crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-06 00:56:08

367) Carl David Anderson

Carl David Anderson, (born Sept. 3, 1905, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Jan. 11, 1991, San Marino, Calif.), American physicist who, with Victor Francis Hess of Austria, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter.

Anderson received his Ph.D. in 1930 from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, where he worked with physicist Robert Andrews Millikan. Having studied X-ray photoelectrons (electrons ejected from atoms by interaction with high-energy photons) since 1927, he began research in 1930 on gamma rays and cosmic rays. While studying cloud-chamber photographs of cosmic rays, Anderson found a number of tracks whose orientation suggested that they were caused by positively charged particles—but particles too small to be protons. In 1932 he announced that they were caused by positrons, positively charged particles with the same mass as electrons. The claim was controversial until verified the next year by British physicist Patrick M.S. Blackett and Italian Giuseppe Occhialini.

In 1936 Anderson discovered the mu-meson, or muon, a subatomic particle 207 times heavier than the electron. At first he thought he had found the meson, postulated by the Japanese physicist Jukawa Hideki, that binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus of the atom, but the muon was found to interact weakly with these particles. (The particle predicted by Yukawa was discovered in 1947 by the British physicist Cecil Powell and is known as a pi-meson, or pion.)

Anderson spent his entire career at Caltech, joining the faculty in 1933 and serving as professor until 1976. During World War II he conducted research on rockets.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-08 01:07:56

368) Marcello Malpighi

Marcello Malpighi, (born March 10, 1628, Crevalcore, near Bologna, Papal States [Italy]—died Nov. 30, 1694, Rome), Italian physician and biologist who, in developing experimental methods to study living things, founded the science of microscopic anatomy. After Malpighi’s researches, microscopic anatomy became a prerequisite for advances in the fields of physiology, embryology, and practical medicine.

Life

Little is known of Malpighi’s childhood and youth except that his father had him engage in “grammatical studies” at an early age and that he entered the University of Bologna in 1646. Both parents died when he was 21, but he was able, nevertheless, to continue his studies. Despite opposition from the university authorities because he was non-Bolognese by birth, in 1653 he was granted doctorates in both medicine and philosophy and appointed as a teacher, whereupon he immediately dedicated himself to further study in anatomy and medicine.

In 1656, Ferdinand II of Tuscany invited him to the professorship of theoretical medicine at the University of Pisa. There Malpighi began his lifelong friendship with Giovanni Borelli, mathematician and naturalist, who was a prominent supporter of the Accademia del Cimento, one of the first scientific societies. Malpighi questioned the prevailing medical teachings at Pisa, tried experiments on colour changes in blood, and attempted to recast anatomical, physiological, and medical problems of the day. Family responsibilities and poor health prompted Malpighi’s return in 1659 to the University of Bologna, where he continued to teach and do research with his microscopes. In 1661 he identified and described the pulmonary and capillary network connecting small arteries with small veins, one of the major discoveries in the history of science. Malpighi’s views evoked increasing controversy and dissent, mainly from envy, jealousy, and lack of understanding on the part of his colleagues.

Hindered by the hostile environment of Bologna, Malpighi accepted (November 1662) a professorship in medicine at the University of Messina in Sicily, on the recommendation there of Borelli, who was investigating the effects of physical forces on animal functions. Malpighi was also welcomed by Visconte Giacomo Ruffo Francavilla, a patron of science and a former student, whose hospitality encouraged him in furthering his career. Malpighi pursued his microscopic studies while teaching and practicing medicine. He identified the taste buds and regarded them as terminations of nerves, described the minute structure of the brain, optic nerve, and fat reservoirs, and in 1666 was the first to see the red blood cells and to attribute the colour of blood to them. Again, his research and teaching aroused envy and controversy among his colleagues.

After four years at Messina, Malpighi returned in January 1667 to Bologna, where, during his medical practice, he studied the microscopic subdivisions of specific living organs, such as the liver, brain, spleen, and kidneys, and of bone and the deeper layers of the skin that now bear his name. Impressed by the minute structures he observed under the microscope, he concluded that most living materials are glandular in organization, that even the largest organs are composed of minute glands, and that these glands exist solely for the separation or for the mixture of juices.

Malpighi’s work at Messina attracted the attention of the Royal Society in London, whose secretary, Henry Oldenburg, extended him an invitation in 1668 to correspond with him. Malpighi’s work was thereafter published periodically in the form of letters in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. In 1669 Malpighi was named an honorary member, the first such recognition given to an Italian. From then on, all his works were published in London.

At the peak of his fame, Malpighi could have left his tiring medical practice and research to accept one of the many highly remunerative positions offered to him. Instead, he chose to continue his general practice and professorship. His years at Bologna marked the climax of his career, when he marked out large areas of microscopy. Malpighi conducted many studies of insect larvae - establishing, in so doing, the basis for their future study - the most important of which was his investigation in 1669 of the structure and development of the silkworm. In his historic work in 1673 on the embryology of the chick, in which he discovered the aortic arches, neural folds, and somites, he generally followed William Harvey’s views on development, though Malpighi probably concluded that the embryo is preformed in the egg after fertilization. He also made extensive comparative studies in 1675-79 of the microscopic anatomy of several different plants and saw an analogy between plant and animal organization.

During the last decade of his life Malpighi was beset by personal tragedy, declining health, and the climax of opposition to him. In 1684 his villa was burned, his apparatus and microscopes shattered, and his papers, books, and manuscripts destroyed. Most probably as a compensatory move when opposition mounted against his views, and in recognition of his stature, Pope Innocent XII invited him to Rome in 1691 as papal archiater, or personal physician, such a nomination constituting a great honour. In Rome he was further honoured by being named a count, he was elected to the College of Doctors of Medicine, his name was placed in the Roman Patriciate Roll, and he was given the title of honorary valet.

Legacy

Malpighi may be regarded as the first histologist. For almost 40 years he used the microscope to describe the major types of plant and animal structures and in so doing marked out for future generations of biologists major areas of research in botany, embryology, human anatomy, and pathology. Just as Galileo had applied the new technical achievement of the optical lens to vistas beyond the Earth, Malpighi extended its use to the intricate organization of living things, hitherto unimagined, below the level of unaided sight. Moreover, his lifework brought into question the prevailing concepts of body function. When, for example, he found that the blood passed through the capillaries, it meant that Harvey was right, that blood was not transformed into flesh in the periphery, as the ancients thought. He was vigorously denounced by his enemies, who failed to see how his many discoveries, such as the renal glomeruli, urinary tubules, dermal papillae, taste buds, and the glandular components of the liver, could possibly improve medical practice. The conflict between ancient ideas and modern discoveries continued throughout the 17th century. Although Malpighi could not say what new remedies might come from his discoveries, he was convinced that microscopic anatomy, by showing the minute construction of living things, called into question the value of old medicine. He provided the anatomical basis for the eventual understanding of human physiological exchanges.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-10 00:15:36

369) Sir Charles Scott Sherrington

Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, (born Nov. 27, 1857, London, Eng. - died March 4, 1952, Eastbourne, Sussex), English physiologist whose 50 years of experimentation laid the foundations for an understanding of integrated nervous function in higher animals and brought him (with Edgar Adrian) the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932.

Sherrington was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (B.A., 1883); at St. Thomas’ Hospital Medical School, where he qualified in medicine in 1885; and at the University of Berlin, where he worked with Rudolf Virchow and Robert Koch. After serving as a lecturer at St. Thomas’ Hospital, he was successively a professor at the universities of London (1891 - 95), Liverpool (1895 - 1913), and Oxford (1913 - 35). He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1893 and served as its president from 1920 to 1925. He was knighted in 1922.

Working with cats, dogs, monkeys, and apes that had been deprived of their cerebral hemispheres, Sherrington found that reflexes must be regarded as integrated activities of the total organism, not as the result of the activities of isolated “reflex arcs,” a notion that was currently accepted. The first major piece of evidence supporting “total integration” was his demonstration (1895–98) of the “reciprocal innervation” of muscles, also known as Sherrington’s law: when one set of muscles is stimulated, muscles opposing the action of the first are simultaneously inhibited.

In his classic work, 'The Integrative Action of the Nervous System' (1906), he distinguished three main groups of sense organs: exteroceptive, such as those that detect light, sound, odour, and tactile stimuli; interoceptive, exemplified by taste receptors; and proprioceptive, or those receptors that detect events occurring in the interior of the organism. He found - especially in his study of the maintenance of posture as a reflex activit - that the muscles’ proprioceptors and their nerve trunks play an important role in reflex action, maintaining the animal’s upright stance against the force of gravity, despite the removal of the cerebrum and the severing of the tactile sensory nerves of the skin.

His investigations of nearly every aspect of mammalian nervous function directly influenced the development of brain surgery and the treatment of such nervous disorders as paralysis and atrophy. Sherrington coined the term 'synapse' to denote the point at which the nervous impulse is transmitted from one nerve cell to another. His books include 'The Reflex Activity of the Spinal Cord' (1932).

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-12 01:49:32

370) Ottmar Mergenthaler

Ottmar Mergenthaler, (born May 11, 1854, Hachtel, Württemberg [Germany]—died Oct. 28, 1899, Baltimore), German-born American inventor who developed the Linotype machine.

A precocious boy, Mergenthaler was anxious to study engineering, but his father, burdened with financing the higher education of older sons, found the expense beyond his means. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker at age 14 and attended technical school classes at night. In 1872 he emigrated to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1878. While employed in the Baltimore machine shop of a relative, he worked on plans for a device to make type molds of papier-mâché. This device proved impracticable, but Mergenthaler became dedicated to the problem involved—setting type by machine. In 1886 he produced his Linotype, which, by bringing copper matrices into brief contact with a molten but fast-cooling alloy, rapidly molded column widths of type. The machine reduced costs by speeding up the printing process; hence it fostered a dramatic expansion of all areas of publishing. Mergenthaler later patented other successful inventions, but developing the Linotype remained his life interest.

(Linotype, (trademark), typesetting machine by which characters are cast in type metal as a complete line rather than as individual characters as on the Monotype typesetting machine. It was patented in the United States in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. Linotype, which has now largely been supplanted by photocomposition, was most often used when large amounts of straight text matter were to be set.

In the Linotype system, the operator selects a magazine containing brass matrices to mold an entire font of type of the size and face specified in the copy at hand. A keyboard is manipulated (or driven by paper or magnetic computer tape) to select the matrices needed to compose each line of text, including tapered spacebands, which automatically wedge the words apart to fill each line perfectly. Each matrix is transported to an assembling unit at the mold.

The slugs produced by the machine are rectangular solids of type metal (an alloy of lead, antimony, and tin) as long as the line or column measure selected. Raised characters running along the top are a mirror image of the desired printed line. After hot-metal casting, a distributing mechanism returns each matrix to its place in the magazine. The slug of type, air-cooled briefly, is then placed in a “stick” for insertion in the proper position into the press form being assembled or made up.)

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-14 01:32:49

371) Sir Edward Mellanby

Born : 8 April 1884 : West Hartlepool
Died : 30 January 1955 (aged 70)
Alma mater : Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Spouse(s) : May Tweedy (married 1914)

Sir Edward Mellanby, (8 April 1884 – 30 January 1955) discovered vitamin D and its role in preventing rickets in 1919.

Education

Mellanby was born in West Hartlepool, the son of a shipyard owner, and educated at Barnard Castle School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he studied physiology.

Career

After working as a research student from 1905 to 1907, Mellanby studied medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, and in 1913 became a medical doctor. He served as a lecturer at King's College for Women in London from 1913 to 1920, during which time he was asked to investigate the cause of rickets. He discovered that feeding caged dogs on a diet of porridge induced rickets, which could then be cured with cod liver oil and concluded that rickets was caused by a dietary factor. It was later discovered that the actual cause of rickets is lack of vitamin D due to lack of sunlight which can be prevented or remedied by ingesting food rich in vitamin D, such as cod liver oil.

He worked on the detrimental effect of foods containing significant phytic acid, particularly cereals.

In 1914 he married May Tweedy, a lecturer at Bedford College (London) who would also carry out research into nutrition and dental disease.

In 1920 he was appointed professor of pharmacology at the University of Sheffield, and consultant physician at the Royal Infirmary in that city. He then served as the secretary of the Medical Research Council from 1933 to 1949.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1925. He was awarded their Royal Medal in 1932 and their Buchanan Medal in 1947.

He delivered the Croonian Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians in 1933 and the Croonian lecture to the Royal Society in 1943, both on the subject of diet.

He was knighted (KCB) in 1937 and made GBE in 1948.

Publications include Nutrition and Disease – the Interaction of Clinical and Experimental Work (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1934). In the work, he writes extensively on vitamin deficiency. He delivered the Harveian Oration to the Royal College of Physicians in 1938.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-16 01:13:20

372) Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman, in full Richard Phillips Feynman, (born May 11, 1918, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 15, 1988, Los Angeles, California), American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era.

Feynman remade quantum electrodynamics—the theory of the interaction between light and matter—and thus altered the way science understands the nature of waves and particles. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for this work, which tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, electricity, and magnetism. The other cowinners of the Nobel Prize, Julian S. Schwinger of the United States and Tomonaga Shin’ichirō of Japan, had independently created equivalent theories, but it was Feynman’s that proved the most original and far-reaching. The problem-solving tools that he invented—including pictorial representations of particle interactions known as Feynman diagrams—permeated many areas of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century.

Born in the Far Rockaway section of New York City, Feynman was the descendant of Russian and Polish Jews who had immigrated to the United States late in the 19th century. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his undergraduate thesis (1939) proposed an original and enduring approach to calculating forces in molecules. Feynman received his doctorate at Princeton University in 1942. At Princeton, with his adviser, John Archibald Wheeler, he developed an approach to quantum mechanics governed by the principle of least action. This approach replaced the wave-oriented electromagnetic picture developed by James Clerk Maxwell with one based entirely on particle interactions mapped in space and time. In effect, Feynman’s method calculated the probabilities of all the possible paths a particle could take in going from one point to another.

During World War II Feynman was recruited to serve as a staff member of the U.S. atomic bomb project at Princeton University (1941–42) and then at the new secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943–45). At Los Alamos he became the youngest group leader in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project. With the head of that division, Hans Bethe, he devised the formula for predicting the energy yield of a nuclear explosive. Feynman also took charge of the project’s primitive computing effort, using a hybrid of new calculating machines and human workers to try to process the vast amounts of numerical computation required by the project. He observed the first detonation of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and, though his initial reaction was euphoric, he later felt anxiety about the force he and his colleagues had helped unleash on the world.

At war’s end Feynman became an associate professor at Cornell University (1945–50) and returned to studying the fundamental issues of quantum electrodynamics. In the years that followed, his vision of particle interaction kept returning to the forefront of physics as scientists explored esoteric new domains at the subatomic level. In 1950 he became professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he remained the rest of his career.

Five particular achievements of Feynman stand out as crucial to the development of modern physics. First, and most important, is his work in correcting the inaccuracies of earlier formulations of quantum electrodynamics, the theory that explains the interactions between electromagnetic radiation (photons) and charged subatomic particles such as electrons and positrons (antielectrons). By 1948 Feynman completed this reconstruction of a large part of quantum mechanics and electrodynamics and resolved the meaningless results that the old quantum electrodynamic theory sometimes produced. Second, he introduced simple diagrams, now called Feynman diagrams, that are easily visualized graphic analogues of the complicated mathematical expressions needed to describe the behaviour of systems of interacting particles. This work greatly simplified some of the calculations used to observe and predict such interactions.

In the early 1950s Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev D. Landau’s theory of superfluidity—i.e., the strange, frictionless behaviour of liquid helium at temperatures near absolute zero. In 1958 he and the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann devised a theory that accounted for most of the phenomena associated with the weak force, which is the force at work in radioactive decay. Their theory, which turns on the asymmetrical “handedness” of particle spin, proved particularly fruitful in modern particle physics. And finally, in 1968, while working with experimenters at the Stanford Linear Accelerator on the scattering of high-energy electrons by protons, Feynman invented a theory of “partons,” or hypothetical hard particles inside the nucleus of the atom, that helped lead to the modern understanding of quarks.

Feynman’s stature among physicists transcended the sum of even his sizable contributions to the field. His bold and colourful personality, unencumbered by false dignity or notions of excessive self-importance, seemed to announce: “Here is an unconventional mind.” He was a master calculator who could create a dramatic impression in a group of scientists by slashing through a difficult numerical problem. His purely intellectual reputation became a part of the scenery of modern science. Feynman diagrams, Feynman integrals, and Feynman rules joined Feynman stories in the everyday conversation of physicists. They would say of a promising young colleague, “He’s no Feynman, but….” His fellow physicists envied his flashes of inspiration and admired him for other qualities as well: a faith in nature’s simple truths, a skepticism about official wisdom, and an impatience with mediocrity.

Feynman’s lectures at Caltech evolved into the books 'Quantum Electrodynamics' (1961) and 'The Theory of Fundamental Processes' (1961). In 1961 he began reorganizing and teaching the introductory physics course at Caltech; the result, published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 3 vol. (1963–65), became a classic textbook. Feynman’s views on quantum mechanics, scientific method, the relations between science and religion, and the role of beauty and uncertainty in scientific knowledge are expressed in two models of science writing, again distilled from lectures: 'The Character of Physical Law' (1965) and 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter' (1985).

When Feynman died in 1988 after a long struggle with cancer, his reputation was still mainly confined to the scientific community; his was not a household name. Many Americans had seen him for the first time when, already ill, he served on the presidential commission that investigated the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. He conducted a dramatic demonstration at a televised hearing, confronting an evasive NASA witness by dunking a piece of rubber seal in a glass of ice water to show how predictable the failure of the booster rocket’s rubber seal might have been on the freezing morning of Challenger’s launch. He added his own appendix to the commission’s report, emphasizing the space agency’s failures of risk management.

He achieved a growing popular fame after his death, in part because of two autobiographical collections of anecdotes published in the years around his passing, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: 'Adventures of a Curious Character' (1985) and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: 'Further Adventures of a Curious Character' (1988), which irritated some of his colleagues by emphasizing his bongo playing more than his technical accomplishments. Other popular books appeared posthumously, including 'Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher' (1994) and 'Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time' (1997), and his life was celebrated in an opera (Feynman [2005], by Jack Vees), a graphic novel (Feynman [2011], by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick), and a play (QED [2001], by Peter Parnell), the latter of which was commissioned by and starred Alan Alda.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-18 00:13:44

373) Pierre Janssen

Pierre Janssen, in full Pierre Jules César Janssen, also called Jules Janssen, (born February 22, 1824, Paris, France—died December 23, 1907, Meudon), French astronomer who in 1868 discovered the chemical element helium and how to observe solar prominences without an eclipse. His work was independent of that of the Englishman Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, who made the same discoveries at about the same time.

Janssen was permanently lamed by an accident in early childhood. He initially worked as a bank clerk. He graduated from the University of Paris in 1852, and in 1865 he became professor of physics at the École Speciale d’Architecture in Paris. He was an enthusiastic observer of eclipses.

While observing a solar eclipse in Guntur, India, on August 18, 1868, Janssen noted that the spectral lines in the solar prominences were so bright that they should be easily observable in daylight. The next day he used his spectroscope to study the solar prominences. That enabled many more such observations to be made than previously, when such phenomena had been observable only for the few minutes’ duration of solar eclipses. During his observations he also noted a yellow spectral line near, but distinct from, the prominent lines of sodium. That line was from helium, which was not observed on Earth until 1895.

In 1870, when Paris was besieged during the Franco-German War, Janssen fled the surrounded city in a balloon so that he could reach the path of totality of a solar eclipse in Algeria. (His effort went for nothing, for the eclipse was obscured by clouds.) In 1873 he invented the “photographic revolver,” a device designed to take 180 images at the rate of one frame per second. The revolver was used by Janssen in Japan to observe the 1874 transit of Venus and is considered a precursor of the motion-picture camera. In 1876 he was appointed the first director of the Meudon Observatory, near Paris. In 1893, using observations from the meteorological observatory he had established on Mont Blanc, he proved that strong oxygen lines appearing in the solar spectrum were caused by oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.

Janssen was the first to regularly use photographs to study the Sun, and in 1903 he published his great 'Atlas de photographies solaires', containing more than 6,000 solar pictures.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-20 00:34:31

374) Robert Fulton

Robert Fulton, (born November 14, 1765, Lancaster county, Pennsylvania [U.S.]—died February 24, 1815, New York, New York), American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success. He also designed a system of inland waterways, a submarine, and a steam warship.

Fulton was the son of Irish immigrants. When their unproductive farm was lost by mortgage foreclosure in 1771, the family moved to Lancaster, where Fulton’s father died in 1774 (not 1786 as is generally written). Having learned to read and write at home, Fulton was sent at age eight to a Quaker school. Later he became an apprentice in a Philadelphia jewelry shop, where he specialized in the painting of miniature portraits on ivory for lockets and rings.

After settling his mother on a small farm in western Pennsylvania in 1786, Fulton went to Bath, Virginia, to recover from a severe cough. There the paintings by the young man—tall, graceful, and an engaging conversationalist—were admired by people who advised him to study in Europe. On returning to Philadelphia, Fulton applied himself to painting and the search for a sponsor. Local merchants, eager to raise the city’s cultural level, financed his passage to London in 1787.

Although Fulton’s reception in London was cordial, his paintings made little impression; they showed neither the style nor the promise required to provide him more than a precarious living. Meanwhile, he became acquainted with new inventions for propelling boats: a water jet ejected by a steam pump and a single, mechanical paddle. His own experiments led him to conclude that several revolving paddles at the stern would be most effective.

Beginning in 1794, however, having admitted defeat as a painter, Fulton turned his principal efforts toward canal engineering. His Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation, in 1796, dealt with a complete system of inland water transportation based on small canals extending throughout the countryside. He included details on inclined planes for raising boats—he did not favour locks—aqueducts for valley crossings, boats for specialized cargo, and bridge designs featuring bowstring beams to transmit only vertical loads to the piers. A few bridges were built to his design in the British Isles, but his canal ideas were nowhere accepted.

Undaunted, he traveled in 1797 to Paris, where he proposed the idea of a submarine, the Nautilus, to be used in France’s war with Britain: it would creep under the hulls of British warships and leave a powder charge to be exploded later. The French government rejected the idea, however, as an atrocious and dishonourable way to fight. In 1800 he was able to build the Nautilus at his own expense. He conducted trials on the Seine and finally obtained government sanction for an attack, but wind and tide enabled two British ships to elude his slow vessel.

In 1801 Fulton met Robert R. Livingston, a member of the committee that drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Before becoming minister to France, Livingston had obtained a 20-year monopoly of steamboat navigation within the state of New York. The two men decided to share the expense of building a steamboat in Paris using Fulton’s design—a 66-foot- (20-metre-) long boat with an eight-horsepower engine of French design and side paddle wheels. Although the engine broke the hull, they were encouraged by success with another hull. Fulton ordered parts for a 24-horsepower engine from Boulton and Watt for a boat on the Hudson, and Livingston obtained an extension on his monopoly of steamboat navigation.

Returning to London in 1804, Fulton advanced his ideas with the British government for submersible and low-lying craft that would carry explosives in an attack. Two raids against the French using his novel craft, however, were unsuccessful. In 1805, after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, it was apparent that Britain was in control of the seas without the aid of Fulton’s temperamental weapons. In the same year, the parts for his projected steamboat were ready for shipment to the United States, but Fulton spent a desperate year attempting to collect money he felt the British owed him.

Arriving in New York in December 1806, Fulton at once set to work supervising the construction of the steamboat that had been planned in Paris with Livingston. He also attempted to interest the U.S. government in a submarine, but his demonstration of it was a fiasco. By early August 1807 a 150-foot- (45-metre-) long Steamboat, as Fulton called it, was ready for trials. Its single-cylinder condensing steam engine (24-inch bore and four-foot stroke) drove two 15-foot-diameter side paddle wheels; it consumed oak and pine fuel, which produced steam at a pressure of two to three pounds per square inch. The 150-mile (240-km) trial run from New York to Albany required 32 hours (an average of almost 4.7 miles [7.6 km] per hour), considerably better time than the four miles per hour required by the monopoly. The passage was epic because sailing sloops required four days for the same trip.

After building an engine house, raising the bulwark, and installing berths in the cabins of the now-renamed North River Steamboat, Fulton began commercial trips in September. He made three round trips fortnightly between New York and Albany, carrying passengers and light freight. Problems, however, remained: the mechanical difficulties, for example, and the jealous sloop boatmen, who through “inadvertence” would ram the unprotected paddle wheels of their new rivals. During the first winter season he stiffened and widened the hull, replaced the cast-iron crankshaft with a forging, fitted guards over the wheels, and improved passenger accommodations. These modifications made it a different boat, which was registered in 1808 as the North River Steamboat of Clermont, soon reduced to Clermont by the press.

In 1808 Fulton married his partner’s niece, Harriet Livingston, by whom he had a son and three daughters.

In 1811 the Fulton-designed, Pittsburgh-built New Orleans was sent south to validate the Livingston-Fulton steamboat monopoly of the New Orleans Territory. The trip was slow and perilous, river conditions being desperate because of America’s first recorded, and also largest, earthquake, which had destroyed New Madrid just below the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Fulton’s low-powered vessel remained at New Orleans, for it could go no farther upstream than Natchez. He built three boats for Western rivers that were based at New Orleans, but none could conquer the passage to Pittsburgh.

Fulton was a member of the 1812 commission that recommended building the Erie Canal. With the English blockade the same year, he insisted that a mobile floating gun platform be built—the world’s first steam warship—to protect New York Harbor against the British fleet. The Demologos, or Fulton, as the ship was alternately called, incorporated new and novel ideas: two parallel hulls, with paddle wheel between and with the steam engine in one hull and boilers and stacks in the other. It weighed 2,745 displacement tons and measured 156 feet (48 metres) in length; a slow vessel, its speed did not exceed 6 knots (6 nautical miles, or 11 km, per hour). Launched in October 1814, the heavily gunned and armoured steamship underwent successful sea trials but was never used in battle; when peace came in December, it was transferred to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it was destroyed by an accidental explosion in 1829.

Fulton spent much of his wealth in litigations involving the pirating of patents relating to steamboats and in trying to suppress rival steamboat builders who found loopholes in the state-granted monopoly. His wealth was further depleted by his unsuccessful submarine projects, investments in paintings, and financial assistance to farmer kin and young artists. After testifying at a legal hearing in Trenton early in 1815, he became chilled en route home to New York, where he died. His family made claims on the U.S. government for services rendered. A bill of $100,000 for the relief of the heirs finally passed the Congress in 1846 but was reduced to $76,300, with no interest.

A Hudson-Fulton Celebration in 1909 commemorated the success of the North River Steamboat of Clermont and the discovery in 1609 of the North River by the English navigator who was the first to sail upstream to Albany. A “Robert Fulton” commemorative stamp was issued in 1965, the bicentenary of his birth, and the two-story farmhouse, his birthplace, was acquired and restored by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-22 00:18:46

375) Conrad Elvehjem

Conrad Arnold Elvehjem (May 27, 1901 – July 27, 1962) was internationally known as an American biochemist in nutrition. In 1937 he identified two vitamins, nicotinic acid, also known as niacin, and nicotinamide, which were deficient directly in human pellagra, once a major health problem in the United States. Collectively, nicotinic acid and nicotinamide are termed vitamin B3 and are now understood to be precursors of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide.

Biography

Conrad Elvehjem, the son of Norwegian emigrants to Wisconsin, was born in McFarland, Wisconsin. He progressed through the secondary schools and the University of Wisconsin, where he received his PhD in 1927 with mentor E.B. Hart for his studies of the importance of copper in iron-deficiency anemia. A National Research Council fellowship permitted a year at Cambridge University in England. Elvehjem began teaching in agricultural chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in 1923, and became a full professor in 1936. He became chairman of the biochemistry department in 1944 and dean of the graduate school in 1946, at 45 years of age. He served as dean of the graduate school until he became the university's 13th president in 1958.

Picking up on the work of Joseph Goldberger, he found that nicotinic acid cured black tongue in dogs, an analogous disease to pellagra. In the previous year, Elvehjem and his colleague Carl J. Koehn had found that a filtrate factor from a liver extract could cure diet-induced pellagra in chicks. That filtrate extract was designated as the vitamin G fraction, after the late Goldberger. To confirm their findings in dogs, they induced black tongue in these animals with the Goldberger diet of yellow corn, before supplementing the diet with the vitamin G fraction. Elvehjem and his colleagues later were able to isolate and identify nicotinamide and nicotonic acid from vitamin G as the curative factors for black tongue in dogs. He also contributed greatly to the identification of vitamin B complex and was co-author of more than 780 scientific papers on biochemistry and nutrition.

Elvehjem commented frequently on nutrition as it affects both scientist and layman. "Vitamins should be obtained from natural foods if possible," he cautioned. "Generally they are cheaper, more palatable, and in better balance with other factors when taken in this form." He acknowledged the value of synthetic vitamins in treating deficiency diseases, but warned that their use should be temporary.

Elvehjem’s first graduate student (in 1931) was noted nutritionist Fredrick John Stare (1910–2002) who later founded and chaired the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, where he served until 1976. Elvehjem met his wife Constance W. Elvehjem when she was an undergraduate at UW Madison. She died in 1999 at the age of 94 after many years supporting the museum and the Madison community. Elvehjem was stricken with a heart attack at his desk on the morning of July 27, 1962, at the age of sixty-one and died within the hour.

Legacy

Elvehjem's name appears on university awards, buildings, a town park, and a local elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin, another in Mc Farland, and a neighbourhood on the South-East Side of Madison nearby and its associated neighbourhood association. His name was formerly on the Elvehjem Art Center (later the Elvehjem Museum of Art), until the museum received a $20 million donation from Simona and Jerome A. Chazen (both UW–Madison alumni), and renamed itself the Chazen Museum of Art. The building housing the museum retains the Elvehjem name.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-24 00:54:49

376) Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, in full Edward Osborne Wilson, (born June 10, 1929, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.), American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals, including humans.

Wilson received his early training in biology at the University of Alabama (B.S., 1949; M.S., 1950). After receiving a doctorate in biology at Harvard University in 1955, he was a member of Harvard’s biology and zoology faculties from 1956 to 1976. At Harvard he was later Frank B. Baird Professor of Science (1976–94), Mellon Professor of the Sciences (1990–93), and Pellegrino University Professor (1994–97; professor emeritus from 1997). In addition, Wilson served as curator in entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (1973–97).

Damage to his depth perception as a result of a childhood eye injury, and the onset of partial deafness during his adolescence, precluded Wilson from pursuing his interest in ornithological fieldwork. He exchanged bird studies, conducted at a distance and requiring acute hearing, for entomology. Wilson could easily observe insects without straining his damaged senses. In 1955 he completed an exhaustive taxonomic analysis of the ant genus Lasius. In collaboration with W.L. Brown, he developed the concept of “character displacement,” a process in which populations of two closely related species, after first coming into contact with each other, undergo rapid evolutionary differentiation in order to minimize the chances of both competition and hybridization between them.

After his appointment to Harvard in 1956, Wilson made a series of important discoveries, including the determination that ants communicate primarily through the transmission of chemical substances known as pheromones. In the course of revising the classification of ants native to the South Pacific, he formulated the concept of the “taxon cycle,” in which speciation and species dispersal are linked to the varying habitats that organisms encounter as their populations expand. In 1971 he published The Insect Societies, his definitive work on ants and other social insects. The book provided a comprehensive picture of the ecology, population dynamics, and social behaviour of thousands of species.

In Wilson’s second major work, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), a treatment of the biological basis of social behaviour, he proposed that the essentially biological principles on which animal societies are based also apply to humans. This thesis provoked condemnation from prominent researchers and scholars in a broad range of disciplines, who regarded it as an attempt to justify harmful or destructive behaviour and unjust social relations in human societies. In fact, however, Wilson maintained that as little as 10 percent of human behaviour is genetically induced, the rest being attributable to environment.

One of Wilson’s most notable theories was that even a characteristic such as altruism may have evolved through natural selection. Traditionally, natural selection was thought to foster only those physical and behavioral traits that increase an individual’s chances of reproducing. Thus, altruistic behaviour—as when an organism sacrifices itself in order to save other members of its immediate family—would seem incompatible with this process. In Sociobiology Wilson argued that the sacrifice involved in much altruistic behaviour results in saving closely related individuals—i.e., individuals who share many of the sacrificed organism’s genes. Therefore, the preservation of the gene, rather than the preservation of the individual, was viewed as the focus of evolutionary strategy; the theory was known as kin selection. In later years, however, Wilson was inclined to think that highly social organisms are integrated to such an extent that they are better treated as one overall unit—a superorganism—rather than as individuals in their own right. This view was suggested by Charles Darwin himself in On the Origin of Species (1859). Wilson expounded on it in Success, Dominance, and the Superorganism: The Case of the Social Insects (1997).

In On Human Nature (1978), for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1979, Wilson discussed the application of sociobiology to human aggression, sexuality, and ethics. His book The Ants (1990; with Bert Hölldobler), also a Pulitzer winner, was a monumental summary of contemporary knowledge of those insects. In The Diversity of Life (1992), Wilson sought to explain how the world’s living species became diverse and examined the massive species extinctions caused by human activities in the 20th century.

In his later career Wilson turned increasingly to religious and philosophical topics. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), he strove to demonstrate the interrelatedness and evolutionary origins of all human thought. In Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (2006), he developed further the evolutionarily informed humanism he had earlier explored in On Human Nature. In contrast to many other biologists, notably Stephen Jay Gould, Wilson believed that evolution is essentially progressive, leading from the simple to the complex and from the worse-adapted to the better. From this he inferred an ultimate moral imperative for humans: to cherish and promote the well-being of their species.

He further elucidated the complex functional relationships that drive ant, bee, wasp, and termite colonies in The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (2009; with Bert Hölldobler). That volume was followed by a monograph on leafcutter ants, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct (2011). Kingdom of Ants: José Celestino Mutis and the Dawn of Natural History in the New World (2011; with José M. Gómez Durán) was a brief biography of Spanish botanist José Mutis, with particular emphasis on the ants he encountered while exploring South America.

Using examples drawn from human history and from the natural history of social insects, Wilson made a case for multilevel selection as the driver of social evolution in a series of papers and, at length, in The Social Conquest of Earth (2012). He argued that the evolution of eusociality occurred at the level of the group—regardless of genetic relation—prior to occurring at the kinship and individual levels. By his reasoning, the emergence of eusocial animals such as ants (and, arguably, humans) could be attributed to a genetic predisposition to act altruistically toward even unrelated conspecifics and to act in concert with one group against another group. Wilson was excoriated by many of his colleagues, who maintained that he had erroneously contradicted his own earlier ideas regarding kin selection as the primary driver of social evolution. His detractors—among them English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Canadian American evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker—claimed that the idea of group selection was predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of natural selection. They argued that, though animals inarguably benefit from sociality, a group of organisms was not a unit of selection in the manner of a gene or individual organism and that altruistic social behaviour was more than adequately explained by kin selection.

Wilson briefly synthesized his deterministic beliefs about behaviour in The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Situating the human species on an evolutionary continuum, he contended that humanity had spent most of its history in ignorance of the biological factors that drove the formation of society and culture. Though science had latterly established the origins of Homo sapiens and the ultimate insignificance of the species in the universe, Wilson asserted that humans remained beholden to primitive survival impulses that lacked utility in contemporary society, leading to religious and tribal conflicts. Nonetheless, he supposed an incipient thought revolution, enabled by further scientific inquiry, that would allow humanity a more fulsome understanding of itself on a cosmic scale. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016) advanced the idea that plummeting biodiversity could be mitigated by reserving a full half of the planet for nonhuman species. By linking extant conservation areas as well as new ones using a system of corridors of protected land, Wilson argued that a tenable system for human coexistence with the rest of life on Earth could be created.

In 1990 Wilson and American biologist Paul Ehrlich shared the Crafoord Prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to support areas of science not covered by the Nobel Prizes. Wilson’s autobiography, Naturalist, appeared in 1994. In 2010 he released his debut novel, Anthill: A Novel, which featured both human and insect characters. Letters to a Young Scientist (2013) was a volume of advice directed at nascent scientific investigators.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-26 00:07:45

377) Casimir Funk

Casimir Funk:

The discoverer of vitamins, Polish American biochemist Casimir Funk (1884-1967) found that vitamins B1, B2, C, and D were necessary to human health and that vitamins contributed to the normal functioning of the hormonal system. His work led to the prevention of beriberi, rickets, scurvy, and other diseases caused by vitamin deficiency.

Studied in Switzerland and Germany

Funk was born February 23, 1884, in Warsaw, Poland, then part of Russia. His mother was Gustawa Zysan and his father was Jacques Funk, a dermatologist. At the time, education for Poles was difficult. All public schools were under Russia's control. Getting into a school required the help of someone with influence.

Funk was tutored at home until he was admitted to public school, where he did well at his studies. Dissatisfied with the education Funk was receiving, his parents enrolled him in the Warsaw Gymnasium in 1894. Funk graduated in 1900 and continued his education. He studied biology under Robert Chodat at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, then transferred to the University of Bern in Germany, where he studied chemistry under Carl Friedheim and Stanislaw Kostanecki. (Funk and Kostanecki later published an article on the synthesis of stilbestrols.)

In 1904, Funk earned his Ph.D. after completing his dissertation on how to prepare two stilbene dyes, Brasilin and H„matoxylin. He then went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he studied organic bases and amino acids under Gabriel Bertrand. During his time in Paris, Funk experimented with laccol, a phenol that caused him to suffer painful swelling. After he stopped those experiments, Funk began to study the building blocks of sugars and proteins.

In 1906, Funk held an unpaid position at the University of Berlin. There he worked in the laboratory of Emil Fischer. Under Fischer's assistant, Emil Abderhalden, Funk experimented with protein metabolism. A year later, Funk began a paid position as a biochemist at the Municipal Hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany. There, he found that when dogs were fed purified proteins they lost weight, but when they were fed horse meat and powdered milk, they gained weight. The results were not what Abderhalden expected; he decided that Funk's methods were at fault and discounted the data. When relations with Abderhalden did not improve, Funk transferred to the pediatric clinic at the University of Berlin.

Discovered "Vitamines"

In 1910, Funk left Germany and became a scholar at the Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine in London, England. In 1911 he published his first paper in English, on dihydroxyphenylalanine. Charles Martin, head of the institute, gave Funk another problem to study: beriberi. Beriberi is a disease of the peripheral nerves that causes pain and paralysis. At the time of Funk's study, it was not known that beriberi is caused by a lack of B1, but only that the disease occurred in areas of the Orient where the population consumed polished rice.

Earlier work in how deficiencies in diet could cause health problems were the basis for Funk's work. In 1873, research had shown that dogs did not thrive on a diet of washed meat and that pigeons that ate synthetic food developed symptoms of disease. At the turn of the 20th century, Christiaan Eikjman found that chickens made sick by a diet of polished rice would recover if fed rice hulls. He determined that rice hulls could cure some diseases, but he assumed wrongly that the problem arose from a toxic factor in rice. In the early 1900s, Sir Frederick Hopkins found that mice fed a diet of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and mineral salts stopped growing if their diet did not contain milk. He determined that milk contained a substance that maintained health.

Building on the work of such researchers, Funk looked at how food factors affected health. It was already known that including citrus fruit in the diet could prevent scurvy and that rice hulls could prevent beriberi. But it was not clear why. To find the answer, Funk experimented with extracts made from the dark outer coating of rice that was removed during polishing. He found that there was a substance within that coating that cured beriberi. Funk also fed pigeons a diet of polished rice and found that within a short time the birds lost weight and became unhealthy. Since the birds were consuming enough proteins, he knew that the problem was not a protein or amino acid deficiency.

Birds fed the extract made from rice polish soon began to recover. Also, birds that ate small amounts of yeast regained their health. Funk decided that there was a substance in the rice polish and the yeast that was required in small amounts to maintain health. He published an article on the subject titled "On the Chemical Nature of the Substance which Cures Polyneuritis in Birds Induced by a Diet of Polished Rice."

The study led Funk to realize that there were substances in food essential to good health. He found that diseases such as beriberi, rickets, and scurvy could be cured by introducing into the diet organic compounds that contained certain chemical substances. Funk also maintained that certain diseases could be prevented by making sure the chemical substances were present in the diet. He called the substances "vitamines," with "vita" meaning vitality and "amines" meaning a chemical compound containing nitrogen. (The "e" was dropped in the 1920s when it was found that amines, or organic compounds derived from ammonia, were not always present.)

In 1912, Funk published his paper, "Vitamines." His publication earned him public recognition and a Beit Fellowship from the University of London. In 1913, Funk began working at the London Cancer Hospital Research Institute. He published his first book, Die Vitamine, translated in 1922 by Dr. H.E. Dubin into English. (Dubin collaborated with Funk to produce the first cod liver oil vitamin concentrate, called Oscodal.)

Later Career

In 1915 during World War I, Funk decided to leave England and accept a position at the Harriman Research Laboratory in New York City. Upon his arrival, he found to his dismay that the laboratory did not have research funding or equipment. Anxiety over how he would support his family caused Funk to suffer serious health problems. But he recovered and in 1916 accepted a position with Calco Company in Bound Brook, New Jersey. A year later, in 1917, he started working for the pharmaceutical firm Metz and Company in New York City. From 1918 to 1923, he also held an academic position at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he worked on the synthesis of adrenaline.

Funk became a United States citizen in 1920. In 1923, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, he returned to Poland and worked as chief of the Department of Biochemistry at the State Institute of Hygiene. While there, he increased the quality of insulin produced in the laboratory. In 1928, because of political unrest in Poland, he accepted a part-time position with Gr, my, a pharmaceutical house in Paris. There he founded Casa Biochemica, a private laboratory that produced biochemical products. From 1927 to 1936, Funk also worked as a biochemist for the Rousell Company.

In 1936, Funk published Vitamin and Mineral Therapy, also translated by H.E. Dubin. In this publication he called vitamin deficiencies insidious because they occur without warning and can cause irreparable damage. "Lack of a particular vitamin leads eventually to a particular nutritional disease," Funk wrote. "However, long before this deficiency disease becomes apparent, a shortage of one or more vitamins may—and usually does—give rise to some tissue changes which lower the general resistance of the body making it susceptible to the attack of certain infections."

After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Funk returned to New York and began working for the U.S. Vitamin Corporation, a company for which he had previously worked and which owned the copyright to Vitamin and Mineral Therapy. In 1947, with the support of the U.S. Vitamin Corporation, Funk became head of the Funk Foundation for Medical Research. In 1963, Funk gave up an active role in research when he retired. He died in New York City on November 20, 1976.

Married in 1914 to Alix Denise Schneidesch, Funk had two children. During his lifetime, he published more than 140 articles, including material on gonadotropic hormones, ulcers, and diabetes.

Legacy of Improved Health

Funk advanced humankind's understanding of nutrition and revolutionized the way people looked at their health. He never isolated a pure vitamin, but he did prepare concentrations that contained several vitamins. His conclusion that lack of vitamins in the diet was responsible for disease helped develop effective preventive and curative measures for anemia, beriberi, osteomalacia, pellagra, rickets, scurvy, and sprue.

During the vitamin craze that followed Funk's discoveries, many people overlooked Funk's observation that only small amounts of the substances were necessary to maintain health. Nutritional supplements were said to cure diseases, and vitamin makers claimed that synthetic vitamins improved energy and health. Consumers began to ingest large amounts of vitamins, despite the fact that small amounts were sufficient and that too much of some vitamins, such as A and D, are toxic to the body.

Although he is remembered primarily for his work with vitamins, Funk was also instrumental in advancing studies on hormones, cancer, and diabetes. His contributions to science include developing accurate views of the relationship between diet and health that led to advances in child and adult nutrition. He also contributed to getting proper nutrients into manufactured foods.

Other contributions made by Funk include finding the connection between Vitamin B complex and carbohydrate metabolism, discovering that vitamins influence the speed at which cancer grows, separating Vitamin D from cholesterol, and realizing that bacteria are a necessary part of the diet.

Generations of children made to consume cod liver oil by their parents may not appreciate Funk's work, but it is certain that his contributions have improved the health of countless. Indeed, his work clearly contributed to the increased life span many people enjoy in modern society.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-28 01:09:29

378) Mahlon Loomis

Mahlon Loomis - The First Wireless Telegrapher

Born July 26, 1826 - Oppenheim, New York.
Died, October 13, 1886 - Terra Alta, West Virginia.

As it is with any event in history, invention of a process is seldom the responsibility of only one singular person. Radio, as we know it, has been attributed to Guglimo Marconi, however his success was built upon the works of Hertz, Lodge and Branley, and others.

The Early Days

Mahlon Loomis was born July 21, 1826, in Oppenhiem New York, into the family of Professor Nathan Loomis and Waitie Loomis. He was the fourth of nine children.

Not a lot of details are available about Mahlon Loomis’ early life. This is unfortunate because it is often interesting to see how a young inventive mind grows. We do, however, know that he was surrounded by educated minds, as his father was a founder of the AMERICAN EPHEMERIS and NATIONAL ALMANAC. In addition to this, his older brother George, was an inventor and holder of several patents himself.

In 1836, Mahlon’s family moved to Springvale, Virginia. In September of 1848, Mahlon went to Cleveland, Ohio to partake in the study of dentistry. In 1850, he returned to Springvale to continue his dental work.

For several years Mahlon spent time as a traveling dentist. During this time he went to Earlville, New York, Cambridgeport Massachusetts and Philadelphia. During this practice in Massachusetts he received a patent for a mineral plate (Kaolin ) process for the making of artificial teeth.

In November of 1856, Loomis and his bride of only a few months, Achsah Ashley, settled in Washington D.C. to set up a dentistry practice.

The Start Of The Electrical Days

About 1860, Mahlon Loomis became interested in electricity, and his first application of this was an experiment in the forced increase of growth in plants. This was achieved by buried metal plates connected to an electrical current furnished by batteries.

In this same time period Mahlon became interested in using the electrical charges obtainable from the upper atmosphere by means of kites carrying metal wires. At first he planned to use this natural source of electricity to replace batteries on a telegraph circuit. It is noted in many references that this was something that was actually achieved on a telegraph line that was 400 miles long.

Later on, from experiments in this area, Mahlon discovered that a kite sent aloft would affect the flow of current in another kite that was some distance away from the first kite.

This set him on a path of developing it as a system of wireless telegraphy for practical long distance communications.

It Actually Works!

The year is 1868, and Mahlon Loomis demonstrates to a group of Congressmen and eminent scientists a wireless "communication" system between two sites 14 to 18 miles apart. There seems to be some discrepancy as to the distance in the various records that exist, however in the picture that was drawn by Mahlon Loomis, 14 miles is mentioned. This and many other pictures and notes are on file in the Library of Congress.

From one mountain peak he sent up a kite, the bottom of which was covered with thin copper gauze, and the kite string was copper wire. He connected this apparatus up to a galvanometer that had the other end of the circuit connected to ground. Immediately the galvanometer showed the passage of current!

He then set up an identical outfit on a mountain peak 18 miles away, to send. He would touch this second kites wire to ground and by this action reduced the voltage of the charged stratum and lowered the deflection in the galvanometer attached to the other kite at first location we discussed.

There were problems with the communications system sometimes. It seemed that if one of the kites was at the wrong height, the system would not work. This led Loomis to believe that there were different areas in the atmosphere, and depending which area you were in, would control if the communication would work or not.

There were even days when the system just would not work at all. In thinking about that, it could be due to the electrostatic charge in the atmosphere that existed at that time during the experiment.

Mahlon Seeks the Government’s Help

Senator Charles Sumner, encouraged by a previous government grant to Samuel F.B. Morse, introduced a bill into the Senate on January 13, 1869. The "Loomis Aerial Telegraph Bill" asked for an act of incorporation for the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company, and for the appropriation of $50,000 to help perfect Loomis’s discovery and make it practical.

Loomis had proposed a system where wireless telegraph messages could be sent across the Atlantic at 1/16 the cost of what it was using a Trans-Atlantic cable.

In an address to Congress, Loomis explained his system worked by: "Causing electrical vibrations or waves to pass around the world, as upon the surface of some quiet lake one wave circlet follows another from the point of the disturbance to the remotest shores, so that from any other mountain top upon the globe another conductor, which shall pierce this plane and receive the impressed vibration, may be connected to an indicator which will mark the length and duration of the vibration; and indicate by any agreed system of notation, convertible into human language, the message of the operator at the point of the first disturbance."

The bill, although gaining the support of a few Congressmen, was thought to be a fraud by many others. It was shuttled from committee to committee with much delay.

On May 20 thru 21, 1872, a lengthy discussion took place in the House. The issue of appropriations had been removed from the bill, and issue of incorporation was all that remained of the Loomis bill.

The newspapers became extremely active on the Loomis issue, unfortunately the majority of them were not favorable to the concept of wireless communication. Their reports ranged from polite skepticism to outright ridicule and allegations of the Loomis method being a fraud!

A copy of the Loomis Bill was also submitted to the committee for patents. On July 30, 1872, Patent number 129,971 was issued to Mahlon Loomis.

On January 6, 1873, the Loomis Bill was brought to a vote in the Senate and passed by a vote of 29 to 12, with 33 Senators absent. The record shows that neither of Virginia's Senators voted for the bill, despite the fact that Loomis was a resident there. Five days later the bill was signed into law by President Grant, thus incorporating the Loomis Aerial Telegraph Company. What had been achieved by this? Actually, not very much! Although Loomis now had a legal corporation, it was not allowed to operate outside Washington D.C. with out the prior consent of the state the corporation wished to operate within.

The Twilight Years

During the later years of his life, Mahlon worked as a dentist only to the extent to get some more capital to use to purchase goods for his electrical and communications experiments.

In the late 1870’s a distance was obtained of 20 miles. In this experiment he erected steel masts on top of wooden towers (these replaced the kites of the earlier experiments) and reportedly maintained fairly reliable communications for periods of months at a time.

There was even some hints in his notes about experimenting with a "Wireless Telephone". There do not seem to be any surviving details of these experiments however, so it is really hard to say if he met with any successes in this area or not.

There are also drawings of buzzers connected to the Loomis system. Was this the start of an idea never finished?

Twilight Fades to Dark

Mahlon Loomis was heard to say many time the following statement:

"I know that I am regarded as a crank, perhaps a fool by some, and as to the latter, possibly I am, for I could have discarded this thing entirely and turned my attention to making money."

"I have not only discovered a new world, but the means to invade it. My compensation is poverty, contempt, neglect, forgetfulness. In the distant future, when the possibilities of this discovery are more fully developed, public attention will be directed to it’s originator, and the congressional records will furnish the indisputable proof that the credit belongs to me."

On October 13,1886, after a weeks long illness, Mahlon Loomis died at his brother’s country home in Terra Alta, West Virginia ; he was 60 years old. During the illness, his brother George reported that Mahlon was in hopes that the world would realize and use his invention. George Loomis also told others his brother's thoughts as Mahlon’s life neared it’s end......

"I know that I am by some, even many, regarded as a crank - by some perhaps a fool.... But I know that I am right, and if the present generation lives long enough their opinions will be changed - and their wonder will be that they did not perceive it before. I shall never see it perfected - but it will be, and others will have the honor of the discovery "

The Aftermath

What is Loomis’s place in communications history? At the very least there are several areas he should receive credit for.

1. First to use a complete antenna and ground system

2. First experimental transmission of wireless telegraph signals.

3. The first use of kites to carry an antenna aloft.

4. The first use of balloons to raise an antenna wire.

5. First vertical antenna (steel rod mounted on top of a wood tower).

6. Formulation of the idea of ‘waves’ traveling out from his antenna.

7. The first Patent for wireless telegraphy.

His actions did not catch the attention of the world as those experiments and successes that Marconi had. It almost seems that he was just a generation ahead of his time. The wireless system that was to happen had to wait another generation until there would be a bit more knowledge to draw upon to bring it to it’s fulfillment and usefulness.

Who is to know though, what the publicity that surrounded his experiments may have done to inspire other people. It is often a chain reaction, once an idea is brought to light, and it inspires other people to think along the same lines or to start experimenting with their own variation of an idea. We will never know if there was any of this inspiration ‘transmitted’ to other thinkers or not. Even though he did not personally succeed, somehow he had an influence on what was to later happen.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-08-30 00:11:44

379) Sir John Ambrose Fleming

Sir John Ambrose Fleming, (born Nov. 29, 1849, Lancaster, Lancashire, Eng.—died April 18, 1945, Sidmouth, Devon), English engineer who made numerous contributions to electronics, photometry, electric measurements, and wireless telegraphy.

After studying at University College, London, and at Cambridge University under James Clerk Maxwell, Fleming became a consultant to the Edison Electric Light Company in London, an adviser to the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, and a popular teacher at University College (1885–1926), where he was the first to hold the title of professor of electrical engineering.

Early in his career Fleming investigated photometry, worked with high-voltage alternating currents, and designed some of the first electric lighting for ships. He is best remembered as the inventor of the two-electrode radio rectifier, which he called the thermionic valve; it is also known as the vacuum diode, kenotron, thermionic tube, and Fleming valve. This device, patented in 1904, was the first electronic rectifier of radio waves, converting alternating-current radio signals into weak direct currents detectable by a telephone receiver. Augmented by the amplifier grid invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest of the United States, Fleming’s invention was the ancestor of the triode and other multielectrode vacuum tubes. Fleming was the author of more than a hundred scientific papers and books, including the influential 'The Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy' (1906) and 'The Propagation of Electric Currents in Telephone and Telegraph Conductors' (1911). He was knighted in 1929.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-01 00:40:35

380) Antonio Meucci

Antonio Meucci : Birthdate : 1808/04/13
Birthplace : Florence, Italy
Death date : 1889/10/18

Fields of study : Telegraphy, Telephony

Biography

Antonio Meucci was born in Florence, Italy to Amatis Meucci and Domenica Pepi, in 1808. From an early age he showed an interest in technical matters. A few years after completing his schooling, he became chief engineer at the Florence's most important theater. The tense political situation in Italy at the time was a factor in Meucci's acceptance of an offer to become chief engineer at a large theater in Havana, and in 1835 he and his wife emigrated to Cuba. For 15 years Meucci thrived in Havana. In addition to his main job, he set up an electroplating business and did a great deal of experimenting on his own.

He became particularly interested in medical uses of electricity, and it was in 1849 while administering shock treatment to a patient that he first conceived of using electricity and wires to convey speech. In one of his experiments with electric shock, the patient, who had one electrode in his mouth, cried out in pain. Meucci thought he heard the sound more clearly than usual. He then placed an electrode from the apparatus in his own ear, and thus heard sound conveyed through wires. Meucci dubbed his discovery the speaking telegraph and continued to experiment, though he had difficulty reproducing the phenomenon.

When the theater in Havana, where Meucci worked, was destroyed by fire in 1850, Meucci and his wife moved to New York City. There he could continue his enginering work with the Italian Opera community and quickly established himself within the Italian community in the city. Meucci lived mostly in a world of his countrymen, establishing relationships with Italian political exiles, and never fully learning English. In the early 1850s, he shared a home on Staten Island with Giuseppe Garibaldi, a leader of the Italian independence fight and opera tenor Lorenzo Salvi. Meucci set up his laboratory in the basement and remained in the home with his wife for the rest of their lives.

After a failed sausage and salami factory enterprise, Meucci developed a formula for the manufacture parafin candles, which would later be patented. This enterprise too struggled, as did his attempts to construct pianos and produce beer. His real interest continued to lie with experimentation and inventing. His inventions and discoveries were varied, ranging from oil treatments for paint, an oil lamp without a glass chimney, a screw steamer for canals, and effervescent temperance drinks. Perhaps his most potentially lucrative invention, besides the talking telegraph was a process for making paper from wood fiber. Meucci was never able to successfully capitalize on his inventions, however, often outmaneuvered by business associates.

From the mid 1850s to the early 1860s, his financial situation deteriorated, reducing him to poverty. A serious injury resulting from a boiler explosion aboard a Staten Island ferry boat confined Meucii to bed for three months. His wife, desperate for money and often suspicious of his experimenting, sold all of Meucci’s electrical apparatus in 1871.

The Telephone

In about 1854 Meucci's wife's rheumatoid arthritis became so severe that she could seldom leave her bedroom on the third floor of the house. This prompted Meucci to resume work on his speaking telegraph, and by 1861 he had built a mechanical telephone connection between the bedroom and his two laboratories, one in the basement and one behind the house.

Meucci made some efforts to gain the interest of investors in his speaking telegraph invention, but without success. Nevertheless, over the years that followed he worked from time to time on his telephone and on other inventions.

In December 1871 Meucci formed a partnership with three others to promote the telephone invention. They engaged a lawyer to prepare a patent application, but the partners did not provide the $250 fee, so all that was prepared was a caveat, which cost $20. The lawyer, who did not understand the invention, prepared the caveat hastily and did not include any drawings. The partnership soon dissolved: one partner withdrew, another returned to Italy, and the third died. Meucci was able to find the required $10 to renew his caveat in December 1872, and he did so again the following year. But he did not have the funds to renew it a third time, so the caveat expired. It was just a year later, in early 1876, that Alexander Graham Bell filed his first telephone patent, and a patent examiner later said that had Meucci's caveat been renewed, no patent would have been issued to Bell.

When Bell's telephone became known, Meucci made efforts to prove his priority. In 1883 he assigned the rights to his invention to a group working to overturn the Bell patents. This group was not successful in the courts.

Legacy

On 18 October 1889 Meucci died. Although he did not succeed in gaining recognition for his telephone invention in his lifetime, he did receive five patents in other areas, including hygrometry and effervescent drinks.

On the hundredth anniversary of his death, two books on Meucci were published in Italy, and in 1990 a square in Brooklyn was named after him. The Meucci home on Staten Island is today maintained as a museum, the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, by the Order of the Sons of Italy in America.

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Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-03 00:14:24

381) David Bushnell

David Bushnell (August 30, 1740 – 1824 or 1826), of Westbrook, Connecticut, was an American inventor, a patriot, a scholar, and a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He had invented the first submarine to be used in battle.

Biography

Early life

Bushnell was born near Saybrook, Connecticut into a farming family. He was the first of five children born to Nehemiah and Sarah Ingram Bushnell. Following the death of his father circa 1769, he sold his half interest in the family Westbrook farm to his brother Ezra and entered Yale College in 1771 at the relatively old age of 31.

Turtle

Bushnell is credited with creating the first submarine ever used in combat, while studying at Yale in 1775. He called it Turtle because of its look in the water. His idea of using water as ballast for submerging and raising his submarine is still in use, as is the screw propeller, which was used in Turtle.

While at Yale, Bushnell proved that gunpowder could be exploded under water. He also made the first time bomb. He combined these ideas by building Turtle which was designed to attack ships by attaching a time bomb to their hulls, while using a hand powered drill and ship auger bit to penetrate the hulls.

On September 6, 1776, Turtle, manned by Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army, was used to attack the British 64-gun ship of the line HMS Eagle which was moored in New York Harbor. However, Turtle's attack failed.

Turtle was lost while being transported aboard a sloop; the sloop was discovered, and sunk, by British frigates leaving Bloomingdale.

Attack on HMS Cerberus

Realizing that Turtle was impractical as a weapon, Bushnell turned his attention to torpedoes (as explosive devices were then called). In 1777 Bushnell attempted to use a floating mine to blow up HMS Cerberus in Niantic Bay; the mine struck a small boat near Cerberus and detonated killing four sailors and destroying the vessel, but not the intended target. In 1778 he launched what became lauded as the Battle of the Kegs, in which a series of mines was floated down the Delaware River to attack British ships anchored there, killing two curious young boys and alerting the British. The attack was ineffectual.

Continental Army service

In 1778, General Washington proposed the formation of a new military unit to be known as the "Corps of Sappers and Miners" (i.e. combat engineers) and in the summer of the next year it was organized. Bushnell was given command of the Corps with the rank of captain-lieutenant on August 2, 1779. On May 6, 1779, he was taken prisoner in Middlesex Parish, now Darien, Connecticut, and was later exchanged.

On June 8, 1781, Bushnell was commissioned as a captain in the Continental Army and was at the Siege of Yorktown in September and October of that year. This was the only time the Sappers and Miners had had the opportunity to serve in combat.

Bushnell served in the Army until he was discharged on June 3, 1783. He then became an original member of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati, an organization formed by officers who were veterans of the Continental Army and Navy.

At some point after the Revolution, Bushnell was presented a medal by George Washington.

Later life

After peace was declared he returned to Connecticut where he lived until 1787 when he abruptly moved to France. His activities in France are unknown although it has been speculated that he may have collaborated with inventor Robert Fulton in developing a design for a submarine.

In 1803 Bushnell settled in Warrenton, Georgia under the pseudonym of David Bush. He taught at the Warrenton Academy and practiced medicine. He died in Warrenton in 1824 or 1826 and was buried in the town cemetery in an unmarked grave. There is a cenotaph in the Warrenton Cemetery in his honor.

Legacy

A full sized model of David Bushnell's Turtle is on display at the U.S. Navy Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut.

In 1915, the U.S. Navy named the submarine tender USS Bushnell (AS-2) after him and it was launched in Bremerton, Washington. Bushnell served during World War I and was renamed USS Sumner in 1940 and was present during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. She was employed as a survey ship during World War II and was decommissioned in 1946.

On 14 September 1942, another submarine tender of the same name USS Bushnell (AS-15) was launched. Bushnell served during World War II and later was the flagship of Submarine Squadron 12 in Key West, Florida from 1952 until she was decommissioned in 1970.

In 2004 the Georgia House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring August 30, 2004 as David Bushnell Day in Georgia.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-05 00:14:56

382) Leo Szilard

Leo Szilard, (born February 11, 1898, Budapest, Hungary, Austria-Hungary—died May 30, 1964, La Jolla, California, U.S.), Hungarian-born American physicist who helped conduct the first sustained nuclear chain reaction and was instrumental in initiating the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb.

In 1922 Szilard received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin and joined the staff of the Institute of Theoretical Physics there. When the Nazis came into power in 1933, he went to Vienna and, in 1934, to London, where he joined the physics staff of the medical college of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. There, with the British physicist T.A. Chalmers, Szilard developed the first method of separating isotopes (different nuclear forms of the same element) of artificial radioactive elements. In 1937 Szilard went to the United States and taught at Columbia University.

In 1939 Szilard and Eugene Wigner alerted Albert Einstein to the potential for the creation of a nuclear chain reaction and persuaded him to inform the U.S. government. Szilard subsequently drafted the famous letter to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed by Einstein, that advocated the immediate development of an atomic bomb. From 1942 until the end of the war he conducted nuclear research at the University of Chicago, where he helped Enrico Fermi construct the first nuclear reactor. In 1946 he became professor of biophysics at Chicago.

After the atomic bomb was first used, Szilard became an ardent promoter of the peaceful uses of atomic energy and the international control of nuclear weapons, founding the Council for a Livable World. In 1959 he received the Atoms for Peace Award. He published a collection of satirical sketches on the misuse of scientific knowledge entitled The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (1961).

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-07 00:47:33

383) Henry-Louis Le Chatelier

Henry-Louis Le Chatelier, (born Oct. 8, 1850, Paris, France—died Sept. 17, 1936, Miribel-les-Échelles), French chemist who is best known for Le Chatelier’s principle, which makes it possible to predict the effect a change of conditions (such as temperature, pressure, or concentration of reaction components) will have on a chemical reaction. His principle proved invaluable in the chemical industry for developing the most-efficient chemical processes.

Early Life And Education

Le Chatelier was the first of six children. Coming from a bourgeois Roman Catholic family, he had the benefit of a privileged education. He attended the Collège Rollin in Paris, from which he earned undergraduate degrees in 1867 and 1868, before enrolling at the École Polytechnique in 1869. The following year, he entered the mining engineer program at the École des Mines in Paris, from which he graduated in 1873. In 1876 Le Chatelier married Geneviève Nicolas; together they raised seven children, three boys and four girls.

Scientific Career

After two years in the provinces as a mining engineer, Le Chatelier returned to the École des Mines as a chemistry lecturer in 1877. He had at his disposal a well-equipped laboratory that he put to good use the following year by contributing to the Firedamp Commission, which was concerned with the improvement of safety in mines. Under the direction of the French mineralogist Ernest-François Mallard, Le Chatelier conducted experiments on explosive materials and published his first works of scientific research. These studies led him to improvements in measuring high temperatures, based on the thermocouple principle. He perfected the coupling of pure platinum with a platinum-rhodium alloy that gave rise to the thermoelectric pyrometer, known as the “Le Chatelier.” He also adapted an optic pyrometer for industrial use.

During the same period, Le Chatelier was interested in hydraulic binding materials (e.g., lime, cement, and plaster), which became the subject of a scientific thesis presented at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1887. This work established him as a scientific expert in the field.

Le Chatelier’s early work led to the experimental study of thermodynamics. In 1884 he enunciated a general principle that defined how systems in chemical equilibrium maintain their stability, stating that

'any system in stable chemical equilibrium, subjected to the influence of an external cause which tends to change either its temperature or its condensation (pressure, concentration, number of molecules in unit volume), either as a whole or in some of its parts, can only undergo such internal modifications as would, if produced alone, bring about a change of temperature or of condensation of opposite sign to that resulting from the external cause.'

In other words, equilibria tend to minimize changes imposed on their conditions. This became known as Le Chatelier’s principle, and it led him to develop mathematical equations to describe systems in equilibrium. Le Chatelier later recognized that the American mathematician Josiah Willard Gibbs had partially provided this mathematical formalization between 1876 and 1878. Consequently, in 1899 Le Chatelier devoted a year to studying these issues, concluding with a translation of Gibb’s original work about chemical equilibrium systems.

Le Chatelier’s attention then turned to the question of how to apply the science of chemical thermodynamics to the development of industrial processes. He suggested increasing the output of industrial ammonia production by using low heat and high pressure, as indicated by his principle of chemical equilibrium. Similarly, his interest in industrial applications of chemistry led him to perfect the oxyacetylene torch, which achieves the extremely high temperatures required for welding and cutting metals.

Metallurgy was the other specialized field where thermodynamic theories were used with notable success. Le Chatelier introduced to France methods of analyzing alloys based on metallography, and he also contributed to the method of drawing phase diagrams. All these studies were conducted while teaching in scientific institutions in Paris, and in 1882 Le Chatelier was nominated as a lecturer in chemistry at the prestigious École Polytechnique. His ambition had always been to achieve a position as a professor there, but that title was denied him. The École des Mines, however, was more welcoming, and in 1887 he obtained a professorship in industrial chemistry and metallurgy. Le Chatelier remained at the École des Mines until his retirement. In 1897 he succeeded Paul Schutzenberger in his chair of mineral chemistry at the Collège de France, and he also succeeded the Nobelist Henri Moissan at the Sorbonne in 1907.

Other Notable Activities

Le Chatelier’s career was largely devoted to the development of a systematic approach to organizing the relationship between science and industrial production. His teaching was entirely concerned with what he called industrial science—the scientific study of industrial phenomena in order to maximize outputs. He successfully introduced his ideas about industrial science to the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale as guidelines for research programs initiated by the institution. He was elected president of the society in 1903 and 1904. In 1904 he founded and edited the Revue de métallurgie, which became a medium for his ideas on industrial science. By providing his services as a consultant for private companies, Le Chatelier also contributed directly to industrial development.

Later Years

In 1907 Le Chatelier was elected to the French Academy of Sciences. He devoted most of his time to directing his students’ research work at the Sorbonne and the École des Mines. He sat as a scientific expert on a variety of governmental committees concerned with such issues as the manufacture of explosive materials and military equipment. During World War I, he contributed to the reorganization of shell production in munitions factories. He dedicated a large part of his last years to promoting the American engineer Frederick W. Taylor’s theories about the scientific organization of work. Le Chatelier translated some parts of Taylor’s writings, and he also published his own papers on the subject.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-09 00:44:29

384) Andreas Vesalius

Andreas Vesalius, (Latin), Flemish Andries Van Wesel, (born December 1514, Brussels [now in Belgium]—died June 1564, island of Zacynthus, Republic of Venice [now in Greece]), Renaissance physician who revolutionized the study of biology and the practice of medicine by his careful description of the anatomy of the human body. Basing his observations on dissections he made himself, he wrote and illustrated the first comprehensive textbook of anatomy.

Life

Vesalius, a native of the duchy of Brabant (the southern portion of which is now in Belgium), was from a family of physicians and pharmacists. He attended the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) in 1529–33, and from 1533 to 1536 he studied at the medical school of the University of Paris, where he learned to dissect animals. He also had the opportunity to dissect human cadavers, and he devoted much of his time to a study of human bones, at that time easily available in the Paris cemeteries.

n 1536 Vesalius returned to Brabant to spend another year at the Catholic University of Leuven, where the influence of Arab medicine was still dominant. Following the prevailing custom, he prepared, in 1537, a paraphrase of the work of the 10th-century Arab physician, Rhazes, probably in fulfillment of the requirements for the bachelor of medicine degree. He then went to the University of Padua, a progressive university with a strong tradition of anatomical dissection. On receiving the M.D. degree the same year, he was appointed a lecturer in surgery with the responsibility of giving anatomical demonstrations. Since he knew that a thorough knowledge of human anatomy was essential to surgery, he devoted much of his time to dissections of cadavers and insisted on doing them himself, instead of relying on untrained assistants. At first, Vesalius had no reason to question the theories of Galen, the Greek physician who had served the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome and whose books on anatomy were still considered as authoritative in medical education in Vesalius’ time. In January 1540, breaking with this tradition of relying on Galen, Vesalius openly demonstrated his own method—doing dissections himself, learning anatomy from cadavers, and critically evaluating ancient texts. He did so while visiting the University of Bologna. Such methods soon convinced him that Galenic anatomy had not been based on the dissection of the human body, which had been strictly forbidden by the Roman religion. Galenic anatomy, he maintained, was an application to the human form of conclusions drawn from the dissections of animals, mostly dogs, monkeys, or pigs. It was this conclusion that he had the audacity to declare in his teaching as he hurriedly prepared his complete textbook of human anatomy for publication. Early in 1542 he traveled to Venice to supervise the preparation of drawings to illustrate his text, probably in the studio of the great Renaissance artist Titian. The drawings of his dissections were engraved on wood blocks, which he took, together with his manuscript, to Basel, Switz., where his major work 'De humani corporis fabrica libri septem' (“The Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body”) commonly known as the Fabrica, was printed in 1543.

In this epochal work, Vesalius deployed all his scientific, humanistic, and aesthetic gifts. 'The Fabrica' was a more extensive and accurate description of the human body than any put forward by his predecessors; it gave anatomy a new language, and, in the elegance of its printing and organization, a perfection hitherto unknown.

Early in 1543, Vesalius left for Mainz, to present his book to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who engaged him as regular physician to the household. Thus, when not yet 28 years old, Vesalius had attained his goal. After relinquishing his post in Padua, and returning in the spring of 1544 to his native land to marry Anne van Hamme, he took up new duties in the service of the Emperor on his travels in Europe. From 1553 to 1556 Vesalius spent most of his time in Brussels, where he built an imposing house in keeping with his growing affluence and attended to his flourishing medical practice. His prestige was further enhanced when Charles V, on abdication from the Spanish throne in 1556, provided him with a lifetime pension and made him a count.

Vesalius went to Spain in 1559 with his wife and daughter to take up an appointment, made by Philip II, son of Charles V, as one of the physicians in the Madrid court. In 1564 Vesalius obtained permission to leave Spain to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. He traveled to Jerusalem, with stops at Venice and Cyprus, his wife and daughter having returned to Brussels.

Legacy

Vesalius’ work represented the culmination of the humanistic revival of ancient learning, the introduction of human dissections into medical curricula, and the growth of a European anatomical literature. Vesalius performed his dissections with a thoroughness hitherto unknown. After Vesalius, anatomy became a scientific discipline, with far-reaching implications not only for physiology but for all of biology. During his own lifetime, however, Vesalius found it easier to correct points of Galenic anatomy than to challenge his physiological framework. Conflicting reports obscure the final days of Vesalius’ life. Apparently he became ill aboard ship while returning to Europe from his pilgrimage. He was put ashore on the Greek island of Zacynthus, where he died.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-11 00:00:46

385) Henry Hudson

Henry Hudson, (born c. 1565, England—died after June 22, 1611, in or near Hudson Bay?), English navigator and explorer who, sailing three times for the English (1607, 1608, 1610–11) and once for the Dutch (1609), tried to discover a short route from Europe to Asia through the Arctic Ocean, in both the Old World and the New. A river, a strait, and a bay in North America are named for him.

Of Hudson’s early life, nothing is known. Several Hudsons were associated with his sponsors, the Muscovy Company of London, a generation before his own time. A 1585 voyage by the English navigator John Davis, who sailed to the Arctic to make the first attempt to find a Northwest Passage from Europe to Asia, was planned in the home of a Thomas Hudson in Limehouse, now in the docks area of London’s East End. Henry Hudson may have been present on that occasion and consequently developed a lifelong interest in Arctic exploration. It is certain that he was well informed about Arctic geography and that his competence as a navigator was such that two wealthy companies chose him to conduct hazardous explorations.

The Search For The Northeast Passage

In the spring of 1607, sailing for the Muscovy Company, Hudson, his son John, and 10 companions set forth “for to discover a Passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” Believing that he would find an ice-free sea around the North Pole, Hudson struck out northward. On reaching the edge of the polar ice pack, he followed it east until he reached the Svalbard (Spitsbergen) archipelago. From there he extended explorations made earlier by the 16th-century Dutch navigator Willem Barents, who had also sought a Northeast Passage to Asia.

On April 22, 1608, the Muscovy Company again sent Hudson to seek a Northeast Passage, this time between Svalbard and the islands of Novaya Zemlya, which lie to the east of the Barents Sea. Finding his way again blocked by ice fields, he returned to England in August.

Shortly after his return, Hudson was lured to Amsterdam to undertake a third northeast voyage under contract to the Dutch East India Company. While there, he heard reports of two possible channels to the Pacific across North America. One of these, said to be in about latitude 62° N, was described in the logbooks of a voyage made in 1602 by an English explorer, Capt. George Weymouth. The other, said to be in the vicinity of about latitude 40° N, was newly reported from Virginia by the English soldier, explorer, and colonist Capt. John Smith. Although his interest in a Northwest Passage had been aroused, Hudson agreed to return directly to Holland if his northeast voyage should prove unsuccessful.

Hudson sailed from Holland in the 'Half Moon' on April 6, 1609. When head winds and storms forced him to abandon his northeast voyage, he ignored his agreement and proposed to the crew that they should instead seek the Northwest Passage. Given their choice between returning home or continuing, the crew elected to follow Smith’s proposed route and seek the Northwest Passage around 40° N. While cruising along the Atlantic seaboard, Hudson put into the majestic river encountered by the Florentine navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, which was thenceforth to be known as the Hudson. After ascending it for about 150 miles (240 km) to the vicinity of what is now Albany, New York, Hudson concluded that the river did not lead to the Pacific. During his survey of the region, Hudson passed within 100 miles (160 km) of a party led by French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who had ventured south from his base at Quebec, but the two groups were not aware of each other.

On his way to Holland, Hudson docked at Dartmouth, England. The English government then ordered him and the English members of his crew to desist from further explorations for other countries. His log and papers were sent to Holland, where his discoveries were soon made known.

Hudson now made ready a voyage to America to follow up Weymouth’s suggestion. Weymouth had described an inlet (now Hudson Strait) where a “furious overfall” of water rushed out with every ebb tide. This phenomenon suggested that a great body of water lay beyond the strait. Hudson was confident that it was the Pacific Ocean. The British East India Company contributed £300 toward his voyage, and the Muscovy Company presumably furnished a like amount; Hudson’s private sponsors included 5 noblemen and 13 merchants.

The Voyage To Hudson Bay

Sailing from London on April 17, 1610, in the 55-ton vessel 'Discovery', Hudson stopped briefly in Iceland, then proceeded to the “furious overfall.” Passing through it and entering Hudson Bay in early August, he then followed the east coast southward, rather than striking boldly westward. Finding himself in James Bay at the southernmost extremity of Hudson Bay and with no outlet to the Pacific to be found, Hudson cruised aimlessly until winter overtook him.

In the close confinement of an Arctic winter, quarrels arose. Hudson angered one of his crew, Henry Green, by first giving him a gray gown and then, when Green displeased him, taking it back and giving it to another. Some of his crew suspected that Hudson was secretly hoarding food for his favourites, and tempers flared when Hudson ordered the crew’s own sea chests searched for extra victuals. Robert Juet, the mate, had been demoted, and he conspired with Green and others to mutiny. Once the homeward voyage had begun, the mutineers seized Hudson, his son, and seven others, casting them adrift in Hudson Bay in a small open boat on June 22, 1611. Although the 'Discovery' sailed home to England, neither of the ringleaders returned with her, having been killed, together with several others, in a fight with Eskimos. No more was ever heard of Hudson and his small party, although in 1631 to 1632 another explorer found the ruins of a shelter, possibly erected by the castaways.

As a commander, Hudson was more headstrong than courageous. He violated his agreement with the Dutch and failed to suppress the 1611 mutiny. He played favourites and let morale suffer. In James Bay he appeared irresolute.

Yet Hudson undertook four dangerous voyages, brought his crew through an Arctic winter, and preserved his vessels amid the dangers of ice and unknown shores. He was a competent navigator who materially extended the explorations of Verrazzano, Davis, and Barents. His contribution to geographical knowledge was great, while his discoveries formed the basis for the Dutch colonization of the Hudson River and for English claims to much of Canada.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-13 00:43:23

386) Bill Moggridge

William Grant "Bill" Moggridge, RDI (25 June 1943 – 8 September 2012) was a British designer, author and educator who cofounded the design company IDEO and was director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. He was a pioneer in adopting a human-centred approach in design, and championed interaction design as a mainstream design discipline (he is given credit for coining the term). Among his achievements, he designed the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass, was honoured for Lifetime Achievement from the National Design Awards, and given the Prince Philip Designers Prize. He was quoted as saying, "If there is a simple, easy principle that binds everything I have done together, it is my interest in people and their relationship to things."

Education and early career

Moggridge studied industrial design from 1962 to 1965 at the Central School of Art and Design, London, in 1965, he went to the US to find opportunities as a designer and landed his first job as a designer for the American Sterilizer Co. in Erie, Pennsylvania, designing hospital equipment. In 1969, Moggridge returned to London to study typography and communications.

Moggridge Associates

In 1969 in London, Moggridge founded his first company, Moggridge Associates, in the top floor of his home. His first industrial design to reach the market was a toaster for Hoover UK. In 1972, he worked on his first computer project, a Mini Computer for Computer Technology Ltd, UK, that was not produced. In 1973, another Hoover UK design, for a space heater, got on the cover of a UK design magazine.

ID Two

Moggridge returned to the US in 1979 to open another office, called ID Two, first located in Palo Alto, California. An early client was GRiD Systems, for whom he designed what is widely regarded as the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass. This was the first portable computer with a display that closed over the keyboard, a patented innovation that GRiD licensed for many years. It retailed at $8,150 (£5,097) and flew on board every Space Shuttle mission from 1983 to 1997.

In 1982, designer Mike Nuttall joined ID Two from the London office, and worked on another portable computer project for Convergent Technologies. Because of the potential for conflict of interest, Nuttall left ID Two to form his own firm in Palo Alto, Matrix Product Design.

In this period, Moggridge also began teaching in Stanford University's Product Design Program, where he met fellow teacher David Kelley, who had his own engineering design firm, David Kelley Design.

IDEO

In 1991, Moggridge was a co-founder of IDEO with David Kelley and Mike Nuttall, as all four firms merged into one. Moggridge stayed at IDEO until 2010, when he was named an IDEO Fellow.

Cooper-Hewitt

In March 2010, Moggridge left IDEO to become director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, the first person to do so without a museum background. The Cooper-Hewitt is the only museum in the US devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design.

Academic and industry roles

From 1983 to 2010, Moggridge was consulting associate professor in different departments at Stanford University, including the Product Design Program, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, and the d.school (officially the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design).

Moggridge was Congress Chair for CONNECTING'07, the Icsid World Design Congress held in San Francisco, a role that began in 2000 as he led the effort to prepare a bid that was presented at the 2001 Icsid Congress in Seoul, Korea.

In 2001, Moggridge became a steering committee member at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy.

In 1993, he was a visiting professor in interaction design at Royal College of Art in London and he was a trustee at the Design Museum in London 1992–1995. He had been an advisor to the British government on design education in 1974, and a Board member at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

Awards and honours

In 2014, Moggridge was posthumously awarded an AIGA Medal.

Moggridge was given an honorary doctorate from CCA (California College of the Arts) in San Francisco in 2012.

In FastCompany's October 2011 issue, Moggridge was profiled as a Master of Design, and named one of the 50 Most Influential Designers in America.

In 2010, he was given the Prince Philip Designers Prize.

Moggridge was given a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 at the National Design Awards, in a ceremony at the White House, presided over by First Lady Michelle Obama.

The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) named Moggridge a Fellow in 2006.

In 1988 Moggridge was named a Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce).

Books

In October 2006, Moggridge published Designing Interactions (The MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-13474-8), a 764-page introduction to and history of interaction design comprising 40-plus interviews with designers and entrepreneurs, from Douglas Engelbart to Will Wright to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Moggridge conducted the interviews, recorded and edited the videos (included with the book on a DVD), and designed the book and the book's website. Business week named it one of the Best Innovation and Design Books in 2006, and Don Norman wrote, "This will be the book—the book that summarizes how the technology of interaction came into being and prescribes how it will advance in the future."

He followed this in October 2010 with Designing Media (The MIT Press, ISBN 0262014858), another compilation of more than 35 interviews with experts in various media, new and old, including Mark Zuckerberg, Chad Hurley, Tim Westergren, Ira Glass, Craig Newmark, Hans Rosling, and DJ Spooky. Again, Moggridge conducted the interviews, wrote the text, and designed the book and the book's website.

Film and video

Moggridge is a central figure in Gary Hustwit's 2009 documentary on design, Objectified.

In 2009, Moggridge directed and produced a short film, Professor Poubelle on YouTube, about Doug Wilde, a Stanford Professor Emeritus who began picking up trash on his daily bike rides up a steep mountain highway.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-15 00:11:50

387) Martin Cooper

Martin Cooper, byname Marty Cooper, (born December 26, 1928, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American engineer who led the team that in 1972–73 built the first mobile cell phone and made the first cell-phone call. He is widely regarded as the father of the cellular phone.

Cooper graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering (1950). He joined the U.S. Navy and served during the Korean War. After the war, he joined the Teletype Corporation, and in 1954 he began working at Motorola. He earned a master’s in electrical engineering from IIT (1957). At Motorola, Cooper worked on many projects involving wireless communications, such as the first radio-controlled traffic-light system, which he patented in 1960, and the first handheld police radios, which were introduced in 1967. He later served as a vice president and director of research and development (1978–83) for the company.

Mobile telephones had been introduced by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1946. However, in a given area only 11 or 12 channels were available, so users often had to wait to use the system. Another weakness of the first mobile phones was that the large amount of power needed to run them could be supplied only by car batteries. Thus, there were no truly portable phones but only car phones.

In 1947 AT&T Bell Laboratories engineers W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring showed that more mobile users could be added by breaking down a large area into many smaller cells, but that required more frequency coverage than was then available. However, in 1968 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked AT&T for a plan for employing a little-used portion of the UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television band. AT&T proposed a cellular architecture to expand its car-phone service.

Motorola did not want AT&T to have a monopoly on cell phones and feared the end of its mobile business. Cooper was placed in charge of the urgent project to develop a cell phone. He thought that the cell phone should not be chained to the car but should be portable. The result, the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone, was 23 cm (9 inches) tall and weighed 1.1 kg (2.5 pounds). It allowed 35 minutes of talk before its battery ran down.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper introduced the DynaTAC phone at a press conference in New York City. To make sure that it worked before the press conference, he placed the first public cell-phone call, to engineer Joel Engel, head of AT&T’s rival project, and gloated that he was calling from a portable cellular phone.

In 1983, after years of further development, Motorola introduced the first portable cell phone for consumers, the DynaTAC 8000x. Despite its price of $3,995, the phone was a success. That same year, Cooper left Motorola and founded Cellular Business Systems, Inc. (CBSI), which became the leading company in billing cellular phone services. In 1986 he and his partners sold CBSI to Cincinnati Bell for $23 million, and he and his wife, Arlene Harris, founded Dyna, LLC. Dyna served as a central organization from which they launched other companies, such as ArrayComm (1996), which developed software for wireless systems, and GreatCall (2006), which provided wireless service for the Jitterbug, a cell phone with simple features meant for the elderly. Cooper received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-17 01:29:56

388) James Lind

James Lind, (born 1716, Edinburgh—died July 13, 1794, Gosport, Hampshire, Eng.), physician, “founder of naval hygiene in England,” whose recommendation that fresh citrus fruit and lemon juice be included in the diet of seamen eventually resulted in the eradication of scurvy from the British Navy.

A British naval surgeon (1739–48) and a physician at the Haslar Hospital for men of the Royal Navy, Gosport (1758–94), Lind observed thousands of cases of scurvy, typhus, and dysentery and the conditions on board ship that caused them. In 1754, when he published 'A Treatise on Scurvy', more British sailors were dying from scurvy during wartime than were killed in combat. In an early example of a clinical trial, Lind compared the effects of citrus fruits on patients with scurvy against five alternative remedies, showing that the fruit was noticeably better than vinegar, cider, seawater, and other remedies.

Nearly two centuries earlier the Dutch had discovered the benefits of citrus fruits and juices to sailors on long voyages. In his Treatise and in 'On the Most Effectual Means of Preserving the Health of Seamen' (1757), Lind recommended this dietary practice. When it was finally adopted by the Royal Navy in 1795, scurvy disappeared from the ranks “as if by magic.” Lind recommended shipboard delousing procedures, suggested the use of hospital ships for sick sailors in tropical ports, and arranged (1761) for the shipboard distillation of seawater for drinking. He also wrote 'An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates' (1768).

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-19 00:38:59

389) Richard Gurley Drew

Richard Gurley Drew (June 22, 1899 – December 14, 1980) was an American inventor who worked for Johnson and Johnson, Permacel Co., and 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he invented masking tape and cellophane tape.

Biography

When Drew joined 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1921, it was a modest manufacturer of sandpaper. While testing their new Wetordry sandpaper at auto shops, Drew was intrigued to learn that the two-tone auto paintjobs so popular in the Roaring Twenties were difficult to manage at the border between the two colors. In response, after two years of work in 3M's labs, Drew invented the first masking tape (1925), a two-inch-wide tan paper strip backed with a light, pressure-sensitive adhesive.

The first tape had adhesive along its edges but not in the middle. In its first trial run, it fell off the car and the frustrated auto painter growled at Drew, "take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!" (By "Scotch," he meant "cheap".) The nickname stuck, both to Drew's improved masking tape, and to his 1930 invention, Scotch Brand cellulose tape.

In 1930 he came up with the world's first transparent cellophane adhesive tape (called sellotape in the UK and Scotch tape in the United States). During the Great Depression, people began using Scotch tape to repair items rather than replace them. This was the beginning of 3M’s diversification into all manner of marketplaces and helped them to flourish in spite of the Great Depression.

Drew died in 1980 in Santa Barbara, California.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-21 01:39:57

390) Willem Johan Kolff

Willem Johan Kolff (February 14, 1911 – February 11, 2009) was a pioneer of hemodialysis as well as in the field of artificial organs. Willem is a member of the Kolff family, an old Dutch patrician family. He made his major discoveries in the field of dialysis for kidney failure during the Second World War. He emigrated in 1950 to the United States, where he obtained US citizenship in 1955, and received a number of awards and widespread recognition for his work.

Netherlands

Born in Leiden, Netherlands, Kolff was the eldest of a family of 5 boys. Kolff studied medicine in his hometown at Leiden University, and continued as a resident in internal medicine at Groningen University. One of his first patients was a 22-year-old man who was slowly dying of renal failure. This prompted Kolff to perform research on artificial renal function replacement. Also during his residency, Kolff organized the first blood bank in Europe (in 1940). Kolff's first prototype dialyzer was developed in 1943, built from orange juice cans, used auto parts, and sausage casings. Over a two year span, Kolff had attempted to treat 15 people with his machine, but all had died. In 1945, Kolff successfully treated his first patient, a 67 year old woman, from renal failure using his hemodialysis machine.

During World War II, he was in Kampen, where he was active in the resistance against the German occupation. Simultaneously, Kolff developed the first functioning artificial kidney. He treated his first patient in 1943, and in 1945 he was able to save a patient's life with hemodialysis treatment. In 1946 he obtained a PhD degree summa cum laude at University of Groningen on the subject. It marks the start of a treatment that has saved the lives of millions of acute or chronic renal failure patients ever since.

United States

When the war ended, Kolff donated his artificial kidneys to other institutions to spread familiarity with the technology. In Europe, Kolff sent machines to London, Amsterdam, and Poland. Another machine sent to Dr. Isidore Snapper at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City was used to perform the first human dialysis in the United States on January 26, 1948 under the supervision of Drs. Alfred P. Fishman and Irving Kroop.

In 1950, Kolff left the Netherlands to seek opportunities in the US. At the Cleveland Clinic, he was involved in the development of heart-lung machines to maintain heart and pulmonary function during cardiac surgery. He also improved on his dialysis machine. At Brigham and Women's Hospital, with funding from New York real estate developer David Rose he developed the first production artificial kidney, the Kolff Brigham Artificial Kidney, manufactured by the Edward A. Olson Co. in Boston Massachusetts, and later the Travenol Twin-Coil Artificial Kidney.

He became head of the University of Utah's Division of Artificial Organs and Institute for Biomedical Engineering in 1967, where he was involved in the development of the artificial heart, the first of which was implanted in 1982 in patient Barney Clark, who survived for four months, with the heart still functioning at the time of Clark's death.

In 1976 Kolff became a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Impact

Kolff is considered to be the Father of Artificial Organs, and is regarded as one of the most important physicians of the 20th century. He obtained more than 12 honorary doctorates at universities all over the world, and more than 120 international awards, among them the Harvey Prize in 1972, AMA Scientific Achievement Award in 1982, the Japan Prize in 1986, the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 2002, and the Russ Prize in 2003. In 1990 'Life Magazine' included him in its list of the 100 Most Important Persons of the 20th Century. He was a co-nominee with William H. Dobelle for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003. Robert Jarvik, who worked in Kolff's laboratory at the University of Utah beginning in 1971, credited Kolff with inspiring him to develop the first permanent artificial heart.

Kolff died three days short of his 98th birthday on February 11, 2009, in a care center in Philadelphia. On February 29, 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Willem Johan Kolff and his wife as Righteous Among the Nations, for their part in concealing a Jewish medical colleague and his son.

Jai Ganesh · 2018-09-22 00:24:21

391) Max von Laue

Max von Laue, in full Max Theodor Felix von Laue, (born Oct. 9, 1879, Pfaffendorf, near Koblenz, Ger.—died April 23, 1960, Berlin, W.Ger.), German recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X rays in crystals. This enabled scientists to study the structure of crystals and hence marked the origin of solid-state physics, an important field in the development of modern electronics.

Laue became professor of physics at the University of Zürich in 1912. Laue was the first to suggest the use of a crystal to act as a grating for the diffraction of X rays, showing that if a beam of X rays passed through a crystal, diffraction would take place and a pattern would be formed on a photographic plate placed at a right angle to the direction of the rays. The pattern would mark out the symmetrical arrangements of the atoms in the crystal. This was verified experimentally in 1912 by two of Laue’s students working under his direction. This success demonstrated that X rays are electromagnetic radiations similar to light and also provided experimental proof that the atomic structure of crystals is a regularly repeating arrangement.

Laue championed Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, did research on the quantum theory, the Compton effect (change of wavelength in light under certain conditions), and the disintegration of atoms. He became director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Berlin in 1919 and director of the Max Planck Institute for Research in Physical Chemistry, Berlin, in 1951.

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