crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-08 00:43:12

642) Gregory Pincus

Gregory Pincus, in full Gregory Goodwin Pincus, (born April 9, 1903, Woodbine, New Jersey, U.S.—died August 22, 1967, Boston, Massachusetts), American endocrinologist whose work on the antifertility properties of steroids led to the development of the first effective birth-control pill.

Pincus was educated at Cornell University and Harvard University (M.S., Sc.D., 1927) and also studied in England and Germany. He was a faculty member at Harvard (1931–38), Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (1938–45), Tufts Medical School in Medford, Massachusetts (1946–50), and Boston University (1950–67).

In 1944 Pincus and Hudson Hoagland founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, which became an important centre for the study of steroid hormones and mammalian reproduction. Margaret Sanger encouraged his work, and in 1951 Pincus and his collaborators began to work with synthesized hormones and the prevention of pregnancy. They found that inhibition of ovulation was an effective means of preventing pregnancy in laboratory animals and moved to perfect an oral contraceptive for women.

Pincus’s publications include ‘The Eggs of Mammals’ (1936) and ‘The Control of Fertility’ (1965). He also edited a number of monographs on aspects of hormones.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-10 01:05:13

643) George Constantinescu

George Constantinescu, (first name's diminutive is Gogu, last name also Constantinesco; 4 October 1881 – 11 December 1965) was a Romanian scientist, engineer and inventor. During his career, he registered over 130 inventions. He is the creator of the ‘theory of sonics’, a new branch of continuum mechanics, in which he described the transmission of mechanical energy through vibrations.

Born in Craiova in "the Doctor's House" near the Mihai Bravu Gardens, he was influenced by his father George, born in 1844 (a professor of mathematics and engineering science, specialized in mathematics at the Sorbonne University). Gogu Constantinescu settled in the United Kingdom in 1912. He was an honorary member of the Romanian Academy.

Family

He married Alexandra (Sandra) Cocorescu in Richmond, London, in December 1914. The couple moved to Wembley and, after their son Ian was born, they moved to Weybridge. The marriage broke down in the 1920s and ended in divorce. He then married Eva Litton and the couple moved to Oxen House, beside Lake Coniston. Eva had two children, Richard and Michael, by a previous marriage.

Inventions and designs

Synchronization gear

His hydraulic machine gun synchronization gear allowed airplane-mounted guns to shoot between the spinning blades of the propeller. The Constantinesco synchronization gear (or "CC" gear) was first used operationally on the D.H.4s of No. 55 squadron R.F.C. from March 1917, during World War I, and rapidly became standard equipment, replacing a variety of mechanical gears. It continued to be used by the Royal Air Force until World War II – the Gloster Gladiator being the last British fighter to be equipped with "CC" gear.

Sonics

In 1918, he published the book ‘A treatise on transmission of power by vibrations’ in which he described his Theory of sonics. The theory is applicable to various systems of power transmission but has mostly been applied to hydraulic systems. Sonics differs from hydrostatics, being based on waves, rather than pressure, in the liquid. Constantinescu argued that, contrary to popular belief, liquids are compressible. Transmission of power by waves in a liquid (e.g. water or oil) required a generator to produce the waves and a motor to use the waves to do work, either by percussion (as in rock drills) or by conversion to rotary motion.
Internal combustion engines

He had several patents for improvements to carburetors, for example US1206512. He also devised a hydraulic system (patent GB133719) for operating both the valves and the fuel injectors for diesel engines.

Torque converter

He invented a mechanical torque converter actuated by a pendulum. This was applied to the Constantinesco, a French-manufactured car. It was also tried on rail vehicles. A 250 hp petrol engined locomotive with a Constantinescu torque converter was exhibited at the 1924 Wembley Exhibition. The system was not adopted on British railways but it was applied to some railcars on the Romanian State Railways.

Other

Other inventions included a "railway motor wagon". The latter ran on normal flanged steel wheels but the drive used a road vehicle powertrain with rubber tyres pressed against the rails. This is similar to the system used on many modern road-rail vehicles. He also designed the Constanţa Mosque (a project completed by the architect Victor Ştefănescu).

Recent developments

Research on a ‘sonic asynchronous motor for vehicle applications’ (based on Constantinescu's work) has been done at the Transilvania University of Brașov. The date of the paper is believed to be 5 October 2010.

Death

He died at Oxen House, beside Coniston Water on 11/12 December 1965, and is buried in the churchyard at Lowick, Cumbria.

Recognition

The Dimitrie Leonida Technical Museum in Bucharest has exhibits relating to George Constantinescu.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-12 00:34:28

644) Sir Henry Cole

Sir Henry Cole (15 July 1808 – 18 April 1882) was a British civil servant and inventor who facilitated many innovations in commerce and education in 19th century in the United Kingdom. Cole is credited with devising the concept of sending greetings cards at Christmas time, introducing the world's first commercial Christmas card in 1843.

Biography

The world's first commercially produced Christmas card, made by Henry Cole 1843.

Henry Cole was born in Bath the son of Captain Henry Robert Cole, then of the 1st Dragoon Guards, and his wife Lætitia Dormer. He was sent in 1817 to Christ's Hospital, and upon leaving school in 1823 became clerk to Francis Palgrave, and then a sub-commissioner under the Record Commission. Cole was employed in transcribing records, but found time to study water-colour painting under David Cox, and exhibited sketches at the Royal Academy. He lived with his father in a house belonging to the novelist Thomas Love Peacock, who retained two rooms in it, and became a friend of young Cole. Cole drew for him, helped him in writing critiques of musical performances, and was introduced by him to John Stuart Mill, Charles Buller, and George Grote. The friends used to meet at Grote's house in Threadneedle Street for discussions twice a week. A new Record Commission was issued in 1831, and in 1833 Cole was appointed a sub-commissioner. The secretary, Charles Purton Cooper, quarrelled with the commission, and with Cole, who applied to Charles Buller for protection. A committee of the House of Commons was appointed upon Buller's motion in 1836, which reported against the existing system, and the commission lapsed on the death of William IV on 20 June 1837. Cole wrote many articles in support of Buller. He was appointed by Lord Langdale, who, as Master of the Rolls, administered the affairs of the commission, to take charge of the records of the exchequer of pleas.

The record office was constituted in 1838 under the Public Record Office Act 1838, and Cole became one of the four senior assistant-keepers. He ranged a large mass of records in the Carlton House Riding School, where he was placed for the purpose 2 November 1841. His reports upon the unsuitability of this place contributed to bring about the erection of the building in Fetter Lane (begun in 1851). Cole's duties at the record office did not absorb his whole energy. In 1838, with the leave of his superiors, he became secretary to a committee for promoting postal reform. He edited their organ, the Post Circular, suggested by himself, of which the first number appeared 14 March 1838. He got up petitions and meetings with such energy that Cobden offered to him in 1839 the secretaryship of the Anti-Cornlaw League.
Parliament granted power to carry out the new postal scheme in August 1839, and the treasury offered premiums for the best proposals as to stamps. Cole gained one of the premiums; he attended the treasury to discuss details, and was employed there till the beginning of 1842 in working out the scheme.

From 1837 to 1840, he worked as an assistant to Rowland Hill and played a key role in the introduction of the Penny Post. He is sometimes credited with the design of the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black.

In 1843, Cole introduced the world's first commercial Christmas card, commissioning artist John Callcott Horsley to make the artwork.

Felix Summerly pseudonym

Cole was personally interested in industrial design, and under the pseudonym Felix Summerly designed a number of items which went into production, including a prize-winning teapot manufactured by Minton. As Felix Summerly, he also wrote a series of children's books, including 'The home treasury' (1843-1855); 'A hand-book for the architecture, sculpture, tombs, and decorations of Westminster Abbey' (1859); 'Beauty and the beast: an entirely new edition' (1843); 'An Alphabet of Quadrupeds' (1844); and 'The pleasant history of Reynard the Fox, told by the pictures by Albert van Everdingen' (1843).

Cole and the exhibitions

Through his membership of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, Cole lobbied government for support for his campaign to improve standards in industrial design. The backing of Prince Albert was secured, and in 1847 a royal charter was granted to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Under the patronage of Prince Albert, Cole organised a successful Exhibition of Art Manufactures in 1847, with enlarged exhibitions following in 1848 and 1849.

Cole visited the 1849 11th Quinquennial Paris Exhibition and noticed the lack of an exhibition open to international participants. He saw that the RSA's planned exhibitions for 1850 and 1851 could be adapted into a larger international exhibition, and he secured the backing of Queen Victoria to establish in 1850 the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to manage the new exhibition, under the Presidency of Prince Albert.

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851, and was an enormous popular and financial success, partially due to the astute management of Henry Cole.

Museums

As one of the Commissioners, Cole was instrumental in the decision that the £186,000 surplus from the Great Exhibition would be used for improving science and art education in the United Kingdom. Land was purchased in the South Kensington area and developed as the centre for a number of educational and cultural institutions, known half-jokingly as "Albertopolis". Henry Cole was appointed the first General Superintendent of the Department of Practical Art, set up by the government to improve standards of art and design education in Britain with reference to their applicability to industry. In this capacity he was instrumental in the development of the Victoria and Albert Museum which had begun as the Museum of Ornamental Art in Marlborough House. Cole oversaw its move to its current site, and became first director of what was called South Kensington Museum from 1857 to 1873. In 1974 a part of the museum that was once known as the Huxley Building was renamed the Henry Cole Building; today it forms the Henry Cole Wing of the V&A.

Honours and legacy

Cole was instrumental in the development of the National Art Training School (renamed the Royal College of Art in 1896) and played a part in the establishment of many other South Kensington institutions, such as the Royal College of Music and Imperial College London. In fact, the Imperial College Mathematics Department was formerly based in the Henry Cole Wing on Exhibition Road, before the premises were donated to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Cole was awarded the CB for his work on the Great Exhibition and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1875. Often referred to in the press as "Old King" Cole, he was known to have the closest personal backing of the Queen and especially of the Prince Consort, who when he needed a facilitator for one of his pet projects, was heard to remark: "We must have steam, get Cole".

An English heritage blue plaque commemorates where Cole lived and worked at 33 Thurloe Square, South Kensington, London, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 2001, one of Cole's first Christmas cards, which was sent to his grandmother in 1843, sold at auction for £22,500.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-14 00:51:25

645) Charles Chamberland

Charles Chamberland (12 March 1851 – 2 May 1908) was a French microbiologist from Chilly-le-Vignoble in the department of Jura who worked with Louis Pasteur.

In 1884 he developed a type of filtration known today as the Chamberland filter or Chamberland-Pasteur filter, a device that made use of an unglazed porcelain bar. The filter had pores that were smaller than bacteria, thus making it possible to pass a solution containing bacteria through the filter, and having the bacteria completely removed from the solution. Chamberland was also credited for starting a research project that led to the invention of the autoclave device in 1879.

He worked with Pasteur and came up, by chance, with a vaccine for chicken cholera. He went away on holiday, forgetting to inject the disease into some chickens as he had been told. When he came back he saw the jar of bacteria sitting on the side and thought he would inject it into the chickens anyway. To his amazement they did not die. He reported this to Pasteur, who told him to inject a fresh form into the chickens. He went on to inject the fresh form into the same chickens, and they didn't die. He had found a vaccine. They had also discovered that a weakened form of a disease could act as a vaccine.

(A Chamberland filter, also known as a Pasteur–Chamberland filter, is a porcelain water filter invented by Charles Chamberland in 1884. It was developed after Henry Doulton's ceramic water filter of 1827. It is similar to the Berkefeld filter in principle.)

(An autoclave is a pressure chamber used to carry out industrial and scientific processes requiring elevated temperature and pressure in relation to ambient. Autoclaves are used in medical applications to perform sterilization and in the chemical industry to cure coatings and vulcanize rubber and for hydrothermal synthesis. Industrial autoclaves are used in industrial applications, especially in the manufacturing of composites.

Many autoclaves are used to sterilize equipment and supplies by subjecting them to pressurized saturated steam at 121 °C (250 °F) for around 15–20 minutes depending on the size of the load and the contents The autoclave was invented by Charles Chamberland in 1884, although a precursor known as the steam digester was created by Denis Papin in 1679. The name comes from Greek auto-, ultimately meaning self, and Latin clavis meaning key, thus a self-locking device.)

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-16 00:58:56

646) Sir Julian Huxley

Sir Julian Huxley, in full Sir Julian Sorell Huxley, (born June 22, 1887, London—died Feb. 14, 1975, London), English biologist, philosopher, educator, and author who greatly influenced the modern development of embryology, systematics, and studies of behaviour and evolution.

Julian, a grandson of the prominent biologist T.H. Huxley, a brother of novelist Aldous Huxley, and the oldest son of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. His scientific research included important work on hormones, developmental processes, ornithology, and ethology. He developed and headed the biology department at the newly formed Rice University in Houston, Texas, before serving in the British Army Intelligence Corps between 1916 and the end of World War I. He later became professor of zoology at King’s College, London University; served for seven years as secretary to the Zoological Society of London, transforming the zoo at Regent’s Park and being actively involved in the development of that at Whipsnade in Bedfordshire; and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is perhaps best known among biologists for coining the term “evolutionary synthesis” to refer to the unification of taxonomy, genetics, and Darwinian theory in the 1940s. He was the first director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1946–48. He was knighted in 1958. In 1961 he cofounded the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. A biography “The Huxleys” by Ronald W. Clark was published in 1968.

In 1919 Huxley married Marie Juliette Baillot, daughter of a Swiss lawyer, by whom he had two sons: Anthony Julian Huxley, who conducted valuable operational research on aircraft, became an authority on exotic garden plants, and produced the standard encyclopaedia on mountains, and Francis Huxley, who became a lecturer in social anthropology at Oxford.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-18 00:57:29

647) Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin, in full Rosalind Elsie Franklin, (born July 25, 1920, London, England—died April 16, 1958, London), British scientist best known for her contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a constituent of chromosomes that serves to encode genetic information. Franklin also contributed new insight on the structure of viruses, helping to lay the foundation for the field of structural virology.

Franklin attended St. Paul’s Girls’ School before studying physical chemistry at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. After graduating in 1941, she received a fellowship to conduct research in physical chemistry at Cambridge. But the advance of World War II changed her course of action: not only did she serve as a London air raid warden, but in 1942 she gave up her fellowship in order to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, where she investigated the physical chemistry of carbon and coal for the war effort. Nevertheless, she was able to use this research for her doctoral thesis, and in 1945 she received a doctorate from Cambridge. From 1947 to 1950 she worked with Jacques Méring at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris, studying X-ray diffraction technology. That work led to her research on the structural changes caused by the formation of graphite in heated carbons—work that proved valuable for the coking industry.

In 1951 Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College, London, as a research fellow. There she applied X-ray diffraction methods to the study of DNA. When she began her research at King’s College, very little was known about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA. However, she soon discovered the density of DNA and, more importantly, established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation. Her work to make clearer X-ray patterns of DNA molecules laid the foundation for James Watson and Francis Crick to suggest in 1953 that the structure of DNA is a double-helix polymer, a spiral consisting of two DNA strands wound around each other.

From 1953 to 1958 Franklin worked in the Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College, London. While there she completed her work on coals and on DNA and began a project on the molecular structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix, rather than the double helix found in the DNA of bacterial viruses and higher organisms. Franklin’s involvement in cutting-edge DNA research was halted by her untimely death from cancer in 1958.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-20 00:56:04

648) Pehr Victor Edman

Pehr Victor Edman (April 14, 1916 — March 19, 1977) was a Swedish biochemist. He developed a method for sequencing proteins; the Edman degradation.

Early life

Edman was born in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1935 he started studying medicine at Karolinska Institutet, where he became interested in basic research and received a bachelor in medicine in 1938. His research was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, where he was drafted to serve in the Swedish army. He returned to the Karolinska Institutet where he earned his doctoral degree under advice from Professor Erik Jorpes in 1946.

Developing the Edman Degradation

At the time Edman started working on Angiotensin, it was just being recognized that proteins are distinct entities with a defined molecular mass, electric charge and structure. This inspired Edman to develop a method, that could be used to determine the sequence of amino acids in the protein. In 1947 he was awarded a travel stipend to go to Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. When he returned to Sweden in 1950 to be an Assistant Professor at the University of Lund, he published his first paper using the method later known as Edman degradation, to determine the sequence of a protein. To his death he continued to work to improve the method to be able to determine longer stretches with smaller amounts of sample.

Late career

In 1957 he moved to Australia to be the director of St. Vincent's School of Medical Research. In 1967 he successfully developed an automated protein sequencer, called the sequenator, with his assistant Geoffrey Begg.

In 1972 he moved to the Max-Planck-Institut of Biochemistry, Martinsried near Munich. He worked with his second wife, Agnes Henschen, and she used Edman's method to sequence fibrinogen.

In 1977 Edman died of a brain tumor after a short coma.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-22 00:15:58

649) Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky

Mikhail Osipovich Dolivo-Dobrovolsky (2 January [O.S. 21 December 1861] 1862 – 15 November [O.S. 3 November] 1919) was a Polish-Russian engineer, electrician, and inventor.

As one of the founders (the others were Nikola Tesla, Galileo Ferraris and Jonas Wenström) of polyphase electrical systems, he developed the three-phase electrical generator and a three-phase electrical motor (1888) and studied star and delta connections. The triumph of the three-phase system was displayed in Europe at the International Electro-Technical Exhibition of 1891, where Dolivo-Dobrovolsky used this system to transmit electric power at the distance of 176 km with 75% efficiency. In 1891 he also created a three-phase transformer and short-circuited (squirrel-cage) induction motor. He designed the world's first three-phase hydroelectric power plant in 1891.

Life

Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrowolsky was born as the son of the Russian civil servant and landowner of Polish descent Josif Florovich Dolivo-Dobrowolski and Olga Mikhailovna Jewreinova from an old Russian noble family in Gatchina near Saint Petersburg. He spent his school days in Odessa, where his father was transferred in 1872. After secondary school he went to the Riga Polytechnic at the age of 16. At the end of the 1870s, after the murder of Tsar Alexander II, a wave of repression broke out, with which all progressively oriented students were expelled from their university, which was equivalent to a study ban in all of Russia. Among them was Dolivo-Dobrowolsky. After his forced exmatriculation in Riga in 1881, he left his homeland in 1883 and went to Germany.

He studied electrical engineering at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt (TH Darmstadt) in Germany from 1883 to 1884. From 1885 to 1887, he became one of Eramus Kittler's first assistants. There he published several smaller publications and was in close contact with Carl Hering, a mechanical engineer from the USA and Kittler's first assistant.

After the inventions, Dolivo-Dobrowolsky continued his research in the field of heavy current technology, inventing the phase meter in 1892 and the ferrodynamic wattmeter in 1909. He published papers and gave numerous lectures. From 1903 to 1907 he devoted himself to scientific work in Lausanne, where he acquired Swiss citizenship with his entire family in 1906.

After his return to Berlin, he continued his work at AEG and became Technical Director of the apparatus factory in 1909. On 24 October 1911, he received an honorary doctorate from the TH Darmstadt, whose Dolivo building bears his name today. During his life he obtained over 60 patents.

In 1919, Dolivo-Dobrowolski died of a severe heart condition at the academic hospital in Heidelberg. He was buried at the forest cemetery of Darmstadt, where his grave (grave site: R 6a 7) - located very close to the memorial of his teacher Erasmus Kittler - can still be visited today. In the city centre of Darmstadt in 1969 a street was named after Dr.-Ing. E. h. Michael Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, the Dolivostraße.

Invention of the three-phase system

In 1887, AEG Director General Emil Rathenau offered him a position, whereupon Dolivo-Dobrowolsky remained associated with the company until the end of his life. At the AEG, Dolivo-Dobrowolsky initially made an effort to further perfect direct current technology. After all, AEG's origins lay in an Edison subsidiary, and Edison, like Siemens, relied entirely on direct current. At that time, alternating current gradually attracted the attention of technicians, and engineers from Ganz Works in Budapest had designed the first transformer in today's sense in 1885. However, AC technology required further equipment, especially reliable and self-starting motors; AC theory was also still underdeveloped. Before Dolivo-Dobrowolsky, the Italian Galileo Ferraris drew attention to alternating current. Ferraris experimented with two alternating currents shifted by 90°, with which he operated specially designed motors. However, he believed that the maximum efficiency was 50 %. Independently of this, in 1887 Nikola Tesla designed a synchronous motor for two-phase alternating current, which was to introduce the two-phase alternating current network in America. Nikola Tesla already dealt with the subject in 1882 and developed a system in a very short time, which was protected by extensive patents. It comprised both motors and generators with multi-phase, preferably two-phase alternating currents.

Regardless of these events, a forward-looking solution was found at AEG in 1888. Dolivo-Dobrowolsky worked with chained three-phase alternating current and introduced the term three-phase current. The associated asynchronous motor invented by him was the first functional solution. However, the asynchronous motor with squirrel-cage rotor had the problem of delivering only low torque at low speeds, such as when starting up. The solution was the slip ring motor, a variation of the asynchronous motor in which the short circuit of the rotor is opened and guided to the outside via sliprings. By connecting various external resistors, Dolivo-Dobrowolsky was able to introduce an asynchronous motor with high starting torque in 1891.

At the beginning of 1889, the first AEG three-phase motors were in operation, and in the following year they already produced 2 to 3 horsepower. Dolivo-Dobrowolsky paid attention to well distributed windings, a low dispersion of the lines of force and as uniform a force field as possible and achieved a satisfactory result. In 1891, he also developed the first Delta-wye transformer for this purpose.

First remote transmission of electrical energy

At AEG and the Swiss cooperation partner Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon (MFO), all components for a three-phase network were available, but until now they had only been in trial operation. At this time, Oskar von Miller made the extremely daring proposal to present the three-phase current transmission system Lauffen-Frankfurt at the International Electrotechnical Exhibition planned for 1891 in Frankfurt at the MFO, where Dolivo-Dobrowolsky and his chief electrician partner Charles E. L. Brown realized the project: A 300 HP three-phase AC generator of the MFO was to be driven by the water turbine of the cement plant in Lauffen am Neckar, generating a voltage of about 50 V and 40 Hz, transforming it up to 15 kV (later 25 kV) and then transmitting it via 175 km of overhead line to Frankfurt and transforming it down again to supply a 100 HP asynchronous motor and several small three-phase motors as well as about 1000 incandescent lamps. The power output of the motors, which had previously been in test operation, was still only 2 to 3 hp. Nevertheless, the plant was put into operation on the evening of 24 August 1891, and a test committee determined that 75 % of the energy generated in Lauffen arrived in Frankfurt. This proved that, on the one hand, alternating current was profitable for a large-scale public electricity supply and, on the other hand, that the three-phase components were now of the same quality as those of direct current technology. The image-boosting effect of the demonstration at the World Expo finally led to the breakthrough of three-phase AC technology. At Siemens and Edison, however, AC technology only slowly gained acceptance, which enabled AEG to become a global company.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-24 00:56:27

650) Charles Fabry

Maurice Paul Auguste Charles Fabry (11 June 1867 – 11 December 1945) was a French physicist.

Life

Fabry graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and received his doctorate from the University of Paris in 1892, for his work on interference fringes, which established him as an authority in the field of optics and spectroscopy. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Marseille, where he spent 16 years.

Career

In optics, he discovered an explanation for the phenomenon of interference fringes. Together with his colleague Alfred Pérot he invented the Fabry–Pérot interferometer in 1899. He and Henri Buisson discovered the ozone layer in 1913.

In 1921, Fabry was appointed Professor of General Physics at the Sorbonne and the first director of the new Institute of Optics. In 1926 he also became professor at the École Polytechnique. He was the first general director of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée and director of "grande école" École supérieure d'optique (SupOptique). In 1929, he received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society.

Fabry was the President of the Société astronomique de France from 1931-1933.

During his career Fabry published 197 scientific papers, 14 books, and over 100 popular articles. For his important scientific achievements he received the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society of London in 1918. In the United States his work was recognized by the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences (1919) and the Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute (1921). In 1927 he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.

(In optics, a Fabry–Pérot interferometer (FPI) or etalon is an optical cavity made from two parallel reflecting surfaces (i.e.: thin mirrors). Optical waves can pass through the optical cavity only when they are in resonance with it. It is named after Charles Fabry and Alfred Perot, who developed the instrument in 1899. Etalon is from the French étalon, meaning "measuring gauge" or "standard".

Etalons are widely used in telecommunications, lasers and spectroscopy to control and measure the wavelengths of light. Recent advances in fabrication technique allow the creation of very precise tunable Fabry–Pérot interferometers. The device is called an interferometer when the distance between the two surfaces (and with it the resonance length) can be changed, and etalon when the distance is fixed (however, the two terms are often used interchangeably)).

Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-26 00:17:26

651) Benoît Fourneyron

Benoît Fourneyron, (born Oct. 31, 1802, Saint-Étienne, Fr.—died July 31, 1867, Paris), French inventor of the water turbine.

The son of a mathematician, he graduated in the first class of the new Saint-Étienne engineering school in 1816. While working in the ironworks at Le Creusot, he studied a proposal advanced by his former professor, Claude Burdin, for a new type of waterwheel that Burdin named a “turbine.” Though neither the Academy of Sciences nor the Society for the Encouragement of Industry accepted Burdin’s paper, Fourneyron recognized its importance and undertook its realization. He built in 1827 a small, six-horsepower unit in which water was directed outward from a central source onto blades or vanes set at angles in a rotor.

By 1837 Fourneyron had produced a turbine capable of 2,300 revolutions per minute, 80 percent efficiency, and 60 horsepower, with a wheel a foot in diameter and weighing only 40 pounds (18 kilograms). Besides its more obvious advantages over the waterwheel, Fourneyron’s turbine could be installed as a horizontal wheel with a vertical shaft. It achieved immediate international success, powering industry in continental Europe and in the United States, notably the New England textile industry. But the real significance of the invention did not emerge until 1895, when Fourneyron turbines were installed on the American side of Niagara Falls to turn generators for electric-power production.

Fourneyron perceived the potential of steam-driven turbines, but his attempts to make a satisfactory steam turbine were thwarted by the inadequacy of available materials and workmanship.

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Jai Ganesh · 2020-02-28 00:23:27

652) Thomas J. Fogarty

Dr. Thomas J. Fogarty (born February 25, 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American surgeon and medical device inventor. He is best known for the invention of the embolectomy catheter (or balloon catheter), which revolutionised the treatment of blood clots (embolus).

Early life and education

Fogarty was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 25, 1934. His father worked as a railroad engineer, but died when Fogarty was eight years old.

Fogarty cites his father's absence as being influential in his own creative nature as an inventor. He fixed things that needed to be fixed for his mother, and he worked with soapbox derby cars and model airplanes. "I just had a natural inclination and inquisitive nature about building things. I looked at things and just naturally thought, 'Okay, how can I make this better? His business side was evident in childhood as well. The model airplanes that he built were sold to neighborhood kids. When he became frustrated with motor scooter gears, he built and sold a centrifugal clutch.

Fogarty was not a good student, and his original career goal was to be a boxer. “I wasn’t a very good kid. They sent me to a camp to keep me out of trouble. One of the routine activities was boxing."

To help his family get by in the late 1940s, Fogarty started working at Good Samaritan Hospital, beginning with cleaning medical equipment while he was in the eighth grade at school. He continued working during his high school summer vacations and was soon promoted to scrub technician, a person who handed medical instruments to surgeons – he witnessed his first surgery at a young age. It was during this time that he first met Dr. Jack Cranley, who would have a major influence on Fogarty's future career.

During his last year of high school, Fogarty discovered that he wanted to be a doctor. At the age of 17, he quit his boxing career after he broke his nose in a match that ended in a draw. A family priest gave him a recommendation, and because of his awful grades, he was admitted to Cincinnati's Xavier University on probation. Jack Cranley, one of the most prominent vascular surgeons in the United States became his mentor. Speaking of Cranley, Fogarty later stated: “I had a mentor who encouraged me and helped to persuade me to go to college… He had 10 kids and I became the 11th. He always told me, ‘You are smarter than you think.’”

Fogarty graduated from Xavier University with a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1956 and went on to attend the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1960. From 1960 to 1961, he interned at the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland, Oregon, and he completed his surgical residency at the same school in 1965.

Invention of the embolectomy catheter

During Fogarty’s years at Good Samaritan Hospital, he witnessed the deaths of many patients who died from complications in blood clot surgeries in their limbs. “Fifty percent of the patients died. I thought there must be a better way.” Before Fogarty's invention, surgeons had to use forceps to remove the blood clots only after a huge part of an artery had been cut open, and the patient would be under general anesthesia for hours. Blood flow is usually interrupted in the procedure, increasing the risk of the patient losing a limb.

At home, the ideas that went through Fogarty's head concerned different ways of making the procedure better, and he especially concentrated on avoiding the risky incisions. He tinkered with a urethral catheter and a balloon in his attic. Because a catheter only required a small incision, it would be able to get to the clot without much trauma to the patient. The urethral catheter is also flexible yet strong enough to be pushed through a blood clot. As for the balloon, he basically cut off the tip of the pinky finger of a size 5 surgical latex glove and attempted to incorporate it onto the end of the catheter. The resulting balloon could be inflated with saline using a syringe, and once it expands to the size of the artery, it is then retracted, withdrawing the clot through the artery and out the incision.

The main problem in building this device was the way the balloon could be attached to the catheter. Glue that could hold vinyl, the material making up a catheter, and latex, the type of glove used, was not available. Fogarty's own take on the catheter came about because of fishing techniques he learned as a child. Precise hand-tying was needed in fishing, and with these techniques, he tied the balloon to the catheter. "I'd always tied flies and made lures so it was just a natural thing." His experimental balloon catheter, however, always seemed to burst when it was over inflated. It even broke when he dragged it through glass tubes filled with Jell-o, a model he thought simulated a clot within an artery. After some time, he figured out the type and thickness of rubber that was firm enough when inflated to extract a clot and still flexible enough to move through without breaking. The device, made before Fogarty even received his MD from University of Cincinnati in 1960, became the first minimally invasive surgical device.

Fogarty, however, came across difficulties in getting a manufacturer to produce it. From 1959 to 1961, nobody was willing to help. "Companies thought I was some stooge fooling around. I didn't have any credibility." Dr. Cranley continued to encourage him, and soon, during his fellowship training at the University of Cincinnati in 1961 and 1962, Fogarty started to make the catheter system by hand for himself and for other vascular surgeons.

At the University of Oregon, while Fogarty was completing his residency in surgery, Dr. Al Starr, head of the cardiothoracic division, used Fogarty's balloon catheters. After he was informed that no company was willing to manufacture Fogarty's device, he asked one of his acquaintances, Lowell Edwards, an electrical engineer and president of his own company, to give the device consideration in producing it. In 1969, Fogarty patented his device, and Edwards Life Sciences from Irvine, California, was assigned the patent to begin manufacturing the Fogarty embolectomy catheter.

Because of the decreased risk associated with the device, Fogarty's balloon catheter became the industry standard and remains the most widely used catheter for blood-clot removal. Before his invention the success rate for removing an embolus, or blood clot, was forty to fifty percent. The balloon catheter is now used in over three hundred thousand procedures every year all over the world, and is estimated to have saved the lives and limbs of approximately twenty million patients.

Other inventions

Numerous sequel applications of Fogarty's catheter came about. The first balloon angioplasty, for example, was performed with a Fogarty catheter in 1965, and has led to over six hundred fifty thousand such operations per year. Fogarty has also modified his catheter to less invasive biopsy techniques.

After completing his residency and becoming a cardiovascular surgeon, Fogarty continued to invent new medical devices. One of his most successful products is the Stent-Graft, which dealt with the difficult problem of abdominal aortic aneurysms (a term referring to a weakened blood vessel). The old method was to remove the bad part of a weakened blood vessel, but Fogarty's idea was to support it with an implant. He used a stent, a thin polyester tube that grabs onto the blood vessels. A catheter transports the stent to the weakened blood vessel, and once the balloon is inflated, the stent expands to the size of the blood vessel, and blood flows normally.

Fogarty's other inventions include Fogarty surgical clips and clamps, which are used by cardiac and vascular surgeons to temporarily occlude vessels during surgery. Working with Warren Hancock, he is co-inventor of the Hancock tissue heart valve – the world's first porcine valve.

Fogarty's own inventions and the many others that resulted from his original embolectomy catheter heavily influenced the way surgery was performed. Considered one of the pioneers of minimally-invasive surgery, Fogarty has said: "I had no concept that [non-invasive surgery] would reach the magnitude that it has."

As a result of the embolectomy catheter and other inventions, Dr. Fogarty has won many prizes, including the National Medal for Technology and Innovation in 2012 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) in 2015. He has published around 180 scientific articles and textbook chapters in the fields of general and cardiovascular surgery. He served as President of the Society for Vascular Surgery from 1995-1996.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Fogarty founded Fogarty Engineering, Inc. in 1980, to promote ideas for new medical devices, and has founded/co-founded and chaired the board for many business and research companies based on devices developed at the company.

In 1993, with Mark Wan and Wilfred Jaeger, he founded Three Arch Partners, a venture capital fund to invest in new technology and medical devices. Three Arch helped to create and fund more than 100 companies.

As a pioneer and supporter of innovation in medical technology, Fogarty has acquired over 160 patents for his medical work. He is associated with numerous medical technology companies and was appointed as an independent director to the Board of Pulse Biosciences in 2017. He is managing director of early-stage life science accelerator Emergent Medical Partners.

Fogarty Institute for Innovation

Fogarty left Stanford Medical School after about fourteen years as a professor and practicing cardiovascular surgeon. In September 2007, at Mountain View, California, he founded the Thomas Fogarty Institute for Innovation. It occupies forty-five hundred square feet of offices and engineering labs on the campus of El Camino Hospital. The educational, non-profit organization mentors and trains medical innovators. The idea for the institution dates back to Fogarty's early life when he received encouragement from Dr. Jack Cranley.

“We are teaching people (doctors and engineers) how to get their concepts and products into use. Very few have gone through the process of coming up with a concept and getting it funded. That does not come naturally. It comes through experience. We will teach how to address these challenges.” Physician innovators, including Fogarty, serve as the faculty of the Institute and make use of their networks and experiences in the private industry to help those with projects that are ready for commercialization.

Thomas Fogarty Winery and Vineyards

In 1969, when he began teaching surgery at the Stanford University Medical Center, Fogarty was first introduced to wine. He helped out at a Stanford colleague's small winery. Later on, he purchased land in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He established a cellar there and began making wine with grapes bought from nearby growers. With help from founding winemaker Michael Martella, he planted his first vines in 1978 and set up a commercial winery, Thomas Fogarty Winery and Vineyards, in 1981, largely in order to share a business with his family. The estate now has thirty acres under vine, which are farmed organically.

The winery is run today by Tom Fogarty, Jr and the Fogarty family with production overseen by Winegrower Nathan Kandler. It has become well known as a top producer of single-vineyard Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wines. Thomas Fogarty Winery was named by Wine and Spirits magazine as one of its top 100 wineries in 2014. Like his father, Tom Fogarty Jr was also an avid boxer in his youth, winning multiple amateur golden-glove tournaments throughout the Bay area. The younger Fogarty is famously credited for knocking down Danny Bonaduce in a celebrity boxing match in San Jose in 1997.

Awards

• Distinguished Scientific Presentations, American College of Surgeons, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1981
• Inventor of the Year, San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association, 1980
• Honorary Doctorate, Xavier University, 1987
• Lemelson-MIT Prize, 2000
• AAMI Foundation Laufman-Greatbatch Prize, 2000
• National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2001
• Medical Design Excellence Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, 2012
• National Medal of Technology and Innovation, 2012
• AdvaMed Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015

Affiliated organizations

• American Association for Thoracic Surgery
• American College of Surgeons, Fellow
• American Surgical Association
• International Society for Cardiovascular Surgery-North American Chapter
• International Society of Endovascular Specialists
• Pacific Coast Surgical Association
• Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery
• Society of Thoracic Surgeons
• Society for Vascular Surgery
• Society of Vascular Technology
• Western Thoracic Surgical Society

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Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-01 00:24:43

653) Humberto Fernández-Morán

Humberto Fernández-Morán Villalobos (February 18, 1924 – March 17, 1999) was a Venezuelan research scientist born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, renowned for inventing the diamond knife or scalpel, significantly advancing the development of electromagnetic lenses for electron microscopy based on superconducting technology, and many other scientific contributions.

Career

Fernández-Morán founded the Venezuelan Institute for Neurological and Brain Studies, the predecessor of the current Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research (IVIC). He studied medicine at the University of Munich, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1944. He contributed to the development of the electron microscope and was the first person to use the concept of cryo-ultramicrotomy. After flying over Angel Falls in his home country of Venezuela he was inspired by the concept of the smoothly reoccurring flow system inherent in a waterfall to take his diamond knife invention and combine it with an ultramicrotome to dramatically improve the ultra-thin sectioning of electron microscopy samples. The ultramictrotome advances the rotating, drum-mounted specimen sample in such small increments (utilizing the very low thermal expansion coefficient of Invar) past the stationary diamond knife that sectioning thicknesses of several Angstrom units are possible. He also helped to advance the field of electron cryomicroscopy - the use of superconductive electromagnetic lenses cooled with liquid helium in electron microscopes to achieve the highest resolution possible - among many other research topics.

Fernández-Morán was commissioned in 1957 with the supervision of the first Venezuelan research nuclear reactor, the RV-1 nuclear reactor, one of the first in Latin America.

He was appointed Minister of Science during the last year of the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and was forced to leave Venezuela when the dictatorship was overthrown in 1958. He worked with NASA for the Apollo Project and taught in many universities, such as MIT, University of Chicago and the University of Stockholm.

He donated a collection of his papers to the National Library of Medicine in 1986.

Personal life

His wife Anna was Swedish and together they had two daughters, Brigida Elena and Verónica.

The body of Dr. Humberto Fernández-Morán Villalobos was cremated and his ashes rest today in Cemetery The Square Luxburg-Carolath in his hometown, Maracaibo.

Inventions

• Diamond knife
• Ultra microtome

Awards and honors

• 1967, the John Scott Award, for his invention of the diamond scalpel.
• Knight of the Order of the Polar Star
• Claude Bernard Medal, University of Montreal
• Cambridge annual Medical Prize

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-03 00:37:18

654) John B. Fenn

John B. Fenn, (John Bennett Fenn; born June 15, 1917, New York City, New York, U.S.—died December 10, 2010, Richmond, Virginia), American scientist who, with Tanaka Koichi and Kurt Wüthrich, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002 for developing techniques to identify and analyze proteins and other large biological molecules.

Fenn received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale University in 1940. He then spent more than a decade working for various companies before joining Princeton University in 1952. In 1967 he moved to Yale, where he became professor emeritus in 1987. Fenn took a post as research professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994.

Fenn’s prizewinning research expanded the applications of mass spectrometry (MS), an analytic technique used in many fields of science since the early 20th century. MS can identify unknown compounds in minute samples of material, determine the amounts of known compounds, and help deduce molecular formulas of compounds. For decades scientists had employed MS on small and medium-sized molecules, but they also hoped to use it to identify large molecules such as proteins. After the genetic code was deciphered and gene sequences were explored, the study of proteins and how they interact inside cells took on great importance.

A requirement of MS is that samples be in the form of a gas of ions, or electrically charged molecules. Molecules such as proteins posed a problem because existing ionization techniques broke down their three-dimensional structure. Fenn developed a way to convert samples of large molecules into gaseous form without such degradation. In the late 1980s he originated electrospray ionization, a technique that involves injecting a solution of the sample into a strong electric field, which disperses it into a fine spray of charged droplets. As each droplet shrinks by evaporation, the electric field on its surface becomes intense enough to toss individual molecules from the droplet, forming free ions ready for analysis with MS. Fenn’s electrospray ionization has proved to be a highly versatile technique, and it has been used in the development of pharmaceuticals and the analyzation of foodstuffs for harmful substances.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-05 00:43:03

655) John Fowler

John Fowler, (born July 11, 1826, Melksham, Wiltshire, Eng.—died Dec. 4, 1864, Ackworth, Yorkshire), English engineer who helped to develop the steam-hauled plow. He began his career in the grain trade but later trained as an engineer. In 1850 he joined Albert Fry in Bristol to found a works to produce steam-hauled implements. Later, with Jeremiah Head, he produced a steam-hauled plow, which in winning the £500 prize (1858) offered by the Royal Society fulfilled the society’s dictum for a “steam cultivator” that would be an “economic substitute for the plough or the spade.” He died of tetanus following an injury received after being thrown by a horse.

John Fowler (11 July 1826 – 4 December 1864) was an English agricultural engineer who was a pioneer in the use of steam engines for ploughing and digging drainage channels. His inventions significantly reduced the cost of ploughing farmland, and also enabled the drainage of previously uncultivated land in many parts of the world.

Early life

Fowler was born in Melksham, Wiltshire. His father, John Fowler senior was a wealthy Quaker merchant, who had married Rebecca Hull, and together they had three daughters and five sons, of whom Fowler was the third son. When he left school Fowler followed his father’s wishes and began working for a local corn merchant, but when he came of age in 1847 he turned his back on the corn business and joined the engineering firm of Gilkes Wilson and Company of Middlesbrough. Amongst other things, the company was involved in building steam locomotives and colliery winding engines. The company built a number of locomotives for the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Change of career

Fowler might have remained with the Middlesbrough firm and made his reputation there, had it not been for a chance visit to Ireland in 1849, probably on business. This was at the time of the Irish potato famine, and Irish agriculture depended on the potato crop whilst much of the land was uncultivated due to poor drainage. This affected Fowler and he was convinced that there must be a way of bringing more land into production. The normal way to drain agricultural land was to use a mole plough to dig a subterranean drainage channel. The mole plough has a vertical blade with a cylindrical “mole” attached to the bottom. The mole is pointed at the front end, and as it moves through the soil, it leaves a horizontal channel into which porous drainage pipes can be laid. However this required considerable tractive power, so that the size of the plough was limited by the strength of the teams of horses that pulled it. Fowler returned to England and developed a horse-powered ploughing engine that would dig drainage channels.

First drainage plough

Fowler's ploughing engine dragged itself across the field on rollers, pulling the mole plough as it went. The engine was driven by a team of horses that walked round a capstan, winding in a rope which was passed through a pulley securely anchored at the far end of the field. The mole would have a string of drainage pipes attached at the rear end and these would be dragged through the channel created by the mole. On completing each length of drains, the engine would be turned, the rope would be let out and the pulley repositioned ready for the next length. Fowler had trouble with the capstan gears and with the rope slipping on the capstan, but was able to demonstrate his engine at a meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society of England at Exeter in 1850. He was able to lay a drain at a depth of 2 ft 6 in (0.76 m) in heavy clay. His invention was awarded a silver medal and was reported as "altogether the most important feature of the exhibition."

Second drainage plough

Fowler then decided to change his design so that the horse engine remained stationary at the corner of the field. The team of horses drove a vertical winch around which a rope was wound. The rope would pass along the edge of the field to a securely anchored pulley and would then pass at right angles across the field to the mole plough. As the horses drove the winch, the rope would drag the mole plough across the field, digging a drainage channel and inserting a length of drainage pipes. When each length had been completed, the pulley would be moved to a new position, the rope would be let out and the plough would be taken to the far side of the field, ready to start the next channel. The design was a vast improvement on the previous one, in that the horsepower was not being expended in dragging the machine across the field, only the plough. Fowler demonstrated his new drainage plough at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and at the Royal Agricultural Society of England meeting at Gloucester in 1853, where he was awarded another silver medal. He was able to lay drains to a depth of 3 ft 6 in (1.07 m).

First steam-driven drainage plough

In his early career, Fowler had worked with steam engines and the logical progression was to apply this method of power to his drainage plough. This he did in 1852 when he designed a steam engine with a winch mounted out in front of the smoke box and a rope running from it, round a pulley anchored at the far side of the field and back to the engine. The engine pulled itself across the field, dragging the mole plough behind it. The design was therefore similar to his first design for the horse-powered plough. The experiment was a failure because the steam engine proved to be too heavy to move easily over soft ground. However, in the same year, on 21 October, Fowler was awarded patent number 480 for "Improvements in Machinery for draining land", believed to be one of the first patents for the use of steam power in agriculture.

Second steam-driven drainage plough

Following the failure of his first steam-driven plough, Fowler reverted to the design used for his second horse-driven plough. His new design consisted of a steam engine placed in a corner of the field driving a winch. A rope led from the winch along the side of the field, around a securely anchored pulley and across the field to the mole plough. As the winch drew in the rope the mole plough was drawn across the field digging a drainage channel as it went. The engine also had a second winch with a rope passing round the same anchored pulley and then passing across the field and around a second pulley and back to the plough. This second rope would be used to drag the plough back to its starting point after completing a drainage line. Both pulleys would then be re-anchored at both ends of the next channel to be dug and the ploughing process would be repeated. The steam plough was demonstrated at the Royal Agricultural Society of England meeting at Lincoln in 1854.

Steam-driven plough

It seemed an obvious progression to use Fowler’s latest steam-driven plough for normal ploughing, rather than just drainage channels. However normal ploughing was much lighter work that could be achieved perfectly well by a team of horses and in comparison the steam-driven plough was rather cumbersome. One way of improving the plough’s efficiency would be to design a plough that could plough in either direction without having to be turned round. Fowler achieved this by designing a frame for the plough that had two ploughs attached as a kind of see-saw. One of the two plough blades would be swung down to make contact with the soil, depending on the direction the plough was to travel. At the end of each furrow the anchored pulleys would be moved slightly ready for the next furrow.

The firm of Ransome and Sims built the new engine at its Orwell works at Ipswich, and on 10 April 1856 a trial was carried out at Nacton in which 1 acre was ploughed in an hour. Despite the fact that the engine and plough coped well with the task, the effort of re-positioning the pulleys at either end of the field was too time-consuming.

Fowler got round the above problem by using a weighted cart with a pulley mounted beneath the frame. The cart had disc wheels that dug into the ground so that the cart acted as an anchor for the pulley. Two carts would be placed at opposite ends of the furrow so as to pull the plough in either direction, and after completing a furrow, the carts would be winched to the position for the next furrow.

Fowler’s modified ploughing system was demonstrated at the Royal Agricultural Society of England meeting at Chelmsford in 1856. and at the following meeting at Salisbury in 1857. In 1854 the R.A.S.E. had offered a £200 prize for the best system of mechanical cultivation, and this had since been raised to £500. At Chelmsford, Fowler’s ploughing system was pitted against a rival ploughing system designed by John Smith of Woolston. Smith’s design did not fulfil all of the judges’ conditions and it was disqualified. Fowler’s system worked very well, but the estimated cost of his work was 7s 2½d per acre as against 7s for horse ploughing. The judges therefore decided not to award the prize, a bitter disappointment for Fowler who thought that the superior speed of his system over horse ploughing should have been taken into account.

A similar trial was held at the R.A.S.E. meeting at Salisbury in 1857, but again the prize was withheld. However, Fowler did receive £200 awarded by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, after a trial at Stirling that same year, despite the judges agreeing that the sole entrant had not exactly fulfilled the conditions the efforts were impressive. Fowler returned to contest the R.A.S.E. ploughing trial at Chester in 1858. He was opposed by a number of competitors but was successful in being awarded the £500 prize.

Marriage

On 30 July 1857 Fowler married his third cousin (once removed), Elizabeth Lucy (1833–1881), fifth child of Joseph Pease, MP for South Durham. Joseph Pease was a wealthy Quaker from Darlington who had supported his father Edward Pease's proposal for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Fowler had become more closely acquainted with the Pease family when he was working at Middlesbrough. Fowler and his wife settled at Havering in Essex and had five children: Emma Mary Fowler (4 May 1858 – 13 Dec 1939), Edith Rebecca Fowler (15 Oct 1859 – 6 Dec 1895), Laura Elizabeth Fowler (16 Mar 1861 – 11 Oct 1941), John Ernest Fowler (3 Jan 1863 – 21 Apr 1884), Lucy Pease Fowler (25 Apr 1864 – 22 Aug 1909).

Double-engine ploughing

In 1856 Fowler filed a patent relating to a method of ploughing using two self-moving engines, placed at opposite ends of the field and each using a winch to draw a plough backwards and forwards between them. This system did away with the need for pulleys and anchors, but was more expensive in that it required two engines, only one of which was working at a time. It is believed that Fowler persevered with his single-engine ploughing system because it was cheaper and he saw it as more affordable for average farmer. Eventually the double-engine ploughing method superseded the single-engine system that had won the prize at Chester. Because of its expense it was normally operated by contractors.

Fowler first showed his double-engine system of ploughing at the R.A.S.E. ploughing trial at Worcester in 1863. He competed in 1864 in Newcastle upon Tyne competing against a ploughing system designed by his great rivals, the Howard brothers of Bedford. Fowler’s system carried off every prize.

Later career

Between 1850 and 1864 Fowler took out in his own name and in partnership with other persons thirty-two patents for ploughs and ploughing apparatus, reaping machines, seed drills, traction engines, slide valves, the laying of electric telegraph cables, and the making of bricks and tiles.
By 1858 Fowler had forty sets of ploughing tackle in use, and by 1861 he had one hundred sets working. From 1860 the manufacture of the ploughing machinery was carried out by the firm of Kitson and Hewitson of Leeds.

John Fowler and Company

In 1862 Fowler formed a partnership with William Watson Hewitson of the above firm and founded Hewitson and Fowler based at Hunslet. A year later Hewitson died and the firm became John Fowler and Company. Fowler’s ploughing sets were sold all over the world and were responsible for bringing land into production that was previously unable to be cultivated.

Retirement

Fowler had worked so hard in developing his ideas that he had undermined his health. He was advised to take more rest and so he retired to Ackworth in Yorkshire, to recuperate. He was persuaded to take up hunting as a way of getting exercise and whilst out with the hunt he had a fall and sustained a compound fracture of his arm. Whilst recovering from this mishap, he developed tetanus and died on 4 December 1864, at his home in Ackworth. He died only months after his great triumph at the Newcastle ploughing trial, at age 38.

His brothers Robert, William and Barnard had joined him in the business he had founded and they continued to run the firm after his death. Fowler’s method of ploughing continued to be used until well into the twentieth century when the internal combustion engine allowed the development of light but powerful tractors that could draw a plough behind them.

A monument to John Fowler's invention of the steam plough was placed on his father-in-law's Pierremont estate in 1856, but was moved in 1870 to South Park, Darlington. The plinth may still be seen there, but the plough that it supported disappeared in 1970.

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Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-07 00:32:59

656) Maurice Ralph Hilleman

Maurice Ralph Hilleman, American microbiologist (born Aug. 30, 1919, Miles City, Mont.—died April 11, 2005, Philadelphia, Pa.), developed some 40 vaccines, including those for chicken pox, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, measles, meningitis, mumps, and rubella. His work was credited with having saved tens of millions of lives by making possible the virtual elimination from many countries of once-common deadly childhood diseases and by serving as the basis for public health measures against many other infectious diseases. His accomplishments included the development of vaccinations that combine vaccines against more than one disease, the discovery of patterns of genetic change in the influenza virus relating to its ability to infect persons, and the discovery or co-discovery of several viruses, including the hepatitis A virus and the rhinoviruses that cause colds. The animal vaccine he developed against Marek disease, which causes a cancer in chickens, became of great economic importance to the poultry industry. Hilleman received a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Chicago in 1944. As a researcher at E.R. Squibb & Sons, he developed his first vaccine, which was used to protect U.S. troops in World War II from the Japanese B encephalitis virus. He was chief of respiratory diseases (1949–57) at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C., where he began research on the influenza virus. In 1957 he joined what became Merck & Co., Inc. Following his retirement (1984) Hilleman was an adviser to public health organizations, notably the World Health Organization.

Maurice Ralph Hilleman (August 30, 1919 – April 11, 2005) was an American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. Of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended in current vaccine schedules, he developed eight: those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia and ‘Haemophilus influenzae’ bacteria. He also played a role in the discovery of the cold-producing adenoviruses, the hepatitis viruses, and the potentially cancer-causing virus SV40.

He is credited with saving more lives than any other medical scientist of the 20th century. Robert Gallo described him as "the most successful vaccinologist in history".

Biography

Early life and education

Hilleman was born on a farm near the high plains town of Miles City, Montana. His parents were Anna (Uelsmann) and Gustav Hillemann, and he was their eighth child. His twin sister died when he was born, and his mother died two days later. He was raised in the nearby household of his uncle, Robert Hilleman, and worked in his youth on the family farm. He credited much of his success to his work with chickens as a boy; since the 1930s, fertile chicken eggs had often been used to grow viruses for vaccines.

His family belonged to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. When he was in the eighth grade, he discovered Charles Darwin, and was caught reading ‘On the Origin of Species’ in church. Later in life, he rejected religion. Due to lack of money, he almost failed to attend college. His eldest brother interceded, and Hilleman graduated first in his class in 1941 from Montana State University with family help and scholarships. He won a fellowship to the University of Chicago and received his doctoral degree in microbiology in 1944. His doctoral thesis was on chlamydia infections, which were then thought to be caused by a virus. Hilleman showed that these infections were, in fact, caused by a species of bacterium, ‘Chlamydia trachomatis’, that grows only inside of cells.

Career

After joining E.R. Squibb & Sons (now Bristol-Myers Squibb), Hilleman developed a vaccine against Japanese B encephalitis, a disease that threatened American troops in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II. As chief of the Department of Respiratory Diseases at Army Medical Center (now the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research) from 1948 to 1957, Hilleman discovered the genetic changes that occur when the influenza virus mutates, known as ‘shift and drift’. That helped him to recognize that a 1957 outbreak of influenza in Hong Kong could become a huge pandemic. Working on a hunch, after nine 14-hour days he and a colleague found that it was a new strain of flu that could kill millions. Forty million doses of vaccines were prepared and distributed. Although 69,000 Americans died, the pandemic could have resulted in many more deaths in the United States. Hilleman was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal from the American military for his work.

In 1957, Hilleman joined Merck & Co. (Kenilworth, New Jersey), as head of its new virus and cell biology research department in West Point, Pennsylvania. It was while with Merck that Hilleman developed most of the forty experimental and licensed animal and human vaccines with which he is credited, working both at the laboratory bench as well as providing scientific leadership.

In 1963, his daughter Jeryl Lynn came down with the mumps. He cultivated material from her, and used it as the basis of a mumps vaccine. The Jeryl Lynn strain of the mumps vaccine is still used today. The strain is currently used in the trivalent (measles, mumps and rubella) MMR vaccine that he also developed, the first vaccine ever approved incorporating multiple live virus strains.

He and his group invented a vaccine for hepatitis B by treating blood serum with pepsin, urea and formaldehyde. This was licensed in 1981, but withdrawn in 1986 in the United States when it was replaced by a vaccine that was produced in yeast. This vaccine is still in use today. By 2003, 150 countries were using it and the incidence of the disease in the United States in young people had decreased by 95%. Hilleman considered his work on this vaccine to be his single greatest achievement.

Hilleman was one of the early vaccine pioneers to warn about the possibility that simian viruses might contaminate vaccines. The best-known of these viruses became SV40, a viral contaminant of the polio vaccine, whose discovery led to the recall of Salk's vaccine in 1961 and its replacement with Albert Sabin's oral vaccine. The contamination actually occurred in both vaccines at very low levels, but because the oral vaccine was ingested rather than injected, it did not result in infections or any harm.

Hilleman served on numerous national and international advisory boards and committees, academic, governmental and private, including the National Institutes of Health's Office of AIDS Research Program Evaluation and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the National Immunization Program. In his later life, Hilleman was an adviser to the World Health Organization. He retired as senior vice president of the Merck Research Labs in 1984 at the mandatory retirement age of 65. He then directed the newly created Merck Institute for Vaccinology where he worked for the next twenty years.

At the time of his death in Philadelphia on April 11, 2005, at the age of 85, Hilleman was Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Method and personality

Hilleman was a forceful man who was at the same time modest in his claims. None of his vaccines or discoveries are named after him. He ran his laboratory like a military unit, and he was the one in command. For a time, he kept a row of "shrunken heads" (actually fakes made by one of his children) in his office as trophies that represented each of his fired employees. He used profanity and tirades freely to drive his arguments home, and once, famously, refused to attend a mandatory "charm school" course intended to make Merck middle managers more civil. His employees were fiercely loyal to him.

Legacy

Hilleman was an elected member of the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan presented him with the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. He received the Prince Mahidol Award from the King of Thailand for the advancement of public health, as well as a special lifetime achievement award from the World Health Organization, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service and the Sabin Gold Medal and Lifetime Achievement Awards.

In March 2005, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in collaboration with The Merck Company Foundation, announced the creation of The Maurice R. Hilleman Chair in Vaccinology.

Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, once said "If I had to name a person who has done more for the benefit of human health, with less recognition than anyone else, it would be Maurice Hilleman. Maurice should be recognized as the most successful vaccinologist in history."

After Hilleman's death Ralph Nader wrote, "Yet almost no one knew about him, saw him on television, or read about him in newspapers or magazines. His anonymity, in comparison with Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jose Canseco, or an assortment of grade B actors, tells something about our society's and media's concepts of celebrity; much less of the heroic."

In 2007, Paul Offit published a biography of Hilleman, entitled ‘: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases.’

On October 15, 2008, Merck named its Maurice R. Hilleman Center for Vaccine Manufacturing, in Durham, North Carolina, in memory of Hilleman.

A documentary film titled ‘Hilleman: A Perilous Quest to Save the World's Children’, chronicling Hilleman's life and career, was released in 2016 by Medical History Pictures, Inc.

Hilleman Scholars Program

In 2016, Montana State University dedicated a series of scholarships in memory of its alumnus Hilleman, called the Hilleman Scholars Program, for incoming students who "commit to work at their education beyond ordinary expectations and help future scholars that come after them."

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-09 00:36:36

657) Christoph Gerber

Christoph Gerber is a titular professor at the Department of Physics, University of Basel, Switzerland.

Christoph Gerber is the co-inventor of the atomic force microscope. Born in Basel, Switzerland on May 15, 1942, he was among the 250 most cited living physicists in the world in the year 2000.

Christoph Gerber is a titular professor at the Department of Physics, University of Basel, Switzerland. He was a founding member and Director for Scientific Communication of the NCCR (National Center of Competence in Research Nanoscale Science). He was formerly a Research Staff Member in Nanoscale Science at the IBM Research Laboratory in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, and has served as a project leader in various programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

For the past 35 years, his research has been focused on nanoscale science. He is a pioneer in scanning probe microscopy, who made major contributions to the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, the atomic force microscope (AFM), and AFM techniques in high vacuum and at low temperatures.

He is the author and co-author of more than 165 scientific papers that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and has been cited approximately 29'000 times in cross-disciplinary fields. He belongs to the one hundred worldwide most cited researchers in Physical Sciences. He has given numerous plenary and invited talks at international conferences.

His work has been recognized with multiple honorary degrees and various awards and appeared in numerous articles in daily press and TV coverage. 2016 he has been awarded the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience together with Gerd Binnig and Calvin Quate for the Scanning Force Microscope. He became a fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics UK. His IP portfolio contains 37 patents and patent publications.

His current interests include

• Biochemical sensors based on AFM Technology
• Chemical surface identification on the nanometer scale with AFM
• Nanomechanics, nanorobotics, molecular devices at the ultimate limits of measurement and fabrication
• Atomic force microscopy research on insulators
• Self-organization and self-assembly at the nanometer scale

(Atomic force microscopy (AFM) or scanning force microscopy (SFM) is a very-high-resolution type of scanning probe microscopy (SPM), with demonstrated resolution on the order of fractions of a nanometer, more than 1000 times better than the optical diffraction limit.)

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Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-11 00:54:55

658) Samuel Eto'o

Samuel Eto'o Fils (born 10 March 1981) is a Cameroonian retired professional footballer who played as a striker. In his prime, Eto'o was regarded by pundits as one of the best strikers in the world, and he is regarded as one of the greatest African players of all time, winning the African Player of the Year a record four times: in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2010.

Samuel Eto’o, in full Samuel Eto’o Fils, (born March 10, 1981, Nkon, Cameroon), Cameroonian professional football (soccer) player who is considered one of the greatest African footballers of all time.

Eto’o attended the Kadji Sports Academy in Douala, Cameroon, and first came to national prominence while playing for UCB Douala, a second-division club, in the 1996 Cup of Cameroon. At only 16 years of age, he caught the attention of Real Madrid—one of the top teams in Europe—who signed him in 1997, though Eto’o saw little playing time. Nor did he see much action after joining Cameroon when it qualified for the 1998 World Cup but faltered in the first round.

Eto’o made his name playing for Cameroon during the 2000 African Cup of Nations, where he scored four times, including a crucial goal in the Indomitable Lions’ gold-medal victory over Nigeria. His impressive play continued at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, where Cameroon defeated Spain for the first Olympic gold in its history. In the Olympic final, with the Indomitable Lions facing a 2–0 deficit in the second half, Eto’o and teammate Patrick Mboma led the comeback with two goals, forcing extra time. After Eto’o’s apparent goal in the final seconds of extra time was called back owing to an offside penalty, the game went into penalty kicks, in which Cameroon prevailed.

Eto’o was lent out to a number of teams by Real Madrid until 2000, when he signed with Real Mallorca of the Spanish League; his $6.3 million contract was the largest amount paid by the club at the time. Internationally, he guided Cameroon to a second African Cup of Nations title and a World Cup berth in 2002. While Eto’o was an impressive player for Mallorca—he became the club’s all-time leading goal scorer—his team was still considered below the top tier of European football, and he was lured to the powerhouse club FC Barcelona in 2004.

Eto’o continued his stellar play in Barcelona. He won his record third consecutive African Player of the Year award in 2005, and Barcelona won Spanish first-division championships in 2005 and 2006 as well as the Champions League in 2006. In 2008 he became the all-time leading scorer in African Cup of Nations history as he helped Cameroon to an appearance in the tournament final (a loss to Egypt). Eto’o led Barcelona to a historic season in 2009, when the club captured its first “treble” by winning the national first-division title, Spain’s major domestic cup (Copa del Rey), and the continental championship (Champions League). At the end of the season, Eto’o was transferred to Inter Milan. He helped Inter win the 2010 Champions League title, and he was the club’s leading scorer with 37 goals during the 2010–11 football season.

In 2011 Eto’o was transferred to the Russian team Anzhi Makhachkala, receiving what was reported to be one of the richest contracts in football history in the process. He signed a one-year agreement with Chelsea FC of the English Premier League in 2013. Eto’o moved to Everton the following year but appeared in just 20 matches with the club before he was transferred to Sampdoria of the Italian Serie A league in January 2015. Later that year he signed a three-year contract with Antalyaspor of the Turkish Süper Lig. In January 2018 he moved to another Süper Lig club, Konyaspor. However, in August Eto’o left the team, and later that month he signed with Qatar SC.

In international play, Eto’o scored two goals at the 2010 African Cup of Nations tournament, bringing his scoring record for that event up to 18 goals and helping to earn him African Player of the Year honours a fourth time. He also helped Cameroon qualify for the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, though the team failed to win a match in either appearance. In August 2014 Eto’o retired from international competition.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-13 00:05:53

659) William Friese-Greene

William Friese-Greene, (born September 7, 1855, Bristol, Gloucestershire, England—died May 5, 1921, London), British photographer and inventor, sometimes credited with the invention of cinematography.

Friese-Greene constructed a camera for taking a series of photographs on a roll of perforated film moving intermittently behind a shutter, the basic principle of a motion-picture camera. It would appear, however, that the camera was incapable of taking pictures at a sufficient rate for animation, for no successful presentation of moving pictures was given by him, and the credit for a successful cinematographic device must go to Thomas Edison.

Friese-Greene later pioneered stereoscopic and colour cinematography but lacked the technical knowledge necessary to bring his ideas to fruition.

William Friese-Greene (born William Edward Green, 7 September 1855 – 5 May 1921) was a prolific English inventor and professional photographer. He is principally known as a pioneer in the field of motion pictures, creating a series of cameras in the period 1888–1891 with which he shot moving pictures in London. He went on to patent an early two-colour filming process in 1905. His inventions in the field of printing – including photo-typesetting and a method of printing without ink – brought him wealth, as did his chain of photographic studios. However, he spent everything he earned on inventing, going bankrupt three times and being jailed once, before dying in poverty.

Early life

William Edward Green was born on 7 September 1855, in Bristol. He studied at the Queen Elizabeth's Hospital school. In 1871 he was apprenticed to the Bristol photographer Marcus Guttenberg, but later successfully went to court to be freed early from the indentures of his seven-year apprenticeship. He married the Swiss Helena Friese (born Victoria Mariana Helena Friese) on 24 March 1874, and in a remarkable move for the era, decided to add her maiden name to his surname. In 1877 he set up his own studio in Bath, and by 1881 had expanded his business with more studios in Bath, Bristol and Plymouth.

Cinematic inventor

Experiments with magic lanterns

In Bath he came into contact with John Arthur Roebuck Rudge. Rudge was a scientific instrument maker who also worked with electricity and magic lanterns to create popular entertainments. Rudge built what he called the Biophantic Lantern, which could display seven photographic slides in rapid succession, producing the illusion of movement. It showed a sequence in which Rudge (with the invisible help of Friese-Greene) apparently took off his head. Friese-Greene was fascinated by the machine and worked with Rudge on a variety of devices over the 1880s, various of which Rudge called the Biophantascope. Moving his base to London in 1885, Friese-Greene realised that glass plates would never be a practical medium for continuously capturing life as it happens and began to experiment with the new Eastman paper roll film, made transparent with castor oil, before turning his attention to experimenting with celluloid as a medium for motion picture cameras.

Movie camera

On 21 June 1889, Friese-Greene was issued patent no. 10131 for his camera. It was apparently capable of taking up to ten photographs per second using paper and celluloid film. A report on the camera was published in the British ‘Photographic News’ on 28 February 1890. On 18 March, Friese-Greene sent a clipping of the story to Thomas Edison, whose laboratory had been developing a motion picture system, with a peephole viewer, christened the Kinetoscope. The report was reprinted in ‘Scientific American’ on 19 April. Friese-Greene worked on a series of moving picture cameras until early 1891, but although many individuals recount seeing his projected images privately, he did not ever give a successful public projection of moving pictures. In 1890 he developed a camera with Frederick Varley to shoot stereoscopic moving images. The camera ran at a slower frame rate, and although the 3-D arrangement images worked, there are no records of projection. Friese-Greene's experiments in the field of motion pictures were at the expense of his other business interests and in 1891 he was declared bankrupt. To cover his debts he had already sold the rights to the 1889 moving picture camera patent for £500 (£60,000 in 2016 terms). The renewal fee was never paid and the patent eventually lapsed.

Colour film

Friese-Greene's later exploits were in the field of colour in motion pictures. From 1903 he lived in Brighton where there were a number of experimenters developing still and moving pictures in colour. Initially working with William Norman Lascelles Davidson, Friese-Greene patented a two-colour moving picture system using prisms in 1905. He and Davidson gave public demonstrations of this in January and July 1906 and Friese-Greene held screenings at his photographic studio.

He also experimented with a system which he called "Biocolour". This process produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame of ordinary black-and-white film stock through two or three different coloured filters. Each alternate frame of the monochrome print was then stained red or green (and/or blue). Although the projection of Biocolour prints did provide an impression of true colour, it suffered from noticeable flickering and red and green fringing when the subject was in rapid motion, as did the more popular and famous system, Kinemacolor.

In 1911, George Albert Smith and Charles Urban filed a lawsuit against Friese-Greene, claiming that the Biocolour process infringed upon Smith's Kinemacolor patents, despite the fact that Friese-Greene had both patented and demonstrated his work before Smith. Urban was granted an injunction against Biocolour in 1912, but the Sussex-based, flamboyant racing driver Selwyn Edge decided to help Friese-Greene by funding an appeal to the High Court. This overturned the original verdict on the grounds that Kinemacolor made claims for itself which it could not deliver. Urban fought back and pushed it up to the House of Lords, who in 1915 upheld the decision of the High Court. The decision benefited nobody. For Urban it was a case of hubris because now he could no longer exercise control over his own system, so it became worthless. For Friese-Greene, the arrival of the war and personal poverty meant there was nothing more to be done with colour for some years.

His son Claude Friese-Greene continued to develop the system with his father, after whose death in the early 1920s he called it "The Friese-Greene Natural Colour Process" and shot with it the documentary films "The Open Road", which offer a rare portrait of 1920s Britain in colour. These were featured in a BBC series ‘The Lost World of Friese-Greene’ and then issued in a digitally restored form by the BFI on DVD in 2006.

Death

On 5 May 1921 Friese-Greene – now a largely forgotten figure – attended an important and stormy meeting of the cinema trade at the Connaught Rooms in London. The meeting had been called to discuss the current poor state of British film distribution and was chaired by Lord Beaverbrook. Disturbed by the tone of the proceedings, Friese-Greene got to his feet to speak. The chairman asked him to come forward onto the platform to be heard better, which he did, appealing for the two sides to come together. Shortly after returning to his seat, he collapsed. People came to his aid and took him outside, but he died almost immediately of heart failure.

Given his dramatic death, surrounded by film industry representatives who had almost entirely forgotten about his role in motion pictures, there was a spasm of collective shock and guilt. A very grand funeral was staged for him, a two minute silence was observed in some cinemas and a fund was raised to commission the famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens to design a memorial for his grave. This memorial describes him as "The Inventor of Kinematography", a term William Friese-Greene never used in talking about his achievements. Indeed, he often spoke generously about other workers in the field of capturing movement. He was buried in the eastern section of London's Highgate Cemetery, just south of the entrance and visible from the street through the railings. His second wife, Edith Jane, died a few months later of cancer and is buried with him.

Legacy

In 1951 a biopic was made, starring Robert Donat, as part of the Festival of Britain. The film, ‘The Magic Box’, was not premiered until the festival was nearly over, and only went on full release after it had finished. Despite the all-star cast and a great deal of publicity, it was a costly box office flop. Domankiewicz and Herbert have written, "He was the subject of a romantic and unreliable biography, ‘Friese-Greene, Close-Up of an Inventor’, which was then turned into an even more misleading film, ‘The Magic Box’. Nonetheless, Martin Scorsese has many times cited it as one of his favourite films, and one that inspired him.
Despite a campaign by Bristol photographer Reece Winstone for the retention of Friese-Greene's birthplace for use as a Museum of Cinematography, among other purposes, it was demolished by Bristol Corporation in 1958 to provide parking space for six cars.

Premises in Brighton's Middle Street where Friese-Greene shared workshop space in 1905 are often wrongly described as his home. They bear a plaque in a 1924 design by Eric Gill commemorating Friese-Greene's achievements, wrongly stating that it is the place where he invented cinematography. The plaque was unveiled by Michael Redgrave, who had appeared in ‘The Magic Box’, in September 1957. A modern office building a few yards away is named Friese-Greene House. Other plaques include the 1930s Odeon Cinema in Kings Road, Chelsea, London, with its iconic facade, which carries high upon it a large sculpted head-and-shoulders medallion of "William Friese-Greene" and his years of birth and death. There is a bronze statue of him at Pinewood Studios.

In 2006 the BBC ran a series of programmes called The Lost World of Friese-Greene, presented by Dan Cruickshank about Claude Friese-Greene's road trip from Land's End to John o' Groats, entitled ‘The Open Road’, which he filmed from 1924 to 1926 using the Biocolour process. Modern television production techniques meant they were able to remove the issues of flickering and colour fringing around moving objects, which Kinemacolor and Biocolour had when projected. The result was a unique view of Britain in colour in the mid-1920s.

William Friese-Greene was more or less banished to obscurity by film historians from the 1960s onwards, but new research is leading to a rehabilitation of his reputation and a better understanding of his achievements and his influence on the technical development of cinema.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-15 00:47:32

660) Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper, in full Grace Murray Hopper, née Grace Brewster Murray, (born December 9, 1906, New York, New York, U.S.—died January 1, 1992, Arlington, Virginia), American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who was a pioneer in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, and naval applications for COBOL (common-business-oriented language).

After graduating from Vassar College (B.A., 1928), Hopper attended Yale University (M.A., 1930; Ph.D., 1934). She taught mathematics at Vassar before joining the Naval Reserve in 1943. She became a lieutenant and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance’s Computation Project at Harvard University (1944), where she worked on Mark I, the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers. She remained at Harvard as a civilian research fellow while maintaining her naval career as a reservist. After a moth infiltrated the circuits of Mark I, she coined the term bug to refer to unexplained computer failures.

In 1949 Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., where she designed an improved compiler, which translated a programmer’s instructions into computer codes. She remained with the firm when it was taken over by Remington Rand (1951) and by Sperry Rand Corp. (1955). In 1957 her division developed Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler. She retired from the navy with the rank of commander in 1966, but she was recalled to active duty the following year to help standardize the navy’s computer languages. At the age of 79, she was the oldest officer on active U.S. naval duty when she retired again in 1986.

Hopper was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1962), was named the first computer science Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association (1969), and was awarded the National Medal of Technology (1991). She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-17 00:52:40

661) Nestor Genko

Nestor Karlovich Genko (or Henko, January 22 (February 3) 1839 in the Grodno Governorate, province of Kurland, Russian Empire – January, 28 (February 10) 1904 in Menton, France), was a scientist in the field of forestry, known for creation of the world's first major watershed protection forest belt system, the Genko Forest Belt, located in the east of Ulyanovsk Oblast. He was also a hero of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.

The Genko family

The first recorded mention of the Genko family dates to the 16th century when a member of a patrician family of German origins in Thorn, Poland, participated in wars against the Turks as a lieutenant of cavalry. For bravery and leadership Ian Genko was awarded nobility by the Reichstag in 1683. This hereditary nobility was confirmed to Ivan Iossevitch von Genko and his descendants by the Senate of the Russian Empire in 1848. His great-grandson Nestor Karlovich Genko was born on January 22 (February 3) 1839 in the estate Tadayken (province of Kurland, actually in Latvia), son of Karl Georgevitch von Genko, supervisor of the estate of the Duke of Wurttemberg, and of Wilhelmina Mariana (née Schwander).

Biography

Education

In 1849 Genko entered the elementary school of Tukums, then the grammar school of Mittau (now Yelgava), then studied at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Forestry and Surveying, from which he graduated in 1862 as second lieutenant of the Forest Administration.

Service in the Forest Administration

Genko began his professional activities as inspector in the province of Vilnius in Bialowieza, in 1862 in the Orenburg Governorate and in 1863 in the Vyatka province for the management of naval construction forests. For his outstanding contribution, in 1864, Genko was sent to Prussia for one year. Back to Russia he worked in the Vilnius and Kaluga Governorates. In 1866 he was appointed to be junior forest warden of the Tellerman Forest which included the Shipov Forest. In 1872 this forest was declared to be a separate forest of the first category and Genko was appointed as its warden. He remained there until 1876. During the 10 years he was there, he installed new oak plantations and built paved roads in difficult terrain.

Service in the Russo-Turkish War

In 1876, Genko ostensibly for "reason of health", left the Forest Administration. In 1877 he graduated from the St Petersburg infantry school with the rank of staff captain and was assigned to the Kostroma Infantry Regiment. As a company commander he participated in the battles of Tachkisen, Komartsov and the crossing of the Balkans. Upon the end of the war, he remained in Bulgaria first as chief of the Bourgas and Demoti district, then as police commander of Burgas.

Service in the administration of the Imperial Estates

In 1880 Genko returned to forestry activities as a junior scientist forester of the Imperial Estates Administration where there was less bureaucracy and red tape. This is the most productive part of his life as reported by his colleagues. He developed new instructions (1883, 1893), and carried out, on a massive scale, forest inventory and organised their exploitation. Of particular importance is the work in Bielowieza Forest, where on the basis of theoretical research, he applied for the first time, a definition of the forest area (over 100 thousands hectares) by different type of forests. This fundamental work is still of important value today. Another very important catalogue of Russian European forests, with numerous tables and maps was issued. It set an alarm concerning Russian forests, showing deforestation and poor management. For the first time he proposed an original method for gradual cuts in the pine forests, based on studies of the particularities of renewal of pine trees in various soil and geographical conditions.

The long lasting activity of Genko in the area of steppe protective afforestation (1884-1904) ranks him as a pioneer in this field of forestry.

The aim of these protective forest bands was to increase the yield of an important area of steppe territory belonging to the Imperial Estates. It was planned to repopulate these areas, providing the inhabitants with water (ponds) and forest. These plantations were intended also to ease the harsh climate of the steppes, the pernicious action of hot winds and droughts, as well as preventing formation of ravines. In the arid steppes of the Samara, Volgograd and Voronezh governorates, some 13 thousand hectares of protective forest belts were planted by 1902. These forest belts were known as "Genko Forests". For economic consideration, the width of the forest belts was to be 400 to 600 meters. These strips were located mainly on "black earth" along the watersheds, which in the steppes are the most suitable for a forest. The primary orientation was from southwest to northeast, that is, perpendicular to the predominant summer dry winds.

The forests which have changed the climate of the "beyond the Volga" region are now over 100 years old, but the condition of the remaining plantations testify the correctness of Genko's theories regarding the questions of steppe protective afforestation. Time has decided the scientific disputes between Genko and G. N. Vysotskii, who was a vigorous opponent of the massive afforestation in the steppe, and who gave a very negative forecast to their future

The 1903 all-Russia Congress of Forest Management took place in Riga and Genko attended and participated in the debates. Everyone realized that this was his "swan song". The same year, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Saint Petersburg Imperial Institute of Forestry, Genko was elected an honorary member of the institute, but due to his health problems could not attend the celebrations.

In December 1903, he was released for medical treatment in Menton (southern France) where he died on January 28, 1904 and was buried there.

Awards and decorations

• The merits of Genko were rewarded by numerous awards and decorations.
• Order of Saint Stanislaus 1st degree
• Order of St. Vladimir 3rd degree
• Order of St. Anna 2nd degree with swords (for bravery during the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) and crossing of the Balkans)
• Commemorative medal of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78)
• Medal for the organisation of civil government in Bulgaria
• Medal for the commemoration of the reign of Tsar Alexander III
• Medal for the 100 years of Imperial Estates

In memoriam

In connection with the death of Genko, the Russian Society of Forestry, headed by Professor L. I. Yachnov, held a memorial session at which eminent scientists came forward with the memories of their deceased colleague. The famous forester G. F. Morozov said:

Nestor Karlovich was called to forestry, not by accidental circumstances. He sharply distinguished himself from other specialists not only through his outstanding knowledge, unusual energy, and wide experience, but also love of forestry which was not a sentimental feeling. He committed himself to forestry. Nestor Karlovich had strong opinions in the field of forestry, and what is unfortunately seldom seen; he was a Forester-Citizen.

After long period of neglect, the forest community again remembered Genko, in 1998, by a decree of the governor of the Samara Region, the forest area of Doubovo-Oumet was named in his honour and a memorial plate established.

On the occasion of the 165th anniversary of his birth and 100th anniversary of his death, 2004 was declared the "Year of Genko" in the Samara region, marked by an inter-regional scientific conference, an edition of scientific material, the establishment of memorial squares and excursions to the Genko Forests.

(Genko's Forest Belt is a system of historic forest belts in Russia's Ulyanovsk Oblast. Planted over a century ago, it is now considered a "natural monument", and is legally protected as one of the protected areas of Ulyanovsk Oblast.)

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-19 01:01:30

662) Kateryna Yushchenko (scientist)

Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (December 8, 1919, Chigirin - died August 15, 2001) was a Ukrainian computer and information research scientist, corresponding member of USSR Academy of Sciences (1976), and member of The International Academy of Computer Science. She developed one of the world's first high-level languages with indirect address in programming, called the Address programming language. Over the period of her academic career, Yushchenko supervised 45 Ph.D students. Further professional achievements include Yushchenko being awarded two USSR State Prizes, The USSR Council of Ministers Prize, The Academician Glushkov Prize, and The Order of Princess Olga. Yushchenko was the first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming.

Biography

Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (née Rvacheva) was born in 1919 in Chyhyryn, central Ukraine. She started her undergraduate studies in Kyiv University in 1937, and during the Second World War she attended the Central Asian State University in Tashkent, graduating in 1942. After the war she returned to Ukraine and in 1950, under the direction of Boris Gnedenko, she obtained a Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. For a period of seven years, Yushchenko held the position of Senior Researcher of the Kiev Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences (1950–57). In 1954, the Levedev Laboratory (where the first computer in continental Europe MESM was created) was transferred to the Institute of Mathematics. Yushchenko was a member of the joint group of scholars operating the MESM. In 1957 she became Director of the Institute of Computer Science of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences. During her forty years service to the Institute, Yushchenko created an internationally notable scientific school of theoretical programming.

Scientific contributions

Yushchenko is best known for her creation of Address programming language - the first fundamental advancement in the scientific school of theoretical programming. This language provided the free location of a program in computer memory.

In the process of working with MESM, it became clear that the more complex tasks were difficult to solve by writing simple machine programs. There was a need to develop a high-level programming language, but there was a problem: the absence of an appropriate translator for better human/computer communication. L.I. Kaluzhnin, a professor at Kyiv University, who taught a course on mathematical logic in the 1950-70s, made a significant advancement in the understanding of this problem and formalized a scheme of interfacing with the program. Following this development, in 1955, Yushchenko developed the programming language, which was a language-based on two general principles for the computer work: addressing and software management. Creating a convenient system of concepts for describing the computer architecture and its system instructions, the language thus became the means of manipulation of the second-rank addresses. Yushchenko’s contribution became the first fundamental achievement of the Soviet School of Theoretical Programming, and was well ahead of the creation of the first programming language Fortran (1958), Cobol (1959) and Algol (1960).

Yushchenko was the founder of the first Soviet School of Theoretical Programming. During the 1970-1980 the subject of research of theoretical programming was formed. Of the major achievements of the School at that time, was the creation of algebraic grammar methods for synthesis of software.

In the 1990s, the efforts of the School of Theoretical Programming were concentrated on the study of algebraic grammar-methods of knowledge representation model of computation, and friendly user interface for designing and developing databases and knowledge bases for decision support systems, expert systems and methods of learning for them.

After forty years of research, theoretical programming enriched with its own formal-algorithmic apparatus and the subject of research, significantly expanded from procedural languages to methods of knowledge representation that form artificial intelligence tools for developers of application systems.

Work

Yushchenko worked on probability theory, algorithmic languages and programming languages, and developing methods of automated data processing systems.

To prepare programmers, Yuschenko wrote an educational series of textbooks in the 1970s. Yuschenko held five Copyright Certificates, which developed eight State Standards of Ukraine. She is an author of over 200 manuscripts, including 23 monographs and train aids. Part of these works have two to-three editions, and have been translated to more than 5 languages internationally, including German, Czech, Hungarian, French, Danish and so on.

Note:

The Address programming language is one of the world's first high-level programming languages. It was created in 1955 by Kateryna Yushchenko. In particular, the Address programming language made possible indirect addressing and addresses of the highest rank – analogous to pointers.

Unlike Fortran and ALGOL 60, APL (Address programming language) supported indirect addressing and addressing of higher ranks. Indirect addressing is a mechanism that appeared in other programming languages much later (1963–65 – in PL/1).

The Address language was implemented on all the computers of the first and second generation produced in the Soviet Union. The Address language influenced the architecture of the Kyiv, Strela, Ural, and Promin computers. The Address was used exclusively for the solution of economical problems, including aviation, space exploration, machine building, and military complex – in particular, to calculate the trajectories of ballistic missiles in flight – in the 1950–60s. Implementations of the Address programming language were used for nearly 20 years. A book about APL was written in 1967 and it was translated into French and published in France in 1974.

The Address language affected not only the Soviet Union's economical development, but information technology and programming. APL's proposed and implemented ideas and tools can be found in many programming-related fields, such as abstract data types, object-oriented programming, functional programming, database and artificial intelligence.

MESM (Small Electronic Calculating Machine) was the first universally programmable electronic computer in the Soviet Union. By some authors it was also depicted as the first one in continental Europe, even though the Zuse Z4 and the Swedish BARK preceded it.

It was created by a team of scientists under the direction of Sergei Alekseyevich Lebedev from the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology in the Soviet Union, at Feofaniya (near Kiev).

Initially, MESM was conceived as a layout or model of a Large Electronic Calculating Machine and letter "M" in the title meant "model" (prototype).

Work on the machine was research in nature, in order to experimentally test the principles of constructing universal digital computers. After the first successes and in order to meet the extensive governmental needs of computer technology, it was decided to complete the layout of a full-fledged machine capable of "solving real problems". MESM became operational in 1950. It had about 6,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 25 kW of power. It could perform approximately 3,000 operations per minute. It was 8 to 10 metres (26 to 33 ft) long and about 2 metres (7 ft) tall.

BARK ( lit. 'Binary Arithmetic (Automatic) Relay Calculator') was an early electromechanical computer. BARK was built using standard telephone relays, implementing a 32-bit binary machine. It could perform addition in 150 ms and multiplication in 250 ms. It had a memory with 50 registers and 100 constants. It was later expanded to double the memory. Howard Aiken stated in reference to BARK "This is the first computer I have seen outside Harvard that actually works."

BARK was developed by Matematikmaskinnämnden (Swedish Board for Computing Machinery) a few years before BESK. The machine was built with 8,000 standard telephone relays, 80 km of cable and with 175,000 soldering points. Programming was done by plugboard. It was completed in February 1950 at a cost of 400,000 Swedish kronor (less than $100,000), became operational on April 28, 1950, and was taken offline on September 22, 1954. The engineers on the team led by Conny Palm were Harry Freese, Gösta Neovius, Olle Karlqvist, Carl-Erik Fröberg, G. Kellberg, Björn Lind, Arne Lindberger, P. Petersson and Madeline Wallmark.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-21 00:34:29

663) Edwin Catmull

Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American retired computer scientist and former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics.

Early life

Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. His family later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his father first served as principal of Granite High School and then Taylorsville High School. Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Catmull was the oldest of five and as a young man served as a missionary to the New York City area in the 1960s.

Early in life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies such as ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Pinocchio’ and dreamed of becoming a feature film animator. He even made animation using flip-books. Catmull graduated in 1969 with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the University of Utah. Initially interested in designing programming languages, Catmull encountered Ivan Sutherland, who had designed the computer drawing program Sketchpad, and changed his interest to digital imaging. As a student of Sutherland's he was part of the university's ARPA program sharing classes with James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay.

From that point, his main goal and ambition was to make a computer-animated movie. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. He also independently discovered Z-buffering,even though it had already been described 8 months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis.

In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: an animated version of his left hand which was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie ‘Futureworld’, the first film to use 3D computer graphics and a science-fiction sequel to the 1973 film ‘Westworld’, which was the first to use a pixelated image generated by a computer. The one-minute sequence was created with Fred Parke at the University of Utah. Titled ‘A Computer Animated Hand,, the short film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.

Career

Early career

In 1974, Catmull earned his doctorate in computer science, was hired by a company called Applicon, and by November the same year had been contacted by the founder of the New York Institute of Technology, Alexander Schure, who offered him the position as the director of the new Computer Graphics Lab at NYIT. In that position in 1977 he invented Tween, software for 2D animation that automatically produced frames of motion in between two frames.

However, Catmull's team lacked the ability to tell a story effectively via film, harming the effort to produce a motion picture via a computer. Catmull and his partner Alvy Ray Smith attempted to reach out to studios to alleviate this issue, but were generally unsuccessful until they attracted the attention of George Lucas at Lucasfilm.

Lucasfilm

Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field. Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-wing fighter from ‘Star Wars’, which they did. In 1979 Catmull became the Vice President at Industrial Light & Magic computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.

Pixar

In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull would work. Pixar would be acquired by Disney in 2006.

In June 2007, Catmull and Lasseter were given control of Disneytoon Studios, a division of Disney Animation housed in a separate facility in Glendale. As president and chief creative officer, respectively, they have supervised three separate studios for Disney, each with its own production pipeline: Pixar, Disney Animation, and Disneytoon. While Disney Animation and Disneytoon are located in the Los Angeles area, Pixar is located over 350 miles (563 kilometers) northwest in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Catmull and Lasseter both live. Accordingly, they appointed a general manager for each studio to handle day-to-day affairs on their behalf, then began regularly commuting each week to both Pixar and Disney Animation and spending at least two days per week (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays) at Disney Animation. In November 2014, the general managers of Disney Animation and Pixar were both promoted to president, but both continued to report to Catmull, who retained the title of president of Walt Disney and Pixar.

On October 23, 2018, Catmull announced his plans to retire from Pixar and Disney Animation, staying on as an adviser through July 2019.

Personal life

In 2006, Catmull lived in Marin County, California, with his wife Susan and their three children.

Awards and honors

In 1993, Catmull received his first Academy Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance". He shared this award with Tom Porter. In 1995, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing". In 2001, he received an Oscar "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan". In 2006, he was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation and rendering. At the 81st Academy Awards (2008, presented in February 2009), Catmull was awarded the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry".

In 2013, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking".

His book ‘Creativity, Inc.’ was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2014), and was a selection for Mark Zuckerberg book club in March 2015.

Catmull shared the 2019 Turing Award with Pat Hanrahan for their pioneering work on computer-generated imagery.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-23 00:36:42

664) Irène Joliot-Curie

Irène Curie, born in Paris, September 12, 1897, was the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, and since 1926 the wife of Frédéric Joliot. After having started her studies at the Faculty of Science in Paris, she served as a nurse radiographer during the First World War. She became Doctor of Science in 1925, having prepared a thesis on the alpha rays of polonium. Either alone or in collaboration with her husband, she did important work on natural and artificial radioactivity, transmutation of elements, and nuclear physics; she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1935 with him, in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements, which work has been summarized in their joint paper Production artificielle d’éléments radioactifs. Preuve chimique de la transmutation des éléments (1934).

In 1938 her research on the action of neutrons on the heavy elements, was an important step in the discovery of uranium fission. Appointed lecturer in 1932, she became Professor in the Faculty of Science in Paris in 1937, and afterwards Director of the Radium Institute in 1946. Being a Commissioner for Atomic Energy for six years, Irène took part in its creation and in the construction of the first French atomic pile (1948). She was concerned in the inauguration of the large centre for nuclear physics at Orsay for which she worked out the plans. This centre was equipped with a synchro-cyclotron of 160 MeV, and its construction was continued after her death by F. Joliot. She took a keen interest in the social and intellectual advancement of women; she was a member of the Comité National de l’Union des Femmes Françaises and of the World Peace Council. In 1936 Irène Joliot-Curie was appointed Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research. She was a member of several foreign academies and of numerous scientific societies, had honorary doctor’s degrees of several universities, and was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. She died in Paris in 1956.

Jean Frédéric and Irene Joliot-Curie had one daughter, Helene, and one son, Pierre.

Irène Joliot-Curie died on March 17, 1956.

Jai Ganesh · 2020-03-25 00:47:19

665) 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 · 2020-03-27 00:41:08

666) Dame Kathleen Lonsdale

Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, née Kathleen Yardley, (born Jan. 28, 1903, Newbridge, County Kildare, Ire.—died April 1, 1971, London, Eng.), British crystallographer who developed several X-ray techniques for the study of crystal structure. She was the first woman to be elected (1945) to the Royal Society of London.

From 1922 to 1927 and from 1937 to 1942, she was research assistant to Sir William Henry Bragg at University College and the Royal Institution, London. In 1929 her use of X rays definitely established the regular hexagonal arrangement of carbon atoms in the molecules of benzene compounds. Later she developed an X-ray technique with which she obtained an accurate measurement (to seven figures) of the distance between carbon atoms in diamond. She also applied crystallographic techniques to medical problems, in particular to the study of curarelike drugs and bladder stones.

She became professor of chemistry at University College, London, in 1949. In 1956 she was created Dame of the British Empire.

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