Template:Selected anniversaries/August 20
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).