Template:Selected anniversaries/August 24: Difference between revisions
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||79: The long-dormant Mount Vesuvius erupted in Italy, burying the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash. An estimated 20,000 people died. When discovered, the sites became astonishing archaeological time capsules. Official excavations began on 6 Apr 1748 of behalf of the Italian king's interest in collecting antiquities. | |||
||394: The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, the latest known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs, was written. Pic. | |||
||1217: Eustace the Monk dies ... pirate. No DOB. Pic (Illustration by Matthew Paris). | |||
||1456: The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed. | |||
File:Trigonometriae_-_Bartholomaeus_Pitiscus.jpg|link=Bartholomaeus Pitiscus (nonfiction)|1561: Mathematician, astronomer, and theologian [[Bartholomaeus Pitiscus (nonfiction)|Bartholomaeus Pitiscus]] born. Pitiscus will coin the word "trigonometry". | |||
||1595: Thomas Digges dies ... mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances. He was also first to postulate the "dark night sky paradox". Pic: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/466967055096765851/ | |||
File:Blaise Pascal.jpg|link=Blaise Pascal (nonfiction)|1654: [[Blaise Pascal (nonfiction)|Blaise Pascal]] writes to [[Pierre de Fermat (nonfiction)|Pierre de Fermat]], describing his solution to the Problem of the Points (a probability problem) and asking Fermat to critique it. | |||
||1680: Ferdinand Bol dies ... painter, etcher and draftsman, student of Rembrandt. Pic. | |||
||1771: Georg Friedrich von Reichenbach dies ... scientific instrument maker, was born at Durlach in Baden on 24 August 1771. Pics. | |||
||1772: Georg von Reichenbach born ... maker of astronomical instruments who introduced the meridian, or transit, circle, a specially designed telescope for measuring both the time when a celestial body is directly over the meridian (the longitude of the instrument) and the angle of the body at meridian passage. By 1796 he was engaged in the construction of a dividing engine, a machine used to mark off equal intervals accurately, usually on precision instruments. Pic. | |||
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. | |||
||1803: Gregorio Fontana dies ... mathematician. He was chair of mathematics at the university of Pavia succeeding Roger Joseph Boscovich. He has been credited with the introduction of polar coordinates. Pic. | |||
||1816: Daniel Gooch born ... laid the first successful transatlantic cables. Sir Daniel Gooch was an English railway pioneer and inventor who was trained in George Stephenson & Edward Pease's works at Newcastle upon Tyne. He was locomotive superintendent of Great Western Railway for 27 years, where as Brunel's right-hand man, he designed the best broad-gauge engines and invented “the suspended link motion with the shifting radius link” (1843). Gooch also experimented with a dynamometer carriage. In 1864 he resigned to concentrate on developing telegraphic communication. Sir Daniel Gooch and his son Charles, were the engineers who laid the first Atlantic Cable from the steamship The Great Eastern. Daniel became member of Parliment. Pic. | |||
||1821: Ernest Mouchez born ... French naval officer who became director of the Paris Observatory and launched the ill-fated Carte du Ciel project in 1887. Pic. | |||
||1832: Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot dies ... physicist and engineer. Pic. | |||
||1842: Benjamin Wright dies ... engineer who directed the construction of the Erie Canal. A one-time judge, he helped survey the Erie Canal route. When the Erie Canal was finally funded in 1817, Wright was selected as one of the three engineers to design and build it, then named chief engineer. Wright made the Erie Canal project a school of engineering. Until mid-century, almost every civil engineer in the U.S. had trained with, or been trained by someone who had worked under, Wright on the Erie Canal. Because he trained so many engineers on that project, Wright has been called the “father of American civil engineering.” He also engaged in the design and construction at the outset of the first railroads. He was the first Chief Engineer of the Erie Railroad. Pic. | |||
||1861: Pierre Berthier dies ... mineralogist and mining engineer who discovered bauxite (aluminium ore) on 23 Mar 1821 near the village Les Baux de Provence in southern France. On 24 May 1806, he joined the central laboratory at the Board of Mines. From 1816, he was chief of the laboratory at the École des Mines, and professor of assaying. Berthier analyzed kaolin along with dozens of other minerals and ores. He sought out phosphate deposits valuable for agriculture. He published a treatise (1834) of practical analytical procedures that were widely used by other mineralogists. In another field, Berthier noticed - before Mitscherlich - that isomorphism occurred whereby chemically different substances can have the same crystalline form and even co-crystallize. Pic. | |||
||1875: Henry Louis Rietz born ... mathematician, actuarial scientist, and statistician, who was a leader in the development of statistical theory. Pic search. | |||
||1886: William Francis Gibbs born ... naval architect, one of the most renowned in his time, having designed over 6,000 ships from a fireboat, to freighters, ocean liners and warships. Early in his life, he began building self-taught skills by studying blueprints and existing vessels. In 1915, Gibbs and his brother Frederic H., joined the International Mercantile Marine Company, but had their own firm by 1922 which converted an ex-German liner into the American luxury liner SS Leviathan. The Gibbs firm oversaw the design of 74% of all naval vessels built during WW II, making Gibbs an outstanding contributor to the American war effort. Postwar, he realized his lifelong dream: the 1,000 foot superliner, the SS United States, the fastest ship to cross the Atlantic. Pic. | |||
File:Rotary dial telephone.jpg|link=Telephone (nonfiction)|1877: Canada grants Alexander Graham Bell a patent for the [[Telephone (nonfiction)|telephone]]. | |||
File:Rudolf Clausius.jpg|link=Rudolf Clausius (nonfiction)|1888: [[Rudolf Clausius (nonfiction)|Rudolf Clausius]] dies. He was one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. | File:Rudolf Clausius.jpg|link=Rudolf Clausius (nonfiction)|1888: [[Rudolf Clausius (nonfiction)|Rudolf Clausius]] dies. He was one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. | ||
||1889: Jan Ernest Matzeliger dies ... inventor who is best known for his shoe-lasting machine that revolutionished the shoe industry by replacing the hand work of attaching the sole to the upper of a shoe. He left his homeland of Dutch Guiana and sailed for America at age 19. He settled in Lynn, Massachussetts, by about age 25, where he became a shoe stitching machine operator. There he saw the tedious and slow process of finishing the shoe by hand, and resolved to develop a machine able to do that job more efficiently. Despite being so poor that obtaining materials was difficult, he made a wooden model. He obtained a patent for his invention, issued on 20 Mar 1883. With improvements, by 1885, he had a production model ready, able to produce shoes far more rapidly than hand workers. He died of tuberculosis at the early age of not yet 37. Pic. | |||
File:Thomas Edison.jpg|link=Thomas Edison (nonfiction)|1891: [[Thomas Edison (nonfiction)|Thomas Edison]] patents the motion picture camera. | |||
||1893: Haim Ernst Wertheimer born ... biochemist and academic ... Pic search. | |||
||1894: Rudolf Oskar Robert Williams Geiger born ... meteorologist who was one of the founders of microclimatology (the study of the climatic conditions within a few metres of the ground surface). His observations, made above grassy fields or areas of crops and below forest canopies, elucidated the complex and subtle interactions between vegetation and the heat, radiation, and water balances of the air and soil. Pic: https://www.geographixs.com/koumlppen-geiger.html | |||
||1899: Albert Claude born ... biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate. Pic. | |||
File:Jorge Luis Borges.jpg|link=Jorge Luis Borges (nonfiction)|1899: Short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator [[Jorge Luis Borges (nonfiction)|Jorge Luis Borges]] born. His best-known books, ''Ficciones'' (''Fictions'') and ''El Aleph'' (''The Aleph''), published in the 1940s, will be compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. | |||
||1906: Arnold Ephraim Ross born ... mathematician and educator who founded the Ross Mathematics Program, a number theory summer program for gifted high school students. Pic. | |||
||1907: Peter Thullen born ... mathematician. Pic. | |||
||1907: the Bréguet-Richet Gyroplane No. 1 made what is generally accepted as the first vertical flight, hovering about 2 feet (0.6 meters) off the ground for one minute, powered by a 45 h.p. engine. It was built by the brothers Louis and Jacques Bréguet with assistance from Professor Charles Richet. It lacked stability, any control system, and it needed four men to steady it while it hovered, so it did not represent a practical helicopter. (Some sources give the date as 29 Sep 1907.) | |||
||1909: Panama Canal: Workers pour the first concrete for the Panama Canal at a lock site at Gatun. Finishing all the locks there took nearly four years. A dam holds back the artificial Gatun Lake to supply water for the locks. The Gatun gate was closed on 27 Jun 1913, allowing Gatun Lake to fill to its planned depth. A few months later, on 26 Sep 1913, the tugboat Gatunmade a trial run through the Gatun Locks. The control panel was not ready for the event, so the locks were operated manually. Everything worked perfectly. The Panama Canal crosses the Isthmus of Panama, joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Built 1904-14, it is only half the length of the Suez Canal. Unlike the Suez, the Panama Canal uses locks to raise and lower ships. | |||
||1917: Ralph Eugene Lapp born ... nuclear physicist and author who began his career in high-energy physics research with Arthur H. Compton. Lapp then worked at Chicago on the Manhattan Project. With 69 others, he signed Leo Szilard’s 17 Jul 1945 petition to President Truman, the month before the attack on Hiroshima. They urged that Japan should have an opportunity to surrender before use of the atom bomb. (Nevertheless, the actual attack was by surprise.) After the war, he researched the results in Japan. Lapp lectured across the U.S. He wrote 22 books on nuclear safety, including the dangers of nuclear fallout in The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (1958). A Post book reviewer in 1956 called him “a one-man atomic truth squad and nuclear lie detector.” Pic: https://www.todayinsci.com/8/8_24.htm | |||
||1918: Otis Ray McIntire born ... engineer. After graduating from the University of Kansas with a BSc degree in engineering in 1940, he went to work as a research engineer for The Dow Chemical Company. During World War II, when rubber was in short supply, McIntire's work focused on developing a rubber-like substance that could be used as a flexible insulator. In an experiment, in which he combined styrene with isobutylene, he created a unique material that was solid yet flexible due to the tiny bubbles formed by isobutylene within the styrene. McIntire had invented foam polystyrene, more commonly known by its brand name, Styrofoam Pic: https://www.geni.com/people/Otis-Mac-McIntire/335726453760006055 | |||
File:Howard Zinn 2009.jpg|link=Howard Zinn (nonfiction)|1922: Historian, playwright, and social activist [[Howard Zinn (nonfiction)|Howard Zinn]] born. He will write extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and labor history of the United States. | File:Howard Zinn 2009.jpg|link=Howard Zinn (nonfiction)|1922: Historian, playwright, and social activist [[Howard Zinn (nonfiction)|Howard Zinn]] born. He will write extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and labor history of the United States. | ||
||1923: Victor Mikhailovich Glushkov born ... mathematician, the founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union, and one of the founders of Cybernetics. Pic. | |||
File:Henrietta Bolt.jpg|link=Henrietta Bolt|1932: Pilot, engineer, and alleged time-traveler [[Henrietta Bolt]] shoots down [[Baron Zersetzung]]'s experiment jet flying wing, foiling the Baron's plan to kidnap [[Amelia Earhart (nonfiction)|Amelia Earhart]]. | |||
File:Amelia Earhart standing under nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electral.jpg|link=Amelia Earhart (nonfiction)|1932: [[Amelia Earhart (nonfiction)|Amelia Earhart]] completes her non-stop flight across the United States, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in just over 19 hours. She was the first woman to fly nonstop across the US. Earlier in the same year, on 20 May 1932, she accomplished the first solo flight by a woman across the Atlantic Ocean. | |||
||1936: Arthur B. C. Walker, Jr. born ... physicist and academic ... solar physicist and a pioneer of EUV/XUV optics. He is most noted for having developed normal incidence multilayer XUV telescopes to photograph the solar corona. Pic: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/physics/walker_arthurbc.html | |||
||1940: Paul Gottlieb Nipkow dies ... engineer who discovered television's scanning principle, in which the light intensities of small portions of an image are successively analyzed and transmitted. Nipkow's invented (1884) a rotating disk (Nipkow disk) with one or more spirals of apertures that passed successively across the picture to make a mechanically scanned television system. Pic. | |||
||1941: Adolf Hitler orders the cessation of Nazi Germany's systematic T4 euthanasia program of the mentally ill and the handicapped due to protests, although killings continue for the remainder of the war. | |||
||1942: Jim Horning born ... computer scientist and academic. His interests included programming languages, programming methodology, specification, formal methods, digital rights management and computer/network security. A major contribution was his involvement with the Larch approach to formal specification Pic search. | |||
||1943: Simone Weil born ... mystic and philosopher. Pic. | |||
||1945: Midori Naka dies ... stage actress of the Shingeki style, famous in her country at the time of her death. She survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, only to die 18 days later. She was the first person in the world whose death was officially certified to be a result of radiation poisoning. Her notability helped publicize the adverse effects of exposure to radiation and encouraged more research on this area. Pic. | |||
||1949: Attilio Palatini dies ... mathematician born in Treviso. He worked in absolute differential calculus and in general relativity. Within this latter subject he gave a sound generalization of the variational principle. Pic. | |||
||1967: Led by Abbie Hoffman, the Youth International Party temporarily disrupts trading at the New York Stock Exchange by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing trading to cease as brokers scramble to grab them. | |||
||1967: Henry J. Kaiser dies ... industrialist who became known as the father of modern American shipbuilding. Pic. | |||
||1968: Opération Canopus: France's first two-stage thermonuclear test, conducted at Fangataufa atoll. The test made France the fifth country to test a thermonuclear device after the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and China. | |||
||1970: Vietnam War protesters bomb Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, leading to an international manhunt for the perpetrators. | |||
||1971: Wallace John Eckert dies ... astronomer, who directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University which evolved into the research division of IBM. | |||
||1971: Carl Blegen dies ... archaeologist who unearthed evidence that supported and dated the sack of Troy recorded in Homer's Iliad. Storage jars, skeletons and ash piles (which he interpreted as evidence of the city's fiery destruction) reinforced his conviction. He also discovered, in 1939, clay tablets dating from about 1250 BC. At the fabled palace of King Nestor, a major figure in the Trojan War, nearly 1,100 clay tablet records of palace transactions were found there over 15 years. These were inscribed with the earliest known examples of European writing, enabling cryptographers to find the key by which the ancient tablets could be decoded, proving the existence of a Greek civilization where none was formerly thought to exist. Pic. | |||
||1974: Alexander P. de Seversky dies .. pilot and engineer, co-designed the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Pic (cool!). | |||
||1978: Dame Kathleen (Mary) Kenyon dies ... archaeologist whose work at Jericho identified it as the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement by excavating to its Stone Age foundation. This evidence pushed back the era of occupation of the mound at Jericho from the Bronze Age and Neolithic to the Natufian culture at the end of the Ice Age (10,000 – 9,000 BC). She established that the city itself spanned more than 3,800 years. Over 100 tombs were discovered at Jericho during excavations (1952-58). Kenyon helped pioneer stratigraphic excavations as a more scientific approach to archaeological digs, a technique she learned while working with Sir Mortimer Wheeler at his major excavation of the Romano-British city of Verulamium (north of London). Pic. | |||
||1979: Hanna Reitsch dies ... soldier and pilot dies. Pic. | |||
||1989: Space probe Voyager 2 ends the final planetary fly-by of its mission, leaving Neptune behind after taking photgraphs showing three complete rings and six previously unknown moons. It had also collected data showing that Neptune's atmosphere was stormy, and had a notable magnetic field oriented at an angle to its axis of rotation. The surface features of Triton, its largest moon, were also photographed. | |||
||1990: Harold Masursky dies ... geologist and senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's astrogeology branch supporting space exploration. Starting in the mid 1960s, he helped analyze the photographs from the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor lunar missions. In mapping the moon, suitable landing spots were being sought for the unmanned Surveyor 5 spacecraft (1967) and the manned Apollo landings (1969-72). Masursky headed the group that interpreted television transmissions from Martian satellite Mariner 9 (1971), producing maps to plan the landing of unmanned Viking spacecraft on Mars (1976). He analyzed data on the geological origins and evolution of the planets. He collaborated in foreign projects such as the Soviet Venus probes. Pic: https://www.todayinsci.com/8/8_24.htm | |||
||1993: Boris Levin dies ... mathematician who made significant contributions to function theory. Pic. | |||
||1997: Gordon Spence discovers the largest known prime number to date, 2^2976221 - 1, the 36th known Mersenne prime number. It took his 100-MHz Pentium PC fifteen days to prove it. At 895,932 digits in length, if printed out the number would stretch for 1.4 miles or if spoken 8 hours a day would take 28 days to complete. | |||
||2004: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dies ... psychiatrist and academic ... psychiatrist who was a leading authority on the psychology of dying. She is best-known for twelve books, beginning with On Death and Dying (1969), in which she proposed that the terminally ill go through five stages in their attitude. These are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, perhaps, acceptance. The book offers strategies for caregivers. The work grew from a seminar she founded at the Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago where dying patients talked about their thoughts upon the approach of death. The best-selling success of the book led her into a career of clinical practice to the treatment of dying patients of all ages. Her lectures changed institutional attitudes towards the terminally ill. | |||
||2016: Roger Yonchien Tsien (d. August 24, 2016) was an American biochemist and academic. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, in collaboration with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie. Pic. | |||
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Latest revision as of 13:22, 7 February 2022
1561: Mathematician, astronomer, and theologian Bartholomaeus Pitiscus born. Pitiscus will coin the word "trigonometry".
1654: Blaise Pascal writes to Pierre de Fermat, describing his solution to the Problem of the Points (a probability problem) and asking Fermat to critique it.
1819: inventor, engineer, and chemist James Watt dies. He made major improvements to the steam engine.
1877: Canada grants Alexander Graham Bell a patent for the telephone.
1888: Rudolf Clausius dies. He was one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics.
1891: Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.
1899: Short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator Jorge Luis Borges born. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, will be compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion.
1922: Historian, playwright, and social activist Howard Zinn born. He will write extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, and labor history of the United States.
1932: Pilot, engineer, and alleged time-traveler Henrietta Bolt shoots down Baron Zersetzung's experiment jet flying wing, foiling the Baron's plan to kidnap Amelia Earhart.
1932: Amelia Earhart completes her non-stop flight across the United States, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in just over 19 hours. She was the first woman to fly nonstop across the US. Earlier in the same year, on 20 May 1932, she accomplished the first solo flight by a woman across the Atlantic Ocean.