Template:Selected anniversaries/August 25: Difference between revisions
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||1561 | ||79: Pliny the Elder dies ... Roman scholar and author of the celebrated Natural History, in 37 volumes an encyclopaedic work of very uneven accuracy that was nonetheless an authority on scientific matters up to the Middle Ages. He prepared this as a digest of two thousand ancient books written by nearly five hundred writers. He was mostly undiscriminating regarding the accuracy of the content. Though he rejected, for example, the possibility of immortality, he also rejected Pytheas' valid theory that the moon was responsible for tides. Correctly, he accepted the spherical form of the Earth. As another example, he included various theories on the origin of amber, one correct among others fanciful and wrong. The book dealt in subjects ranging from astronomy, geography, and zoology. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius, too anxious to witness the event to retreat from the ashes and toxic gases. Pics (imagined; no contemporary portrait survives). | ||
||1561: Philippe van Lansberge born ... astronomer and mathematician. Pic. | |||
File:Galileo E pur si muove.jpg|link=Galileo Galilei (nonfiction)|1609: [[Galileo Galilei (nonfiction)|Galileo Galilei]] demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. | File:Galileo E pur si muove.jpg|link=Galileo Galilei (nonfiction)|1609: [[Galileo Galilei (nonfiction)|Galileo Galilei]] demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. | ||
|| | File:Charles Camus - Cours de mathématique.jpg|link=Charles Étienne Louis Camus (nonfiction)|1699: Mathematician and mechanician [[Charles Étienne Louis Camus (nonfiction)|Charles Étienne Louis Camus]] born. He will be the author of ''Cours de mathématiques'' (Paris, 1766), along with a number of essays on mathematical and mechanical subjects. | ||
||1793: Martin Heinrich Rathke born ... physiologist and pathologist who was one of the founders of modern embryology. He was the first to describe the embryonic precursors of gill slits and gill arches in the embryos of higher animals - mammals and birds - which have none when fully grown. Rathke compared the development of the air sacs in birds and the larynx in birds and mammals. In 1839, he traced the origin of the anterior pituitary gland from a depression in the roof of the mouth, which embryonic structure is now known as Rathke's pouch. Rathke also did pioneering work in marine zoology, as being first to describe lancet fish. Pic. | |||
||1796: James Lick born ... carpenter, piano builder, land baron, and patron of the sciences. At the time of his death, he was the wealthiest man in California, and left the majority of his estate to social and scientific causes... placed $700,000 in trust (1874) to build the Lick Observatory at the summit of Mount Hamilton near San Jose, California. After he died, he was interred under the future home of the Great Lick Refracting Telescope. Pic. | |||
||1812: Nikolay Zinin born ... organic chemist. Pic: Extreme Moustache! | |||
File:James Watt.jpg|link=James Watt (nonfiction)|1819: inventor, engineer, and chemist [[James Watt (nonfiction)|James Watt]] dies. He made major improvements to the steam engine. | File:James Watt.jpg|link=James Watt (nonfiction)|1819: inventor, engineer, and chemist [[James Watt (nonfiction)|James Watt]] dies. He made major improvements to the steam engine. | ||
||1822 | ||1822: William Herschel dies ... astronomer and composer. Pic. | ||
||1835 | ||1835: The first Great Moon Hoax article is published in The New York Sun, announcing the discovery of life and civilization on the Moon. | ||
|| | ||1844: Thomas Muir born ... mathematician, remembered as an authority on determinants. Pic: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Muir_Mathematician.jpg | ||
|| | ||1852: Simeon North dies ... inventor and manufacturer who, like Eli Whitney, incorporated interchangeable parts in manufacturing. After a start in farming, he began a business making scythes in 1795. He expanded to making pistols, first for private use, then under government contract in Mar 1799 for 400 pistols. Larger government orders followed. By 1813, at North's suggestion, a contract for 20,000 pistols included the provision that parts should be interchangeable. Subsequently, he developed machine tools to aid production. North is generally credited for building probably the earliest, though primitive, milling machine to replace filing operations by about 1816 or even earlier. For 53 years, he filled War Dept. contracts, including rifles (from 1823), and devised a 10-round repeating rifle (1825). Pic: https://www.allaboutlean.com/230-years-interchangeability/simeon-north-photo-closeup_v04/ | ||
|| | ||1865: The Shergotty meteorite falls. It is the first example of the shergottite Mars meteorite family. It was a 5-kilogram (11 lb) Martian meteorite which fell to Earth at Shergotty (now Sherghati), in the Gaya district, Bihar, India on 25 August 1865, and was retrieved by witnesses almost immediately. Radiometric dating indicates that it solidified from a volcanic magma about 4.1 billion years ago. It is composed mostly of pyroxene and is thought to have undergone preterrestrial aqueous alteration for several centuries. Certain features within its interior are suggestive of being remnants of biofilm and their associated microbial communities. Pic. | ||
|| | ||1867: Michael Faraday ... physicist and chemist dies ... contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Pic. | ||
|| | ||1841: Emil Theodor Kocher born ... physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate. Pic. | ||
|| | ||1880: Joshua Lionel Cowen born ... inventor of electric model trains who founded the Lionel Corporation (1901), which became the largest U.S. toy train manufacturer. At age 18, he had invented a fuse to ignite the magnesium powder for flash photography, which the Navy Department bought from him to be a fuse to detonate submarine mines. He designed an early battery tube light, but without practical application. (His partner, Conrad Hubert, to whom he gave the rights improved it and founded the Eveready Flashlight Company.) At age 22, he created a battery-powered train engine intended only as an eye-catcher for other goods in a store window. To his surprise, many customers wanted to purchase the toy train. Thus he started a model railroad company. Pic. | ||
|| | ||1894: Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in ''The Lancet''. | ||
|| | ||1898: Helmut Hasse born ... mathematician and academic. Pic. | ||
||1900: Hans Adolf Krebs born ... physician and biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate ... pioneer scientist in study of cellular respiration, a biochemical pathway in cells for production of energy. He is best known for his discoveries of two important chemical reactions in the body, namely the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic reactions that produces energy in cells, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", earned him a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953. Pic. | |||
||1903: Physicist, academic, and chess player Arpad Elo born. He will create the Elo rating system for two-player games such as chess. Pic (cool chess!). | |||
||1906: Max Eyth dies ... engineer, inventor and writer who was a pioneer in the mechanization of agriculture. With an education in Germany as a machine engineer, in 1861, he moved to England, the centre of engineering. From 1863, he was employed by John Fowler, manufacturer of a revolutionary new farm implement, the steam plow. Eyth became a global salesman seeking new markets for Fowler's technology. He left the company in 1882 and returned to Germany, where in 1884, he founded the German Agricultural Society, and worked to support the German farmer. He retired in 1896 and moved from Berlin to Ulm to be with his aging mother, and where for the remainder of his life, he became a writer, using his experiences to demythologize and popularize technological progress. In one work, he addressed the engineering aspects of the Tay Bridge collapse. Pic. | |||
||1908: Henri Becquerel dies ... physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate. Pic. | |||
||1913: Walt Kelly born ... illustrator and animator. | |||
||1917: Tosio Kato born ... mathematician who worked with partial differential equations, mathematical physics and functional analysis. Pic. | |||
||1917: Physicist and computer scientist Marcello Conversi born. Pic, Italian wiki: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcello_Conversi | |||
||1921: Peter Cooper Hewitt dies ... electrical engineer who invented the mercury-vapour lamp, an important forerunner of fluorescent lamps. He studied the production of light using electrical discharges (while Thomas Edison was still developing incandescent filaments). The mercury-filled tubes he developed from the late 1890s, gave off an unattractive blue-green light. Although unsuitable in homes, its brilliance won wide adoption by photo studios because the black and white film of the time needed just bright light, despite its colour. There were many other industrial uses for the lamp. His manufacturing company (est. 1902) was bought by General Electric in 1919 which produced a new design in 1933. He took out his first eight mercury vapour lamp patents on 17 Sep 1901. Pic. | |||
||1929: The airship Graf Zeppelin passed over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, headed for Los Angeles after a trans-Pacific voyage from Tokyo. Graf Zeppelin, built in 1928, had a trial flight on 18 Sep1928. It left on 11 Oct 1928 for its first transatlantic trip from Germany to Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA. After other flights, the Graf Zeppelin was again at Lakehurst ready to begin a trip around the world. It left there with 40 crew and 22 passengers on 8 Aug 1929, reaching Friedrichshafen, Germany on 10 Aug. After 5 days stopover, it set off for Tokyo, Japan, arriving there on 18 Aug, leaving again on 23 Aug headed for Los Angeles on 26 Aug. Next day it left for Lakehurst, NJ arriving there on 29 Aug 1929 after 12 days in the air.« | |||
File:Philo T Farnsworth.jpg|link=Philo Farnsworth (nonfiction)|1934: Inventor [[Philo Farnsworth (nonfiction)|Philo Farnsworth]] demonstrates his electronic television system to the public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. | File:Philo T Farnsworth.jpg|link=Philo Farnsworth (nonfiction)|1934: Inventor [[Philo Farnsworth (nonfiction)|Philo Farnsworth]] demonstrates his electronic television system to the public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. | ||
||1948 | File:Chairman Dies of House Committee investigating Un-American activities.jpg|link=House Un-American Activities Committee (nonfiction)|1948: The [[House Un-American Activities Committee (nonfiction)|House Un-American Activities Committee holds]] first-ever televised congressional hearing: "Confrontation Day" between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss. | ||
||1952: Cyril Stanley Smith dies ... metallurgist who in 1943-44 determined the properties and technology of plutonium and uranium, the essential materials in the atomic bombs that were first exploded in 1945. Smith already then had 15 years of experience as a research metallurgist with the American Brass Co., during which time he studied properties of alloys and their microstructure. In WW II, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory at its inception (1943). The properties and technology of plutonium had to be conducted with extremely limited quantities of available material. Smith and his group found it was unique, with five different allotropic forms with huge density differences between them. Postwar, he organized the Institute for the Study of Metal at the Univ. of Chicago. Pic. | |||
||1956: George Washington Pierce dies ... inventor who was a pioneer in radiotelephony and a noted teacher of communication engineering. He did work that led to the practical application of a variety of experimental discoveries in piezoelectricity and magnetostriction. He developed the Pierce oscillator, which utilizes quartz crystal to keep radio transmissions precisely on the assigned frequency and to provide similar accuracy for frequency meters. His other accomplishments include the mathematical calculation of the radiation properties of radio antennae; invention of the mercury-vapor discharge tube, which was the forerunner of the thyratron; invention of a method of recording sound on film; and sound generation by bats and insects. Pic: https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/utphysicshistory/GeorgeWPierce.html | |||
||1961: Morris William Travers dies ... chemist who, while working with Sir William Ramsay in London, discovered the element krypton (30 May 1898). The name derives from the Greek word for “hidden.” It was a fraction separated from liquified air, which when placed in a Plücker tube connected to an induction coil yielded a spectrum with a bright yellow line with a greener tint than the known helium line and a brilliant green line that corresponded to nothing seen before. Pic search. | |||
File:Hedley_Ralph_Marston.jpg|link=Hedley Marston (nonfiction)|1965: Biochemist [[Hedley Marston (nonfiction)|Hedley Ralph Marston]] dies. Marston's research into fallout from the British nuclear tests at Maralinga proved that significant radiation hazards existed at many of the Maralinga sites long after the tests. | |||
||1969: Harry Hammond Hess dies ... geologist who made the first comprehensive attempt at explaining the phenomenon of seafloor spreading (1960). This revived Alfred Wegener's earlier theory of continental drift. Together, these provided an interpretation of the earth's crust in terms of plate tectonics. The surface of the globe is not continuous. Rather, it is broken into a number of huge plates that float on the molten rock under the crust, moved over eons of geologic time by convective currents driven by earth's internal heat. With this motion these plates rub against, collide with, or separate from other plates. Thus the nature of earthquakes and volcanoes could be explained, plus the existence of ridges of young rock mapped around the globe under the ocean where the sea floor was spreading. Pic. | |||
|| | ||1973, the first scan was made using CAT (Computer Assisted Tomography). | ||
|| | ||1975: John Ray Dunning dies ... physicist who played key roles in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bombs. He specialized in neutron physics, and did pioneering work in gaseous diffusion for isotope separation. Pic. | ||
|| | ||1981: Leonidas Alaoglu dies ... Canadian-American mathematician and theorist ... known for his result, called Alaoglu's theorem on the weak-star compactness of the closed unit ball in the dual of a normed space, also known as the Banach–Alaoglu theorem. Pic: http://www.math.caltech.edu/events/alaoglu14.html Death date: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/131213394/leonidas-alaoglu | ||
||1991 | ||1981: Voyager II comes within 63,000 miles (100,000 km) of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back data and pictures of the ringed planet in its closest approach to Saturn, showing not a few, but thousands of rings. Photographs were also sent back of a number of Saturn's moons. The space probe was launched on 20 Aug 1977, and visited Jupiter on 9 Jul 1979, and continued on to Uranus (24 Jan 1986) and Neptune (25 Aug 1989) before leaving the Solar System. Having a nuclear power source, the space probe continues to study ultraviolet sources among the stars, and its fields and particles instruments continue to search for the boundary between the Sun's influence and interstellar space. | ||
||1986: Milton Stanley Livingston dies ... accelerator physicist, co-inventor of the cyclotron with Ernest Lawrence, and co-discoverer with Ernest Courant and Hartland Snyder of the strong focusing principle, which allowed development of modern large-scale particle accelerators. Pic. | |||
||1989: Jean-Louis Verdier dies ... mathematician who worked, under the guidance of Alexander Grothendieck, on derived categories and Verdier duality. Pic. | |||
||1989: The Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune and provided definitive proof of the existence of the planet's rings. | |||
||1991: Linus Torvalds announces the first version of what will become Linux. Pic. | |||
||2005: Ruth Aaronson Bari dies ... mathematician known for her work in graph theory and algebraic homomorphisms. Pic. | |||
File:Voyager spacecraft diagram.png|link=Voyager 1 (nonfiction)|2012: [[Voyager 1 (nonfiction)|Voyager 1]] crossed the heliopause to become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space and study the interstellar medium. | File:Voyager spacecraft diagram.png|link=Voyager 1 (nonfiction)|2012: [[Voyager 1 (nonfiction)|Voyager 1]] crossed the heliopause to become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space and study the interstellar medium. | ||
File:George Spencer- | ||2012: Neil Armstrong dies ... astronaut who was the first man to walk on the moon (20 Jul 1969, Apollo 11). He served as a Navy pilot during the Korean War, then joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became NASA), as a civilian test pilot. In 1962, he was the first civilian to enter the astronaut-training program. He gained experience as command pilot of the Gemini 8 mission, which accomplished the first physical joining of two orbiting spacecraft. Later he was commander of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. From 1971, he worked as professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Pic. | ||
||2013: Akio Hattori dies ... mathematician working in algebraic topology who proved the Hattori–Stong theorem. No DOB. Pic search. | |||
File:George Spencer-Brown.jpg|link=George Spencer-Brown (nonfiction)|2016: Polymath [[George Spencer-Brown (nonfiction)|George Spencer-Brown]] dies. Spencer-Brown wrote the unorthodox and influential ''Laws of Form'', calling it the "primary algebra" and the "calculus of indications". | |||
||2016: James Watson Cronin dies ... particle physicist. Pic. | |||
||2019: Computer scientist Sally Floyd dies. Floyd will contribute to computer networking, notably Internet congestion control. Pic search. | |||
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Latest revision as of 12:24, 7 February 2022
1609: Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1699: Mathematician and mechanician Charles Étienne Louis Camus born. He will be the author of Cours de mathématiques (Paris, 1766), along with a number of essays on mathematical and mechanical subjects.
1819: inventor, engineer, and chemist James Watt dies. He made major improvements to the steam engine.
1934: Inventor Philo Farnsworth demonstrates his electronic television system to the public at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
1948: The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: "Confrontation Day" between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
1965: Biochemist Hedley Ralph Marston dies. Marston's research into fallout from the British nuclear tests at Maralinga proved that significant radiation hazards existed at many of the Maralinga sites long after the tests.
2012: Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause to become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space and study the interstellar medium.
2016: Polymath George Spencer-Brown dies. Spencer-Brown wrote the unorthodox and influential Laws of Form, calling it the "primary algebra" and the "calculus of indications".