight state highway 305 was the venue for the annual World Human-Powered Speed Challenge. The bicylist, Todd Reichert, was recumbent, encased in a lightweight, low-profile aerodynamically designed shell, which also shrouded most of the wheels. During several years of development the engineering team worked to overcome wobbles at high speed and steering issues to build the world’s most efficient vehicle.

September 18th in Science and Engineering

Sep 18, 1752: Adrien-Marie Legendre, French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions, was born.

Sep 18, 1819: French physicist, Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault was born. Using a long pendulum that would swing for many hours, Foucault directly proved that Earth rotates on its axis. The plane under the pendulum rotated, relative to the pendulum, at a rate related to the latitude of the site and Earth’s angular velocity. He made accurate measurements of the velocity of light. He proved that light travels slower in water than in air. He invented an accurate test still used today to measure the spherical and chromatic aberrations of lenses and telescope mirrors.

Sep 18, 1830: On this day, the first railroad locomotive built in the U.S., B&O locomotive Tom Thumb, the first locomotive built in America, lost a 14 kilometer race with a horse due to a boiler leak.

Sep 18, 1831: German-Austrian inventor, Siegfried Marcus, was born. He built four of the world’s first gasoline powered automobiles. He first began working on self-propelled vehicles in 1860. He made many inventions including an electric lamp, a carburetor, and an igniter for explosives. He also taught physics.

Sep 18, 1839: John Aitkin, Scottish physicist and meteorologist, John Aitkin is born. He’s know for his studies on atmospheric dust, the formation of dew, cyclones and evaporation. He invented instruments to study dust particles. Most importantly, Aitkin determined that condensation of water vapor from the air begins on the surface of microscopic particles, now called Aitken nuclei. This is critical to the formation of dew and rain.

Sep 18, 1895: Daniel David Palmer gave the first chiropractic adjustment to Harvey Lillard in Davenport, Iowa – now the home of Palmer Chiropractic College.

Sep 18, 1907: U.S. physicist Edwin Mattison McMillan was born. McMillan shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn T. Seaborg for their discovery of element 93, neptunium. Uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element (92). By bombarding uranium with fast neutrons or deuterons, isotopes of the first element (93) beyond uranium were produced at a laboratory at UC Berkeley. By 1940, McMillan, Seaborg, and other colleagues found that the radioactive decay of neptunium produced element 94, which they named plutonium.

Sep 18, 1927: Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, the first radio network, first went on the air with 47 radio stations. The radio network lost money in its first year. On Jan 18, 1929, Columbia 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).

Sep 18, 1980: Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendéz became the first person of color and the first Latin American to fly into space. He flew on Soyuz 38, one of two men comprising the seventh international crew of the Intercosmos program. 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.