Template:Selected anniversaries/August 28: Difference between revisions
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File: | File:Eclipse.jpg|link=Eclipse (nonfiction)|413 BC: A lunar [[Eclipse (nonfiction)|eclipse]] caused panic among the sailors of the Athens fleet and thus affected the outcome of a crucial battle in the Peloponnesian War. | ||
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||1749: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe born ... writer and statesman. His works include four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and color. In addition, there are numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him extant. Pic. | |||
File:William_Herschel's_40-foot_(12_m)_reflecting_telescope.jpg|link=William Herschel (nonfiction)|1789: With the first use of his new 1.2 m (3.9 ft) telescope, then the largest in the world, [[William Herschel (nonfiction)|William Herschel]] discovered a new moon of Saturn, which was later named Enceladus. | |||
||1796: Irénée-Jules Bienaymé born ... statistician. He built on the legacy of Laplace generalizing his least squares method. He contributed to the fields of probability and statistics, and to their application to finance, demography and social sciences. In particular, he formulated the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality concerning the law of large numbers and the Bienaymé formula for the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables. Pic. | |||
File:Antoine Augustin Cournot.jpg|link=Antoine Augustin Cournot (nonfiction)|1801: Mathematician and philosopher [[Antoine Augustin Cournot (nonfiction)|Antoine Augustin Cournot]] born. He will introduce the ideas of functions and probability into economic analysis. | |||
||1802: Ernst Anton Nicolai dies ... physician and chemist. He was a follower of Leibniz' concept of monadism, reportedly seeking solutions to medical problems based on the philosophic viewpoints of Gottfried Leibniz. Pic search. | |||
||1820: Andrew Ellicott dies ... surveyor and urban planner ... helped map many of the territories west of the Appalachians, surveyed the boundaries of the District of Columbia, continued and completed Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant's work on the plan for Washington, D.C., and served as a teacher in survey methods for Meriwether Lewis. Pic. | |||
||1833: The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 receives royal assent, abolishing slavery through most of the British Empire. | |||
||1839: William 'Strata' Smith dies ... was an English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geological map. At the time his map was first published he was overlooked by the scientific community; his relatively humble education and family connections prevented him from mixing easily in learned society. Financially ruined, Smith spent time in debtors' prison. It was only late in his life that Smith received recognition for his accomplishments, and became known as the "Father of English Geology". Pic. | |||
||1845: The first issue of ''Scientific American'' magazine is published ... published by Rufus Porter (1792-1884), a versatile if eccentric Yankee, who was by turns a portrait-painter, schoolmaster, inventor and editor. While the paper was still a small weekly journal with a circulation less than 300, he offered it for sale. It was bought for $800 in July 1846 by 20-year-old Alfred Ely Beach (1826-1896) as editor, and Orson Desaix Munn (1824-1907). Together, they built it over the years into a great and unique periodical. Their circulation reached 10,000 by 1848, 20,000 by 1852, and 30,000 by 1853. Pic. | |||
||1850: First submarine cable laid: ''Goliath'' laid the cable between Dover and Cap Gris Nez in France on 28 August 1850. Unlike later submarine cables, this one had no armouring to protect it. The single copper wire was protected only by the layer of gutta-percha insulation around it. This made it very light, and it was necessary to attach periodic lead weights to make it sink. Messages sent across the cable were unintelligible due to dispersion of the signal, a phenomenon which was not understood at the time, and would be an even greater problem to the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Dispersion was a problem not fully solved on submarine cables until loading started to be used at the beginning of the 20th century. Both ends of the communication assumed that the messages did not make sense because the other end was in the midst of drunken celebrations of their success. It was decided to try again in the morning. During the night a French fishing boat accidentally pulled up the cable. Thinking the cable was a strange form of seaweed, the fisherman cut a piece out of it. He believed the metal inside was gold. The cable was never put back into service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_Telegraph_Company Pic. | |||
||1853: Vladimir Shukhov born ... architect and engineer, designed the Adziogol Lighthouse. | |||
||1863: Eilhard Mitscherlich dies ... chemist, who is perhaps best remembered today for his discovery of the phenomenon of isomorphism (crystallography) in 1819. | |||
||1863: André-Eugène Blondel born ... engineer and physicist. He is the inventor of the electromechanical oscillograph and a system of photometric units of measurement. Pic. | |||
||1867: Maxime Bôcher born ... mathematician who published about 100 papers on differential equations, series, and algebra. He also wrote elementary texts such as Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry. Bôcher's theorem, Bôcher's equation, and the Bôcher Memorial Prize are named after him. Pic. | |||
||1880: Charles Thomas Jackson dies ... physician, chemist, and pioneer geologist and mineralogist. Jackson's professional career consisted of a series of spectacular claims to the work of others which continued until he finally became insane in 1873. In 1832, during a voyage, he discussed with the portrait painter Samuel Morse the possibilities of electric telegraphy. Morse exhibited his telegraph to Congress in 1837 but had to spend seven years to establish a right to his own invention against Jackson's claim that Morse had stolen it from him. Jackson similarly claimed priority in the idea of use of ether as an anaesthetic, which he had suggested to a dentist, William Morton. Though the effects of ether were somewhat known at the time, it was Morton who made the idea practical. Pic. | |||
||1883: Jan Arnoldus Schouten born ... mathematician and Professor at the Delft University of Technology. He was an important contributor to the development of tensor calculus and Ricci calculus. Pic. | |||
||1892: Thomas Henry Moray born ... inventor from Salt Lake City, Utah. He received a US patent 2,460,707 in February 1949, after a process of 17 years in discussions with the patent office. The main components of the patent were an LC circuit resonator and a set of vacuum power tubes of diode type using uranium and radium power sources and doped germanium semiconductors on the cathodes. It was an early example of doped semiconductors and a forerunner of radioactive power supplies using radioactive isotopes in space research. Moray's device followed other work on nuclear batteries first done in 1913 by Henry Moseley using a radium source. | |||
||1908: American cryptanalyst and Soviet NKVD agent Bill Weisband born ... revealed the Venona Project, U.S. decryptions of Soviet diplomatic and intelligence codes to Soviet intelligence. Pic. | |||
||1910: Paolo Mantegazza dies ... neurologist, physiologist, and anthropologist ... coca. Pic. | |||
||1910: Tjalling Koopmans born ... mathematician and economist Nobel Prize laureate. | |||
||1911: Shizuo Kakutani born ... mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. Pic. | |||
File:Charles Wright Mills.jpg|link=C. Wright Mills (nonfiction)|1916: Sociologist and author [[C. Wright Mills (nonfiction)|C. Wright Mills]] born. He will be published widely in popular and intellectual journals, advocating public and political engagement over disinterested observation. | |||
||1916: Jack Vance born ... author. | |||
||1917: Jack Kirby born ... author and illustrator. | |||
||1918: L. B. Cole born ... illustrator and publisher. | |||
||1919: Godfrey Hounsfield born ... biophysicist and engineer Nobel Prize laureate. Pic. | |||
||1921: John Herbert Chapman born ... physicist and engineer. Pic search. | |||
||1927: Émile Haug dies ... geologist and paleontologist ... known for his contribution to the geosyncline theory. Pic. | |||
||1940: William Bowie dies ... geodesist who investigated isostasy (a principle that dense crustal rocks to tend cause topographic depressions and light crustal rocks cause topographic elevations). He made measured gravity anomalies on land and obtained gravity surveys in the oceans. These observations correlated the anomalies with topographic features and validated the geological concept of isostasy. With John F. Hayford, his predecessor at the Coast and Geodetic Survey, he computed tables of the depth of isostatic compensation (the surface above which the weight of the crust per unit area is equalized). Bowie felt that this zone would occur at a uniform depth as predicted by John Henry Pratt, rather than at the varying depth predicted by Sir George Airy. He wrote Isostasy (1927). Pic. | |||
||1941: Peter Manfred Gruber born ... mathematician working in geometric number theory as well as in convex and discrete geometry. Pic. | |||
||1963: Julius Edgar Lilienfeld dies ... physicist and electronic engineer, credited with the first patents on the field-effect transistor (FET) (1925) and electrolytic capacitor (1931). Pic. | |||
||1965: Giulio Racah dies ... physicist and mathematician. Pic. | |||
||1993: Edward Palmer Thompson dies ... historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. Pic (megaphone). | |||
||1993: The asteroid 243 Ida became the first found to have a moon when it was visited by NASA's Galileo probe. The asteroid 243 Ida and its newly-discovered moon, Dactyl was imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, about 14 minutes before its closest approach (within 2,400-km or 1,500 miles) to the asteroid. Ida is about 52 km (32 mi) in length and is irregularly shaped. It shows numerous craters, including many degraded craters, indicating Ida's surface is older than previously thought. Dactyl is only about 1.4-km in diameter, and it is spectrally different from Ida data. The picture was released on 26 Mar 1994. Galileo had encountered the first asteroid - 951 Gaspra - on 29 Oct 1991. Galileo continued on its mission to study Jupiter, beginning its orbit of the planet on 7 Dec 1995. | |||
||1995: Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton dies ... Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. Pic: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Department/Annual95/Faculty/Salton.html | |||
||2005: George Szekeres dies ... mathematician. He will discover the Szekeres snark, a snark with 50 vertices and 75 edges. Pic. | |||
||2006: Melvin Schwartz dies ... physicist. He shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger for their development of the neutrino beam method and their demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. Pic. | |||
||2007: Paul B. MacCready Jr. dies ... aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "Do more with less". Pic. | |||
||2010: Keith Batey dies ... a codebreaker who, with his wife, Mavis Batey, worked on the German Enigma machine at Bletchley Park during World War. Pic: http://spartacus-educational.com/Keith_Batey.htm | |||
</gallery> | </gallery> | ||
Latest revision as of 13:26, 7 February 2022
413 BC: A lunar eclipse caused panic among the sailors of the Athens fleet and thus affected the outcome of a crucial battle in the Peloponnesian War.
1789: With the first use of his new 1.2 m (3.9 ft) telescope, then the largest in the world, William Herschel discovered a new moon of Saturn, which was later named Enceladus.
1801: Mathematician and philosopher Antoine Augustin Cournot born. He will introduce the ideas of functions and probability into economic analysis.
1916: Sociologist and author C. Wright Mills born. He will be published widely in popular and intellectual journals, advocating public and political engagement over disinterested observation.