Today in History of Science and Engineering

What happened today in science history.

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October 2nd in Science and Engineering

October 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Oct 2, 1608: Johannes Lippershey demonstrated his new invention, the first optical telescope. He showed it to the Netherlands States General. Lippershey was a lens grinder who made eyeglasses or spectacles. One of his apprentices discovered that by holding a long-focus lens at a distance from the eye and a short-focus lens directly in front of the eye, distant objects appeared closer. Lippershey mounted lenses in tubes and applied for a patent in 1608. He also offered them for sale to the Dutch government, which appreciated their military value.

When Galileo heard of the device, he made a similar one and used it to study the sky. The word “telescope” was coined by a guest attending a banquet honoring Galileo on April 14, 1611, where he demonstrated the device.

Oct 2, 1721: The first record of the importation of an African camel into America was an advertisement in the Boston Gazette, announcing that the camel was being exhibited in Boston, Massachusetts, and that it stood 7 feet high and 12 feet long. The first commercial importation of camels into the USA was made in 1856. They were to be used for military purposes, mainly in the desert Southwest.

Oct 2, 1832: Julius von Sachs, a German botanist famous for studying plant physiology, nutrition, and tropism (response to environmental stimuli) was born. He discovered transpiration — that absorbed water moves in tubes in the plant walls without the cooperation of living cells. In 1865, Sachs discovered chlorophyll, the green substance of plants, that it is located in special bodies within plant cells, later called chloroplasts, that glucose is made by the action of chlorophyll, and that the glucose is usually stored as starch. Sachs also studied the formation of growth rings in trees, the role of tissue tension in promoting organ growth, and he invented the clinostat to measure the effects of such external factors such as light and gravity on the movement of growing plants. His work was a significant contribution to the knowledge of plant physiology during the second half of the 19th century.

Oct 2, 1832: English anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor, regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology, was born. After travelling in the USA in 1855, he proceeded to Cuba where he met Henry Christy the ethnologist. Together, they visited Mexico, where Christy’s influence greatly stimulated Tylor’s interest in anthropology. Seeing the rich prehistoric remains in Mexico inspired Tylor to make a systematic study.

His most important work, Primitive Culture, published in 1871, was influenced by Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Tylor developed the theory of an evolutionary, progressive relationship between primitive and modern cultures.

Oct 2, 1836: Charles Darwin returned from his famous five-year voyage on the HMS Beagle to the Pacific. It would be 23 years before he published Origin of Species.

Oct 2, 1846: American physician, Eliza Maria Mosher, whose wide-ranging medical career included an educational focus on physical fitness and health maintenance, was born. Upon receiving her doctorate in medicine in 1875, she began private practice in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1877 she was made resident physician at the Massachusetts State Reformatory Prison for Women at Sherborn, Massachusetts. Subsequently, she became superintendent of the institution, though an injury to her knee forced her to return to private practice and university positions.

In private research she investigated medical aspects of posture. She designed the seats in several types of rapid-transit streetcars, invented an orthopedically sound kindergarten chair, and was a founder of the American Posture League.

Oct 2, 1852: Scottish chemist, William Ramsay, who discovered who discovered the elements neon, krypton and xenon and co-discovered argon, radon, calcium and barium. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904, “in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system.” The so-called “inert gases” are now called “noble gases” because some examples of chemical reactions have been discovered.

Oct 2, 1854: Scottish biologist and sociologist, Sir Patrick Geddes, who was one of the modern pioneers of the concept of town and regional planning, was born. He studied under Darwin’s champion, Thomas Henry Huxley. As a professor of botany, Geddes emphasized the development of sexual reproduction as a major step in organic evolution and, with the naturalist John Arthur Thomson, published The Evolution of Sex (1889). Geddes turned his attention to sociology after an attack of blindness in Mexico hampered his biological experimentation. His researches in India, Palestine, Mexico, and Scotland led to his conviction that the development of human communities was primarily biological in nature, consisting of interactions among people, their environment, and their activities.

Oct 2, 1858: Gerhard (Jakob), Friherre De Geer (Baron), Swedish geologist, was born. He originated the varve-counting method used in geochronology. A varve is a seasonal coarse-fine layer of clay deposited in still water. The layers were produced by the annual meltwater sequence with rapid melting and discharge in summer depositing coarse sediments and slow settling of fine-grained material during the winter months. The method he devised of counting of layers in glaciers was good for dating back to 18,000 years. In 1920 De Geer visited the United States to study the varves of New England.

Oct 2, 1866: The first U.S. patent for a tin can with a key opener was issued to J. Osterhoudt of New York City, US #58,554.

Oct 2, 1878: German geophysicist and petroleum engineer, Conrad Schlumberger, was born. He is noted for his invention in 1927 of a method of continuous electric logging of boreholes. Beginning in 1912, Conrad Schlumberger conceived the idea for electrical measurements to map subsurface rock bodies. He was first joined by his brother, Marcel, in 1919 for work together in Normandy, France, opening their first office in 1921.

For three years, starting in 1923, Schlumberger teams conducted geophysical surveys in Romania, Serbia, Canada, South Africa, Belgian Congo and the USA. Electrical prospecting was used for the first time to map a subsurface oil-bearing structure: a salt dome in Romania. In 1927, the first electrical resistivity log was recorded in a well in Pechelbronn, France.

Today, Schlumberger Limited is the world’s largest oilfield services company. Schlumberger employs approximately 100,000 people working in more than 85 countries.

Oct 2, 1883: Karl (Anton von) Terzaghi, Austrian-American civil engineer, was born. He who founded the branch of civil engineering science known as soil mechanics, a term he coined for the study of the properties of soil under stresses and under the action of flowing water. Soil dynamics deals with soil properties and behaviour under changing stress, such as may occur due to earthquakes, bomb blasts, fast-moving traffic, wind, or wave action.

Oct 2, 1886: Swiss-American astronomer, Robert Julius Trumpler, who moved to the USA in 1915 and worked at the Lick Observatory, was born. In 1922, by observing a solar eclipse, he confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. He made extensive studies of galactic star clusters, and demonstrated the presence throughout the galactic plane of a faint haze of interstellar material that absorbs light generally, that dims and reddens the light of distant star clusters.

The presence of this obscuring haze revealed how the size of spiral galaxies had been over-estimated. Harlow Shapley, in 1918, determined the distance to the centre of the Milky Way to be 50,000 light-years away. Trumpler’s work reduced this to 30,000 light-years.

Oct 2, 1901: American aeronautical engineer, educator, and science administrator, Charles Stark Draper, was born. He who earned degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. In 1939, he became head of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a center for the design of navigational and guidance systems for ships, airplanes, and missiles from World War II through the Cold War. He developed gyroscope systems that stabilized and balanced gunsights and bombsights and which were later expanded to an inertial guidance system for launching long-range missiles at supersonic targets. He was the “father of inertial navigation.” The Apollo contract for guiding man and spacecraft to the moon was placed with the Draper Instrumentation Lab, which developed the Apollo’s onboard computer and many other instruments.

Oct 2, 1903: The first US steam-turbine of large capacity for commercial service was placed in service at the Fiske Street station of the Commonwealth Edison Co., Chicago, Illinois. It was built by General Electric Co in Schenectady, New York, and had been factory-tested on March 4, 1903. Compared to the reciprocating engine it replaced, the turbine needed only one-third the floor space, had one-eighth the weight, and cost one-third as much. The turbine developed 6,500 horsepower, operating at a steam pressure 175 psi and a temperature of 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Oct 2, 1906: German-American engineer, Willy Ley, who was a founder of the German Rocket Society, was born. The society was the first group of men (with the sole exception of Robert Goddard) to experiment with rockets. Ley introduced Wernher von Braun to the society. Ley was consultant for the science fiction film Frau im Mond in which the countdown from ten to zero was introduced. Fiercely anti-Nazi, unlike Von Braun, he emigrated to the USA in 1934 rather than pursue military applications of rocketry. In the USA, he became a popularizer of space exploration and travel, writing many popular books.

Oct 2, 1907: Baron Alexander R(obertus) Todd (of Trumpington), British biochemist, was born. His research on the structure and synthesis of nucleotides, nucleosides, and nucleotide coenzymes gained him the 1957 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Nucleotides, found in the chromosomes and also in cell plasma, are connected with the units of heredity. It was known that they are built up of three very different “building stones”: phosphoric acid, a sugar, and a heterocyclic base containing nitrogen, assembled in one macromolecule. Todd researched how they are connected to each other.

Oct 2, 1917: Belgian cytologist and biochemist, Christian René de Duve, was born. He discovered lysosomes (the digestive organelles of cells) and peroxisomes (organelles that are the site of metabolic processes involving hydrogen peroxide). Lysosomes have been shown by de Duve and others to be engaged in a series of cellular activities during which biological material must be degraded. The lysosomes are used in defense mechanisms against bacteria, during resorption, and secretion. They can also be used for a controlled degradation of the cell in which they are contained, for example, to remove worn out components. For this work he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Albert Claude and George Palade.

Oct 2, 1937: Motion pictures of moving X-ray images on a fluoroscopic screen showing the movement of organs of the human body were shown at the American Roentgen Ray Society convention in New York City. The images were filmed with a home 16 mm movie camera at 16 frames per second. Two second long shots could capture two or three beats of the heart, the act of breathing, movements of the diaphragm or motion of joints. The clips could be looped to show repeating motion. The films were made by Drs William H. Stewart, William J. Hoffman and Francis H. Ghiselin from Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital.

Oct 2, 1956: The Atomicron, the first atomic clock in the USA, was unveiled at the Overseas Press Club in New York City. The time base was the frequency of the transitions between two hyperfine grounds states of cesium, which results in a frequency of 9,192,631,770 Hz. For greatest precision this should be adjusted for the influence of Earth’s magnetic field and Earth’s orbit around the sun. However, when the cesium standard was adopted in 1960, these adjustments weren’t necessary because the precision of the clock exceeded the precision of all other scientific measurements ever made.

September 27th in Science and Engineering

September 27, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sep 27, 1814: American astronomer and mathematician, Daniel Kirkwood, was born. Asteroids orbit the Sun in bands, with gaps in between. His explanation for these gaps was perturbations in the orbits of asteroids caused by Jupiter’s gravity. Objects that orbit in these gaps are regularly disturbed by Jupiter’s pull and eventually move to a different orbit that’s more stable, so gaps appear. A similar mechanism causes the gaps in Saturn’s rings. These gaps are now called Kirkwood gaps.

Sep 27, 1816: Robert Stirling, age 26, applied for a patent for his “Heat Economiser” at Edinburgh, Scotland, patent number 4081/1816. The patent described principles of heat regeneration to reduce fuel consumption in glass and other furnaces, with elements of what is now called the Stirling Cycle engine. While his furnace design came to nothing, 40 years later Siemens made the design practical. In 1827, Stirling patented an engine that worked successfully, now known as the Stirling Engine.

Sep 27, 1818: The German chemist Adolphe Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was born. He accomplished the first generally accepted synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic materials. The commonly believed doctrine of Vitalism said this was impossible. He also succeeded in producing acetic acid from inorganic compounds, which according to the doctrine was impossible. This put an end to 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.

Sep 27, 1825: The first locomotive to haul a passenger train was operated by George Stephenson’s Stockton & Darlington’s line in England. The engine named “Locomotion No. 1” pulled 34 wagons and 1 solitary coach on its journey of 21 miles from Shildon, via Darlington to Stockton in County Durham. This epic journey was the launchpad for the development of the railways, which was to take the world by storm over the following years. Passengers had been hauled before, but only in tests and demonstrations. This time was the beginning of regularly scheduled passenger and freight service.

Sep 27, 1849: Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, who was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was born. He pioneered the investigation that he named the “conditioned reflex”, as opposed to an innate reflex like pain.

In the experiment which made him famous, he trained a hungry dog to associate the sound of a bell with receiving food. Thereafter, the dog would salivate on hearing the bell alone. He had originally set out to study digestion in dogs, investigating how digestive secretions were regulated. He realized that digestion was partly controlled by external stimuli such as vision and smell, and discovered that the response could be associated with any stimulus, like sound. He published his results in 1903.

Sep 27, 1852: British civil engineer, Sir William Willcocks, was born. He proposed and designed the first Aswan Dam (1898-1902) on the Nile River in Egypt and executed major irrigation projects in South Africa and Turkey.

Sep 27, 1854: The first great disaster involving an an ocean liner on the Atlantic Ocean occurred when the steamship S.S. Arctic sank with over 300 lives lost. When launched in 1850, this oak-framed, pine-planked, masted side-paddle steamer was regarded as the best-outfitted ship travelling between England and New York. With steam power it could average thirteen knots. Its last voyage began on 20 Sep 1854 from Liverpool. Six days out, in a fog bank off Cape Race, Newfoundland, it collided with an iron-hulled French ship, the Vesta. Despite bow damage to each, both deemed it advisable to try to reach land. Only the Vesta reached land three days later. The Arctic lost power, its pumps stopped, and it sank. This loss prompted the universal adoption of on-board foghorns.

Sep 27, 1892: Book matches were patented by Joshua Pusey of Lima, Ohio, ptent #483165. He later sold the patent rights to the Diamond Match Company of Barberton, Ohio. The Diamond Match Company was a conglomerate and built by absorbing a number of smaller match manufacturing companies. In 1895, production exceeded 150,000 matchbooks a day. The first Diamond matchbooks were a dangerous and flimsy novelty, but they were improved. Soon, they became common and we often used for advertisement.

Sep 27, 1908: The first production Ford Model T car rolled out of the factory. It was assembled at the Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan, which had built various earlier Ford models such as the B, D, F, K, N, R, and S, in the preceeding four years. The Model T was introduced to the public on Oct 1, 1908. It had a 20-hp 4-cylinder engine, with versions starting at $850. The first 12,000 model Ts were built at the Piquette Avenue Plant, before production was transferred to a new, larger factory at Highland Park.

The Model T was produced for 19 years, until May 26, 1927. Fifteen million were made, making a historic impact on society. As the manufacturing process was refined over the years, production time was reduced from 12 hours per unit to 1 hour 33 minutes in 1913. By the end in 1927, Model T cars rolled off the assembly line every 24 seconds. The Model T was available “in any color you like, as long as it’s black.” This is because black paint was the fastest to dry.

Sep 27, 1910: A U.S. patent for the production of ammonia was issued to Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol, #971,501. This process could produce ammonia on a large scale directly from its component gases, hydrogen and nitrogen, by passing a mixture of them over hot finely-divided osmium metal which served as a catalyst. The Haber process typically takes place at a pressure of 175 atmospheres (2,600 psi) and a temperature of 550 degrees C. The Haber process could easily give an 8% by volume yield of ammonia. Ammonia is used in enormous quantities by modern industry and farming. It’s used directly and as a feedstock for many other processes.

Sep 27, 1918: English radio astronomer, Sir Martin Ryle, who worked on radar for British wartime defense, was born. After WW II, he became a leader in the development of radio astronomy by designing revolutionary radio telescope systems that used the synthetic aperture technique for accurate location of weak radio sources. Using these techniques and interferometry, he and his team located radio-emitting regions on the sun and pinpointed other radio sources so that they could be studied in visible light. Ryle observed the most distant known galaxies of the universe. His 1C – 5C Cambridge catalogues of radio sources led to the discovery of numerous radio galaxies and quasars. For his synthetic aperture work, Ryle shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, along with Antony Hewish. This was the first Nobel Prize recognition of astronomical research.

Sep 27, 1920: American oceanographer and meteorologist, Henry Melson Stommel, was born, He was an expert on physical oceanography, primarily the interpretation of data associated with large scale ocean dynamics. He had a long standing interest in the Gulf Stream. He spent most of his career conducting research at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Stommel was one of the most influential oceanographers of his time. He proposed many theories that were later proven to be correct. He applied electromagnetic measurements to oceanic flows, the dynamics of estuaries, and the related problem of hydraulic controls, and the interaction of nonlinear eddy-like phenomena.

Sep 27, 1922: Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, D.C., demonstrated that if a ship passed through a radio wave being sent between two stations, that ship could be detected. This was the beginning of radar.

Sep 27, 1925: Sir Robert Geoffrey Edwards was a British medical researcher who, with Patrick Steptoe, perfected in-vitro fertilization (IVF) of the human egg. Their technique made possible the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test-tube baby,” in July of 1978, to parents that had previously spent nine years trying to start a family. Edwards was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 2010, “for the development of in vitro fertilization.” His colleague, Steptoe, had died in 1988, so could not be a recipient.

Edwards and Steptoe began their research in the late 1960s, but their research had to be privately funded because the medical establishment found the idea of a “test-tube baby” repugnant. They worked in a secluded laboratory at a small hospital. The work was long and frustrating, with over 100 failures before the first success. Millions of births have since been enabled by IVF.

Sep 27, 1938: British ocean liner “Queen Elizabeth,” the largest passenger liner ever built, was launched at Clydebank in Scotland.

Sep 27, 1941: The first Liberty ship, the S.S. Patrick Henry, was launched. Three months later, it was delivered at Baltimore, Maryland to the U.S. Maritime Commission. It was built in 244 days by the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipbuilding Co. The S.S. Patrick Henry could average a speed of about 11 knots, and had a general cargo capacity of 9,146 tons, although this was often greatly exceeded.

During WW2, the United States stunned the world with its industrial production capabilities. Nothing like it has ever been seen before or since, and the Liberty ships are possibly the best example. With WW2 looming, it was clear that an abundance of freighters would be required. The Liberty Ship was designed to be the first mass-produced freighter. Production was overseen by Henry Kaiser. The USA put 18 shipyards to work and produced 2,710 ships in four years. That’s an average of three ships every two days, an unprecedented level of production. Female workers played a big part in the work. While the ships were only designed for a five year working life, many had much longer careers.

Sep 27, 1950: The answering machine was invented.

September 25th in Science and Engineering

September 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sep 25, 1644: Danish astronomer, Ole Christensen Rømer, was born. Rømer was the first to demonstrate conclusively that light travels at a finite speed. He made measurements of the length of time between eclipses of Jupiter by one of its moons. These observations produced different results depending on the position of the earth in its orbit around the sun. The size of the error was as much as ten minutes on measurements taken a month or two apart. He reasoned that light took longer to travel the greater distance when earth was travelling in its orbit away from Jupiter. This was correct. For some reason, Rømer never made the speed calculation, but others did from his data. The result is within 20 percent of the true value for the speed of light.

Rømer was a polymath and did many things. He was made Chief of Police in Copenhagen. When he took office, his first act was to fire the entire department and start over, in order to eliminate corruption. He developed the first temperature scale for a thermometer using the freezing and boiling points of water. Fahrenheit visited him and improved on Rømer’s design. He invented the first street lights in Copenhagen, and worked to improve the lives of beggars, the poor, and unemployed. He developed building codes, got the water and sewar systems of Copenhagen working properly, and a very long list of other things in the fields of engineering, mechanics, and navigation.

Sep 25, 1725: French military engineer, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, was born today. He invented the world’s first fuel-propelled vehicle, a large, 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 automobile.

Sep 25, 1773: Agostino Marla Bassi de Lodi, an Italian entomologist, botanist and bacteriologist, was born today. He’s known as the father of insect pathology for his pioneering work investigating the cause of transmission of disease in animals. Ten years before Louis Pasteur found disease-causing microorganisms, Bassi showed that a silk worm disease was contagious and could be transmitted naturally by direct contact, from 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. Thus, 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.

Sep 25, 1807: American telegraph pioneer, Alfred Lewis Vail, was born today. Vail was an associate and financial backer of Samuel F. B. Morse in the experimentation that made the telegraph a commercial reality. Vail’s contributions were large. He invented the telegraph key. Vail is responsible for the remarkable efficiency of Morse code by applying the principle that the most frequently sent letters should have the shortest code. Morse code has not been in commercial use since 2000 but is commonly used by radio amateurs because it’s effective and fun. Morse has been in used for over 160 years, longer than any electrical coding scheme.

Sep 25, 1832: American civil engineer and architect, William Le Baron Jenney, was born on this day. His 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 was a skilled town planners, but his greatest fame came from his large commercial buildings. His Home Insurance Building in Chicago was one of the first buildings to use a metal skeleton for support.

Sep 25, 1839: German paleontologist, Karl Alfred von Zittel, was born. He proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age. A distinguished authority on his subjects and their history, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century. His five-volume “Handbuch der Paläonologie” was arguably his greatest service to science, and it remains one of the most comprehensive and trustworthy paleontological reference books.

Sep 25, 1843: U.S. inventor of the carpet sweeper, Melville Bissell, was born. 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 25, 1843: American geologist, Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, was born. He was 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. In 1881 he headed the glacier division of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Sep 25, 1846: German meteorologist and climatologist, Wladimir (Peter) Köppen, was born. 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 with mild winters; (D) Humid Mid-Latitude with severe winters; (E) Polar (summerless climates).

Sep 25, 1866: American geneticist and zoologist, Thomas Hunt Morgan, was born on this day. He’s famous for his experimental research with the fruit fly by which he established the chromosome theory of heredity. He discovered that a number of genetic variations were inherited together and that this was because their controlling genes occurred on the same chromosome. At Columbia University (1904-28), he began his revolutionary genetic investigations of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. 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. His study of the characteristics inherited by mutants ultimately enabled him to determine the precise behaviour and exact localization of genes. Morgan and his “fly room” colleagues, mapped the relative positions of genes on Drosophila chromosomes. Morgan published his seminal book, The Mechanisms of Mendelian Heredity in 1915. Though this work was not widely accepted initially, Morgan was awarded a Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1933.

Sep 25, 1904: American oceanographer, Columbus O’Donnell Iselin was born on this day. He was director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts from 1940 to 1950 and from 1956 to 1957. He expanded its facilities 10-fold and made it one of the largest research establishments of its kind in the world. Iselin developed the bathythermograph and other deep-sea instruments responsible for saving ships during WW II. He made major contributions to research on ocean salinity and temperature, acoustics, and the oceanography of the Gulf Stream.

Sep 25, 1974: Scientists first reported that freon gases released from aerosol spray cans were destroying the ozone layer.

Sep 25, 1956: The world’s first transatlantic telephone cable system began operating from Clarenville, Newfoundland to Oban, Scotland. Previous cables had been limited to telegraph transmissions.

Sep 25, 1820: Francois Arago announced that a copper wire between the poles of a voltaic cell, could laterally attract iron filings to itself. 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.

September 24th in Science and Engineering

September 24, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sep 24, 1501: Italian physician, mathematician and astrologer Girolamo Cardano (a.k.a. Geronimo, Gerolamo, or Anglicized as Jerome Cardan) was born. He was the first to give a clinical description of typhus fever. His book, Ars Magna (“Great Art,” 1545) is one of the great achievements in the history of algebra, in which he published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations. His mechanical inventions included the combination lock, the compass gimbal consisting of three concentric rings, and the universal joint to transmit rotary motion at various angles, used in nearly every automobile today. He contributed to hydrodynamics and held that perpetual motion is impossible, except in celestial bodies. Cardano published two encyclopedias of natural science, introduced the Cardan grille, a cryptographic tool in 1550. He died by suicide.

Sep 24, 1852: A new invention, the dirigible, a semi-rigid airship, was demonstrated in a flight from Paris to Trappe. Henri Giffard (1825-82) installed a 3 horsepower steam engine of his own design in the gondola of a 147-foot-long spindle shaped coal-gas balloon. This engine turned an 11 foot propeller producing a speed of 5 mph over a distance of 17 miles on a 3 hour trip. This was the first powered and controlled flight ever achieved by humans.

In 1858 he patented a steam injector which became widely used in locomotives, making him rich. However, Giffard was depressive and died by suicide in 1882.

Sep 24, 1870: Georges Claude, French chemist, engineer and inventor was born. He invented the neon light, which was the forerunner of the fluorescent light. Claude was the first to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas around 1902 and make a neon lamp. He first publicly displayed the neon lamp on Dec 11, 1910 in Paris. His French company Claude Neon, introduced neon signs to the U.S. with two “Packard” signs for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles, purchased by Earle C. Anthony for $24,000.

Sep 24, 1889: Alexander Dey patented the dial time recorder or “punch clock” for employees to record their arrival and departure times from work.

Sep 24, 1891: William F. Friedman was born today. He was one of the world’s greatest cryptologists, who helped decipher enemy codes from World War I to World War II. He was born as Wolfe Friedman in Kishinev, Russia. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1893. Originally trained as an agricultural geneticist, he had become interested in cryptology. During World War I, with his wife Elizabeth, he set up a cryptology school for military personnel, which led to appointment by the U.S. as head of the Signal Intelligence Service in 1930. He broke the Japanese “Purple” code before 1940, thus allowing Americans to read much of Japan’s secret messages during World War II.

Sep 24, 1895: French-American physiologist and physician André Frederic Cournand was born today. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with two others “for their discoveries concerning heart catheterization and pathological changes in the circulatory system”. Cournand helped develop the technique by which a catheter could be threaded through a vein into the heart to withdraw blood samples to determine cardiac abnormalities. In addition, it permits the measurement of blood pressure, blood flow or gas concentrations in various parts of the cardiac circulatory system (atrium, ventricles, or artery).

Sep 24, 1898: American astrophysicist Charlotte Moore Sitterly was born today. She organized, analyzed, and published definitive books on the solar spectrum and spectral line multiplets. Starting in 1945 until the age of 90, she conducted her work at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Research Laboratory. She detected that technetium, an unstable element created by nuclear reactions in the laboratory, exists in nature. She made major contributions to the compilation of tables for atomic-energy levels associated with optical spectra, which are now standard reference material in astrophysics. She was awarded the Bruce Medal in 1990.

Sep 24, 1898: Sir Howard Walter Florey, Australian pathologist, was born today. He, with Ernst Boris Chain, researched, isolated and purified penicillin for general clinical use. From 1939, he worked with Chain on natural antibacterial agents produced by microorganisms, leading to their isolation and purification, and the determination of the chemical structure of penicillin. They performed the first clinical trials of the antibiotic. They shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with Sir Alexander Fleming, who had discovered antibiotic penicillin in 1928. Florey was knighted in 1944.

Sep 24, 1905: Spanish-American biochemist and molecular biologist, Severo Ochoa, was born. He shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with Arthur Kornberg for “for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid” Ochoa discovered an enzyme in bacteria that enabled him to synthesize ribonucleic acid (RNA), a substance of central importance to the synthesis of proteins by the cell.

Sep 24, 1906: Polidore F. F. Swings, Belgian astrophysicist, was born. He made spectroscopic studies to identify elements and structure of stars and comets. He discovered the first interstellar molecule, the CH radical, called methylidyne or carbyne in 1937. In comet atmospheres he studied the “Swings bands”, which are carbon emission lines. In 1941, with a slit spectrograph he identified a “Swings effect” in the violet CN bands around 387 nm, a fluorescence partly due to solar radiation that shows excitation differences dependant on the Doppler shift caused by a comet’s motion relative to the Sun.

Sep 24, 1907: John Ray Dunning, American nuclear physicist, was born. His experiments in nuclear fission helped lay the groundwork for the development of the atomic bomb. Fission of the rare U235 uranium isotope was verified in an experiment using the microscopic quantity of 20 nanograms. But, great difficulty remained in separating U235 from the more abundant U238. Dunning led the research team at Columbia University which studied the gaseous diffusion method for uranium separation. This process was based on the slightly smaller size of the U235 isotope molecules. When pushed through a porous barrier, U235 would move through faster, and several repetitions would produce almost pure U235.

Sep 24, 1909: Thomas M. Flaherty filed for a U.S. patent for a “Signal for Crossings”. This was the first U.S. patent application for a traffic signal. Patent 991,964 issued on May 9, 1911. His signal used a large horizontal arrow pivoting on a post, which turned to indicate the right of way direction. It was activated by an electric solenoid by a policeman beside the road. Although filed first, it was not the first patent actually issued for a traffic signal. Ernest E. Sirrine filed a different design seven months after Flaherty, but his patent was issued earlier, and thus he held the first U.S. patent for a “Street Traffic System”, 976,939 Nov 29, 1910.

Sep 24, 1918: Michael J. S. Dewar was a Scottish organic chemist who was born in India and attended boarding school in England. His career included both industrial and academic positions in England and the United States. As a theoretician, he was an early master of molecular orbital theory and wrote The Electronic Theory of Organic Chemistry (1949), the first book applying molecular orbital theory to organic chemistry. His experimental work studied carbenium ions, boron chemistry, superconductors, liquid crystals, the biosynthesis of fatty acids, and phenyl radicals.

Sep 24, 1930: John Watts Young, American astronaut, was born. He was the commander of the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1, April 12, 1981. He walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission, April 21, 1972. He made the first manned flight of the Gemini spacecraft with Virgil Grissom. And he was on the aborted Apollo 13 flight. He became the first person to fly into space six times in a career that was one of the busiest of any NASA astronaut. He piloted four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, Apollo Command and Service Module, Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle. Young worked for NASA for 42 years and retired on Dec 31, 2004.

Sep 24, 1945: Ian Stewart, English mathematician was born. He authored many books on mathematics for the lay reader, and others for academics, and textbooks. As a young teenager with a zeal for mathematics, he always read the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. From this he not only expanded his knowledge of mathematics, but also acquired the skills needed to be an entertaining communicator. Now, he writes the “Mathematical Recreations” column in Scientific American.

In his career at the University of Warwick, he is a professor of mathematics with special responsibility for public understanding of science. He gave the 1997 Royal Institute Christmas Lectures. On June 8, 2009, he was presented with the award at the Science Museum in London as the first recipient of the Christopher Zeeman medal for public engagement in mathematics.

Sep 24, 1960: The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, was launched in Newport, Virginia. It was the most astonishing vessel of its time and by far the largest warship in the world. It was powered by eight nuclear reactors. Since it doesn’t need to carry its own fuel oil it has much more room for aviation fuel and weapons. In 1963, the Enterprise and two similarly powered cruisers made a non-stop voyage around the world to demonstrate the viability of nuclear power. Length of the ship: 1120 ft, flight deck width: 250 ft, displacement: 93,970 tons, speed: 33 knots, range: 470,000 miles at 20 knots, air complement: 86 aircraft, crew: 5765.

September 23rd in Science and Engineering

September 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sep 23, 1624: Galileo sent one of his compound microscopes, along with a letter, to a leading scientist of the day, his friend Federico Cesi in Rome. Galileo wrote some tips on how to use the microscope. Galileo did not invent the microscope, but made improvements to it. Galileo also wrote of his own observations, “I have contemplated a great many animals with infinite admiration”. Cesi worked with Francesco Stelluti and viewed the anatomic structure of bees, described in their text, Apiarium (1625), the first publication on microscopic discoveries.

Sep 23, 1791: Johann Franz Encke, German astronomer, was born. In 1819 he established the period of the comet now known by as Encke’s Comet. At at 3.3 years it has the shortest period of any known comet.

Sep 23, 1819: French physicist, Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, was born. In 1849, he was the first to measure the speed of light successfully without using astronomical calculations. Fizeau sent a narrow beam of light between gear teeth on the edge of a rotating wheel. The beam then traveled to a mirror five miles (8 km) away and returned to the wheel. If the wheel was spinning at the right speed, and fast enough, a tooth would block the returning light. Knowing the rotational speed 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, in 1847, he proved the wave nature of the Sun’s heat rays by showing their interference (1847).

Sep 23, 1846: The German astronomer Johann G. Galle discovered Neptune after only an hour of searching, within one degree of the position that had been computed by Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier. Independently of the English astronomer John C. Adams, Le Verrier had calculated the size and position of a previously unknown planet, which he assumed influenced the irregular orbit of Uranus, and he asked Galle to look for it.

Sep 23, 1861: German engineer and industrialist, Robert Bosch, was born. He invented the spark plug and the magneto for automobiles. His firm produced a wide range of precision machines and electrical equipment throughout the world.

Sep 23, 1869: Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was born. She was the quarantined disease carrier known as Typhoid Mary, the famous typhoid carrier in the New York City area in the early 20th century. Fifty-one original cases of typhoid and three deaths were directly attributed to her. Countless more were indirectly attributed. She herself was immune to the typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhi).

The outbreak of typhus in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1904 puzzled the scientists of the time because they thought they had wiped out the deadly disease. Mallon’s case showed that a person could be a carrier without showing any outward signs of being sick. This led to most of the health code laws on the books today. She died not from typhoid but from the effects of a paralytic stroke.

Sep 23, 1879: Richard S. Rhodes invented the Audiophone, the first hearing aid.

Sep 23, 1915: American physicist Clifford G. Shull was born. Shull shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Physics with Canadian physicist Bertram N. Brockhouse. Shull’s part of the award was for his development of neutron-scattering techniques, especially the neutron diffraction process that gave scientists a new tool to investigate the atomic structure of matter.

Sep 23, 1930: Johann Ostermeyer of Athegnenber, Germany, patented his “Improvements in flash lights used for photographic purposes.” The modern photographic safety flash bulb evolved from this design, which used aluminium wire or foil in oxygen. Unfortunately, all too frequently, these versions exploded. The flashbulb was introduced to the American market in 1930 by General Electric. Flash cubes appeared in 1966, and the percussively ignitable “Magicube” in 1970.

Sep 23, 1949: President Truman shocked America with a terse announcement, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.” The alarm stimulated activity in scientific and political circles. An arms race was the clear response. On Jan 31, 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced a program to develop the hydrogen bomb. He said, “I have directed … work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb. Like all other work in the field of atomic weapons, it is … consistent with the overall objectives of our program for peace and security … until a satisfactory plan for international control of atomic energy is achieved.”

Sep 23, 1953: WD-40 was invented and recorded for the first time in the Rocket Chemical Company’s logbook. The aerospace company, located in San Diego, California Southern California was trying to develop a lubricant that penetrated and displaced water. The 40th formulation was successful. It was created by Norm Larsen. In 1958, it was packaged in cans and sold to consumers in San Diego, California as WD-40, its original test designation.

Larsen founded the company in 1953 with the intent to supply materials used in the manufacture of nuclear missiles. WD-40 was originally intended to coat structural components and prevent corrosion by displacing water. WD-40 was widely successful, but it was the company’s only product. So, the company’s name was changed in 1969 to the WD-40 Company.

Sep 23, 1999: the Mars Climate Observer apparently burned up as it was about to go into orbit around the Mars.

September 21st in Science and Engineering

September 21, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sep 21, 1756: John Loudon McAdam was born in Ayr, Scotland. He was the inventor of macadam (McAdam) road construction, which consists of three layers of progressively finer crushed stone. Unlike loose gravel, crushed stone tends to lock together and stay in place. He developed methods for road construction where the road surface was slightly above ground level and drainage was considered. He also invented tarmac, where a layer of hot asphalt is used to bind the top layer. (Tar plus mac, tarmac.)

Sep 21, 1832: French physicist and iron master Louis-Paul Cailletet was born. He is noted for his work on the liquefaction of gases. He worked at his father’s metallurgy business and discovered the permeability of iron to hydrogen and other gases, which accounts for the unpredictable behavior of some irons and steels due to dissolved gases. Every professional welder today is conscious of “hydrogen embrittlement”, which is the reason high strength and critical welds are made using low-hydrogen welding rods like 7018.

Later he became interested in liquefaction of gases and measuring if gases deviated from the Ideal Gas Law. He used the Joule-Thomson effect to liquefy gases by compressing them while at the same time cooling them, then allowing expansion again to cause additional cooling. In this way, he was the first to produce droplets of liquid hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, CO, NO2, and acetylene.

He also invented the high-pressure manometer and the altimeter.

Sep 21, 1853: Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was born today. He received the 1913 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in low-temperature physics. He managed to liquefy hydrogen and helium. He obtained his first sample of liquid helium, the substantial amount of 60 cc, in 1908.

He also studied the resistance of metals at low temperatures and discovered superconductivity.

Sep 21, 1866: French physician and bacteriologist Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle was born. He received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery that typhus was transmitted by the body louse. The clue was that typhus patients continued to spread the disease until they were bathed and issued new clothing. Further investigation led to the body louse as the disease vector.

Sep 21, 1895: Spanish aeronautical engineer, Juan de la Cierva (Codorniu) was born today. He invented the autogiro (autogyro) in 1923. The autogyro can land and take off in much shorter distances than a fixed-wing aircraft. While it cannot hover because the rotor is not powered, it can still spin safety to the ground (autorotation) if the engine fails. Ironically, he died in a fixed-wing plane accident.

Sep 21, 1895: The Duryea Motor Wagon Company became the first American auto manufacturer to open for business. In 1893, Frank Duryea and his brother, Charles, designed the first gasoline-powered automobile built in the U.S. Since it didn’t need a horse, it was called a “horseless carriage”. It was first test driven in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Sep 21, 1901: American physicist Lee Alvin DuBridge was born. He was best known as the president of Caltech (California Institute of Technology) from 1946 to 1969. He had a long career as an academic administrator, advisor to three presidents, and served on the boards of the RAND Corporation and numerous great institutions like the Huntington Library.

Sep 21, 1907: English marine geophysicist Sir Edward (Crisp) Bullard was born. His work with geomagnetism produced the first satisfactory measurements of geothermal heat flow through the earth’s crust beneath the oceans. Bullard made early measurements of gravitational variations in the East African Rift Valley. He helped develop the theory of continental drift. He used computers to analyze the fit of the rifted continents on each side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Most importantly, perhaps, he developed the dynamo theory of geomagnetism, which explains that Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the convection of molten material in the Earth’s core.

Sep 21, 1909: Canadian-American oceanographer Richard Howell Fleming was born. He researched ocean currents, chemistry and biochemistry. He applied oceanography for military uses and studied the disposal of atomic wastes in the ocean. Fleming worked with the first comprehensive synoptic two-year survey of the Northern Pacific Ocean, charting currents, tides, winds, depths, and temperatures and observing plant and animal life.

Sep 21, 1921: A huge explosion at a fertilizer factory at Oppau, Germany, caused 500 deaths. Destruction at the site included hundreds of neighboring houses. The fertilizer made was a 50/50 mix of ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulphate. Storage silos reached up to a hundred feet high. This fertilizer had a tendency to form solid clumps and it was routine to break it up with bulldozers and dynamite. The mixed fertilizer was not regarded as explosive because it was difficult to initiate and no explosion had ever happened before in such circumstances. However, this time, dynamite caused 4,500 tons of fertilizer to explode, creating a crater 250 feet diameter and 50 feet deep.

Sep 21, 1926: American physicist Donald Arthur Glaser was born. He received the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the bubble chamber, which is used to observe and photograph the tracks left by subatomic particles.

Sep 21, 1971: American medical patient known as The Bubble Boy, David Vetter was born. He was born with the genetic disease, severe combined deficiency syndrome (SCID) in which the immune system is non-functional. This disease is quickly fatal but modern technology allowed the design of a sterile plastic bubble in which he could live. He lived for twelve years. He was publically identified only as David or The Bubble Boy. He died after a bone marrow transplant from his sister that was hoped would save him. It might have saved him, but despite careful screening, the marrow contained the Epstein-Barr virus. This resulted in Burkitt’s lymphoma, which killed him.

The media was never fully informed of the truth about The Bubble Boy, and were fed benign information. In fact, the young man suffered terrible emotional turmoil from the loneliness and confinement. The movie made about this is also inaccurate.

With the diagnosis of lymphoma, he was released and lived his final 15 days outside the bubble. The most important thing learned for the first time here was that a virus can cause cancer.

Sep 21, 2003: The NASA Galileo space probe ended its eight-year mission to Jupiter as planned. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California directed the craft into Jupiter’s atmosphere to burn up, completely vaporizing its structure. This prevented the possibility of any later uncontrolled fall onto a moon causing contamination with bacterial life from Earth.

Contact was lost with the spacecraft slightly after 3:40 p.m. EDT. More than 1,000 people who worked on the Galileo program gathered at the Laboratory to celebrate the end of the mission. Galileo was first conceived in 1976 as a mission to Jupiter and its moons, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa.

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