Template:Selected anniversaries/August 20: Difference between revisions
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||1659: Pirate Henry Every born. Pic. | |||
||1680 | File:Johan de Witt.jpg|link=Johan de Witt (nonfiction)|1672: Mathematician and politician [[Johan de Witt (nonfiction)|Johan de Witt]] dies in a riot. The rioters will partially eat his body. | ||
||1680: William Bedloe dies ... English spy. Pic. | |||
|File:Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão.jpg|link=Bartolomeu de Gusmão (nonfiction)|1705: Inventor and priest [[Bartolomeu de Gusmão (nonfiction)|Bartolomeu de Gusmão]]'s uses [[scrying engine]] to design improved [[Airship (nonfiction)|airship]]. | |File:Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão.jpg|link=Bartolomeu de Gusmão (nonfiction)|1705: Inventor and priest [[Bartolomeu de Gusmão (nonfiction)|Bartolomeu de Gusmão]]'s uses [[scrying engine]] to design improved [[Airship (nonfiction)|airship]]. | ||
||1710 | ||1710: Thomas Simpson born ... mathematician and academic. Pic: book cover. | ||
||1719: Christian Mayer born ... astronomer and educator. He is most noted for pioneering the study of binary stars, although his equipment was ill-suitable for distinguishing between true binaries and coincident star alignments. In 1777-78 he compiled a catalog of 80 double stars, which he published in 1781. Pic. | |||
||1779: Jöns Jacob Berzelius born ... Swedish chemist and academic. Pic. | |||
File:Francesco Zantedeschi.jpg|link=Francesco Zantedeschi (nonfiction)|1797: Physicist and priest [[Francesco Zantedeschi (nonfiction)|Francesco Zantedeschi]] born. Zantedeschi will be among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere of red, yellow, and green light. He will also think that he detected, in 1838, a magnetic action on steel needles by ultraviolet light, anticipating later discoveries connecting light and magnetism. | |||
||1831: Eduard Suess born ... geologist who helped lay the basis for paleogeography and tectonics (the study of the architecture and evolution of the Earth's outer rocky shell). He was an authority on structural geology, especially of mountains, and postulated the existence of the giant land mass Gondwanaland. Pic. | |||
||1858: Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory. Pic. | |||
||1863: Corrado Segre born ... mathematician who is remembered today as a major contributor to the early development of algebraic geometry. Pic. | |||
File:Hamaguri rebellion.jpg|link=Kinmon incident (nonfiction)|1864: The [[Kinmon incident (nonfiction)|Kinmon incident]]: a rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate breaks out near the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. The rebels will seek to restore the Imperial household to its position of political supremacy. | |||
||1872: William Robinson was issued a U.S. patent No.130,661 for electric train signalling. | |||
||1892: Octav Onicescu born ... mathematician, member of the Romanian Academy, and founder of the Romanian school of probability theory and statistics. Pic. | |||
||1897: Physician Sir Ronald Ross made a key breakthrough when he discovered malaria parasites while dissecting a mosquito. This day is now known as World Mosquito Day, in celebration of this important discovery. Pic. | |||
||1898: Theoretical physicist Leopold Infeld born. After the first use of nuclear weapons in 1945 Infeld, like Einstein, became a peace activist. Because of his activities, he was unjustly accused of having communist sympathies. In the strongly anti-communist climate of the time many in the Canadian government and media feared that Infled would betray nuclear weapons secrets. He was stripped of his Canadian citizenship and was widely denounced as a traitor. In actuality, Infeld's field was the theory of relativity—not directly linked to nuclear weapons research. Pic. | |||
||1899: Salomon Bochner born ... mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry. Pic. | |||
||1905: Franz Reuleaux dies ... mechanical engineer and a lecturer of the Berlin Royal Technical Academy, later appointed as the President of the Academy. He was often called the father of kinematics.... Reuleaux triangle, a curve of constant width that he helped develop as a useful mechanical form. | |||
||1908: Valentin Petrovich Glushko born ... rocket scientist who was a pioneer developer of rocket engines (1946-74). From 1929, he worked in Leningrad in GDL - the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, the military rocket research organization, founded in 1921. He worked with renowned rocket designer Sergey Korolyov (1932-1966). In Aug 1957, they successfully launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile and in October of the same year, sent the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. He became chief designer for the Soviet space program in 1974, helping to oversee development of the Mir space station. During his life, he designed the most succesessful rocket engines in the Soviet space program. Pic. | |||
||1908: Kingsley Davis born ... sociologist and demographer who was a world-renowned expert on population trends; he coined the terms population explosion and zero population growth and promoted methods of bringing the latter about. His specific studies of American society led him to work on a general science of world society, based on empirical analysis of each society in its habitat. Later, however, he came to be concerned about low birthrates in developed countries, fearing a shortage of educated leaders. Pic: https://www.sociosite.net/sociologists/davis_kingsley.php | |||
||1911: John H. Plumb born ... historian known for his books on British 18th-century history. During the Second World War Plumb worked in the codebreaking department of the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park, Hut 8 & Hut 4; later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren. Pic search. | |||
File:Telegraph.jpg|link=Electrical telegraph (nonfiction)|1911: The first cable message sent around the world from the U.S. by commercial [[Electrical telegraph (nonfiction)|telegraph]] was transmitted from New York City. It read “This message sent around the world,” left the New York Times building at 7:00 pm and was received at 7:16 pm after travelling nearly 29,000 miles through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, Phillipines, Midway, Guam, Hawaii and San Francisco. | |||
||1912: Jerome Murray born ... inventor of the peristaltic pump that made open-heart surgery possible. It met the need to pump blood without damaging the cells through a method of expansion and contraction that imitates the way that peristalsis moves the contents of the digestive tract. In addition, the pump was adapted for kidney dialysis and for food processing (to pump soup into cans without crushing the peas or the celery). He decided to invent the airplane boarding ramp when on a day in 1951 at the Miami International Airport he saw passengers having to walk in the rain to the terminal. In all, he held 75 patents including a television antenna rotator, electric carving knife, high-speed dentist drill, power car seat and an audible pressure cooker. No pic. Obit: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/11/business/jerome-murray-85-a-many-faceted-inventor.html | |||
File:Thomas Edison.jpg|link=Thomas Edison (nonfiction)|1912: [[Thomas Edison (nonfiction)|Thomas Edison]] receives U.S. patent No. 1036470 for a “Phonographic Apparatus,” and No. 1036471 for a “Storage Battery.” | |||
||1913: Roger Wolcott Sperry born ... neurobiologist, corecipient with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981 for their investigations of brain function, Sperry in particular for his study of functional specialization in the cerebral hemispheres. He was responsible for overturning the widespread belief that the left brain is dominant by showing that several cognitive abilities were localized in the right brain. He also provided experimental proof for the specificity of the reconnection of regenerating severed neurons in newts, which later led to new theories on how neurons grow. After 1965, his work turned more to psychology and philosophy. Pic. | |||
||1915: Paul Ehrlich dies ... bacteriologist, hematologist and immunologist whose pioneering work in chemotherapy included the discovery of Salvarsan (arsphenamine), the first effective treatment for syphilis against the spirochete Treponema pallidum. His research in the histology of the blood established hematology as a field. Ehrlich also developed new staining methods for microscopic studies on live tissue. At a time when little was understood about the mechanism of disease caused by bacteria, he proposed the side-chain theory as a chemical explanation of immunity, the body's defenses against infection. Though broadly incorrect, the theory nevertheless stimulated further work on the problem. He shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Russian bacteriologist, Élie Metchnikoff. Pic. | |||
||1917: Adolf von Baeyer dies ... chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate ... synthesised indigo, developed a nomenclature for cyclic compounds (that was subsequently extended and adopted as part of the IUPAC organic nomenclature). | |||
||1920: The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begins operations in Detroit. | |||
||1922: Akutsu Tetsuzo born ... surgeon who built the first artificial heart that was implanted and kept an animal alive. He was a thoracic surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic in 1957 when he was asked by Dr. Willem Kolff to collaborate in the pioneering project. On 12 Dec 1957, it kept a dog alive for 90 minutes. Thus, a new frontier was opened for artificial heart development for humans. Akutsu became assistant director at the Texas Heart Institute, and continued to develop his total artificial heart. Dr Denton Cooley had already implanted the first artifial heart in a human in 1969, but Akutsu was on his team for the implantation of the second human artificial heart at THI in 1981. After that, he returned to Japan and continued taking a major leadership role as a world expert developing the field. He published ''Heart Replacement: Artificial Heart''. Pic: https://www.todayinsci.com/8/8_20.htm | |||
||1923: Tom Mike Apostol born ... analytic number theorist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, best known as the author of widely used mathematical textbooks. Pic search. | |||
||1923, the first American-built rigid dirigible was launched in Lakehurst, N.J, later christened the U.S.S. Shenandoah (“daughter of the stars”). It was the first of the Zeppelin type (ZR-1) to use helium gas, of which a supply was was available in the U.S. It was tested in flight the following month, on 3 Sep 1923, and christened 10 Oct 1923. Covered with an aluminum-painted fabric, it was 680 feet long, weighed 36 tons, could bear 55 tons, and carry enough fuel to cruise 5,000 miles at an average speed of 65 mph. It was commanded by Commander Zachery Lansdowne (1888-1925), an early Navy aviator, who died with 14 members of the crew when the airship was struck and destroyed in a violent thunderstorm on 3 Sep 1925 over Caldwell, Ohio, though 29 of the crew survived. | |||
||1930: Herbert Hall Turner dies ... astronomer and seismologist. Pic search. | |||
||In 1930, the first demonstration telecast of home television in the U.S. was received in New York City. A half-hour program was hosted by the cartoonist Harry Hirschfeld, and demonstrated on screens placed in a store in the Hotel Ansonia, the Hearst building, and a home at 98 Riverside Drive. The signal travelled about six miles, the greatest distance for TV transmission to date. The performers were in the studios were the Jenkins W2XCR (Jersey City, NJ) and the de Forest W2XCD (Passaic, NJ). | |||
||1936: Edward Weston dies ... American chemist noted for his achievements in electroplating and his development of the electrochemical cell, named the Weston cell, for the voltage standard. Pic. | |||
||1939: Agnes Giberne dies ... astronomer and author ... prolific British author who wrote fiction with moral or religious themes for children and also books on astronomy for young people. Pic: book illustration of midnight on Saturn. | |||
File:Plutonium pellet.jpg|link=Plutonium (nonfiction)|1942: The first visible quantity of a [[Plutonium (nonfiction)|plutonium compound]], plutonium(IV) iodate, is isolated by nuclear chemists Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner. | |||
||1944: Leon Chwistek dies ... avant-garde painter, theoretician of modern art, literary critic, logician, philosopher and mathematician. Pic: portrait by Witkacy, 1913. | |||
||1953: The Soviet Union released the news that it had detonated its first hydrogen bomb. U.S. scientists identified it took place eight days earlier (12 Aug 1953), in Kazakhstan. The Soviet device had their own “layer cake” design of lithium-6 deuteride and tritium fuel layered with uranium. The explosion, with a yield of 400 kilotons (about 30 times the power of the bomb dropped on Japan, 6 Aug 1945), came less than 10 months after the first U.S. bomb test, Mike, (1 Nov 1952) announced by President Harry Truman on 7 Jan 1953. Notably, the Soviet bomb was more portable than the U.S. device—small enough to fit in a plane, and be easily weaponizeable, though its size limited the amount of thermonuclear fuel and explosive force. It was dubbed “Joe-4” in the U.S. The American test was designed for greater explosive power. | |||
File:Percy Williams Bridgman.jpg|link=Percy Williams Bridgman (nonfiction)|1961: Physicist and academic [[Percy Williams Bridgman (nonfiction)|Percy Williams Bridgman]] dies. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures. | |||
File:Alice Beta.jpg|link=Alice Beta|1962: Mathematician and crime-fighter [[Alice Beta]] publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants. | |||
||1962: The NS Savannah, the world's first nuclear-powered civilian ship, embarks on its maiden voyage. | |||
||1963: Joan Voûte born ... astronomer and academic. His preliminary account of the parallax of Proxima Centauri was published in 1917, demonstrating that Proxima was the same distance from the Sun as the Alpha Centauri system. Pic. | |||
||1968: Theodore Christian Schneirla dies ... comparative psychologist whose empirical work was based on observations on the behavior patterns of army ants. His "biphasic A-W theory" reduced all behavior to two simple responses: approach and withdrawal -- we approach what causes pleasure, and we withdraw from what causes unpleasure or pain. | |||
||1975: Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars. | |||
|| | ||1977: Voyager program: NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft. | ||
|| | ||1980: Wolfgang Gröbner ... mathematician. His name is best known for the Gröbner basis, used for computations in algebraic geometry. However, the theory of Gröbner bases for polynomial rings was developed by his student Bruno Buchberger in 1965, who named them for Gröbner. Pic | ||
|| | ||1992: Walter Lincoln Hawkins dies ... scientist and inventor. Hawkins was a pioneer of polymer chemistry. For thirty-four years he worked at Bell Laboratories, where he was instrumental in designing a long-lasting plastic to sheath telephone cable. Pic search. | ||
|| | ||1997: Norris Edwin Bradbury dies ... physicist who served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the Gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test. Pic. | ||
||2001: Fred Hoyle dies ... English astronomer and author. Pic. | |||
|| | ||2006: Mathematician Bill Parry dies. Parry contributed to dynamical systems, and, in particular, ergodic theory, and made significant contributions to these fields. He is considered to have been at the forefront of the introduction of ergodic theory to the United Kingdom. He played a founding role in the study of subshifts of finite type, and his work on nilflows was highly regarded. Pic. | ||
File:Elizabeth Dexter Hay.png|link=Betty Hay (nonfiction)|2007: Cell and developmental biologist [[Betty Hay (nonfiction)|Elizabeth Dexter “Betty” Hay]] dies. Hay conducted pioneering research in limb regeneration, the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in cell differentiation, and epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT). | |||
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|| | ||2008: Sergey Mergelyan dies ... mathematician who made major contributions to Approximation Theory. Pic. | ||
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Latest revision as of 04:43, 11 March 2022
1672: Mathematician and politician Johan de Witt dies in a riot. The rioters will partially eat his body.
1797: Physicist and priest Francesco Zantedeschi born. Zantedeschi will be among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere of red, yellow, and green light. He will also think that he detected, in 1838, a magnetic action on steel needles by ultraviolet light, anticipating later discoveries connecting light and magnetism.
1864: The Kinmon incident: a rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate breaks out near the Imperial Palace in Kyoto. The rebels will seek to restore the Imperial household to its position of political supremacy.
1911: The first cable message sent around the world from the U.S. by commercial telegraph was transmitted from New York City. It read “This message sent around the world,” left the New York Times building at 7:00 pm and was received at 7:16 pm after travelling nearly 29,000 miles through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, Phillipines, Midway, Guam, Hawaii and San Francisco.
1912: Thomas Edison receives U.S. patent No. 1036470 for a “Phonographic Apparatus,” and No. 1036471 for a “Storage Battery.”
1942: The first visible quantity of a plutonium compound, plutonium(IV) iodate, is isolated by nuclear chemists Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner.
1961: Physicist and academic Percy Williams Bridgman dies. He won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures.
1962: Mathematician and crime-fighter Alice Beta publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
2007: Cell and developmental biologist Elizabeth Dexter “Betty” Hay dies. Hay conducted pioneering research in limb regeneration, the role of the extracellular matrix (ECM) in cell differentiation, and epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT).