Template:Selected anniversaries/August 21: Difference between revisions
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||1665: Giacomo F. Maraldi born ... astronomer and mathematician. | ||1665: Giacomo F. Maraldi born ... astronomer and mathematician. | ||
||1673: Reinier de Graaf dies ... physician who discovered the follicles of the ovary (known as Graafian follicles), in which the individual egg cells are formed (1672) and also published on male reproductive organs (1668). He was also important for his studies on pancreatic juice (1663) and on the reproductive organs of mammals. He is considered one of the creators of experimental physiology. He used a technique of injecting dye into organs in order to be able to observe them better. It was on this technique that a bitter priority dispute with Swammerdam developed. He wrote a brief tract on the use of the syringe in anatomy (1669). He died, perhaps by suicide, at only 32 years of age. Pic. | |||
||1754: William Murdoch born ... engineer and inventor, created gas lighting. Pic. | ||1754: William Murdoch born ... engineer and inventor, created gas lighting. Pic. | ||
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||1813: Jean Servais Stas born ... chemist, notable for his accurate determinations of atomic weights. He had worked under the direction of Dumas, with whom he established the atomic weight of carbon. Stas worked assiduously to make more accurate measurements of other atomic weights than had ever been done before. Stas wished to prove the hypothesis of Joseph Proust, that all atoms were conglomerations of hydrogen atoms, though this could not be achieved. Stas was probably the most skillful chemical analyst of the nineteenth century. Pic. | ||1813: Jean Servais Stas born ... chemist, notable for his accurate determinations of atomic weights. He had worked under the direction of Dumas, with whom he established the atomic weight of carbon. Stas worked assiduously to make more accurate measurements of other atomic weights than had ever been done before. Stas wished to prove the hypothesis of Joseph Proust, that all atoms were conglomerations of hydrogen atoms, though this could not be achieved. Stas was probably the most skillful chemical analyst of the nineteenth century. Pic. | ||
||1814: Benjamin Thompson dies ... physicist and | ||1814: Benjamin Thompson Rumford dies ... physicist, government administrator, and a founder of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London. Because he was a Redcoat officer and an English spy during the American revolution, he moved into exile in England. Through his investigations of heat he became one of the first scientists to declare that heat is a form of motion rather than a material substance, as was popularly believed until the mid-19th century. Among his numerous scientific contributions are the development of a calorimeter and a photometer. He invented a double boiler, a kitchen stove and a drip coffee pot. Pic. | ||
||1816: Charles Frédéric Gerhardt born ... chemist. | ||1816: Charles Frédéric Gerhardt born ... chemist. | ||
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|File:Wizard Jan Kochanowski.jpg|link=Jan_Kochanowski|1872: Poet and wizard [[Jan Kochanowski]] adapts [[Nebra sky disk (nonfiction)|Nebra sky disk]] for use as [[scrying engine]]. | |File:Wizard Jan Kochanowski.jpg|link=Jan_Kochanowski|1872: Poet and wizard [[Jan Kochanowski]] adapts [[Nebra sky disk (nonfiction)|Nebra sky disk]] for use as [[scrying engine]]. | ||
||1888: The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs. | ||1888: The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs. ... William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, received patents on four adding machine applications (No. 388,116-388,119), the first U.S. patents for a "Calculating-Machine" that the inventor would continue to improve and successfully market. One year after making his first patent application on 10 Jan 1885, he incorporated his business as the American Arithmometer Corporation of St. Louis, in Jan 1886, with an authorized capitalization of $100,000. After Burrough's early death in 1898, after moving from St. Louis to Detroit, Michigan, that company reorganized as the Burroughs Adding Machine Co., incorporated in Jan 1905, with a capital of $5 million. | ||
||1901: Adolf Eugen Fick dies ... physiologist who made several physiological measurment devices, including the first practical opthalmotonometer for the measurement of intraocular pressure. He developed fundamental laws of diffusion in living organisms (published in Die medizinische Physik, 1856) and is remembered for Fick's Law which enables calculation of the cardiac output. Pic. | |||
||1901: Edward Copson born ... mathematician known for his studies in classical analysis, differential and integral equations, and their use in mathematical physics. After graduating from Oxford University with a B.A. degree in 1922, he moved to Scotland where he spent the nearly all of his career. His first book, The Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable (1935) was immediately successful. He was a co-author for his next book, The Mathematical Theory of Huygens' Principle (1939). By 1975, he had published four more books, on asymptotic expansions, metric spaces and partial differential equations. Many of the papers he wrote bridged mathematics and physics, of which his last showed his interest in astrophysics, Electrostatics in a Gravitational Field (1978) which was relevant to Black Holes. Pic: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_Copson | ||1901: Edward Copson born ... mathematician known for his studies in classical analysis, differential and integral equations, and their use in mathematical physics. After graduating from Oxford University with a B.A. degree in 1922, he moved to Scotland where he spent the nearly all of his career. His first book, The Theory of Functions of a Complex Variable (1935) was immediately successful. He was a co-author for his next book, The Mathematical Theory of Huygens' Principle (1939). By 1975, he had published four more books, on asymptotic expansions, metric spaces and partial differential equations. Many of the papers he wrote bridged mathematics and physics, of which his last showed his interest in astrophysics, Electrostatics in a Gravitational Field (1978) which was relevant to Black Holes. Pic: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_Copson | ||
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File:The Custodian.jpg|link=The Custodian|1945: [[The Custodian]] stops [[Baron Zersetzung]] from stealing the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory. | File:The Custodian.jpg|link=The Custodian|1945: [[The Custodian]] stops [[Baron Zersetzung]] from stealing the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory. | ||
||1957: Harald Sverdrup dies ... meteorologist and oceanographer known for his studies of the physics, chemistry, and biology of the oceans. He explained the equatorial countercurrents and helped develop the method of predicting surf and breakers. As scientific director of Roald Amundsen's polar expedition on Maud (1918-1925), Sverdrup worked extensively on meteorology, magnetics, atmospheric electricity, physical oceanography, and tidal dynamics on the Siberian shelf, and even on the anthropology of Chukchi natives. In 1953, Sverdrup quantified the concept of "critical depth", explaining the onset of the spring phytoplankton bloom in newly stratified water columns. Pic. | |||
||1957: The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile. | ||1957: The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile. | ||
File:Mars Observer diagram.png|link=Mars Observer (nonfiction)|1993: NASA loses contact with the [[Mars Observer (nonfiction)|Mars Observer]]. | File:Mars Observer diagram.png|link=Mars Observer (nonfiction)|1993: NASA loses contact with the [[Mars Observer (nonfiction)|Mars Observer]]. | ||
||1960: David Barnard Steinman dies ... engineer whose studies of airflow and wind velocity helped make possible the design of aerodynamically stable bridges. Steinman's thesis for his Ph.D. from Colombia University (1911) was published as "The Design of the Henry Hudson Memorial Bridge as a Steel Arch, and more than 20 years later he built the bridge he had planned over the Harlem River. Steinman designed more than 400 bridges. He also published children's books and poetry. Pic. | |||
||1986: A limnic eruption at Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon kills 1,746 people and some 3,500 livestock. | ||1986: A limnic eruption at Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon kills 1,746 people and some 3,500 livestock. | ||
||1989: The U.S. space probe Voyager 2 fired its thrusters to bring it closer to Neptune's mysterious moon Triton. This later photograph (left) shows a false-color image of Triton, taken two days before closest approach. At 2,700 km diameter, Triton is Neptune's largest satellite. The smallest features resolvable in this image are about 47 km across. The image is a composite of three images taken through ultraviolet, green, and violet filters. | |||
||1993: Contact was lost with the Mars Observer spacecraft, following the pressurization of the rocket thruster fuel tanks, three days before it was to begin orbiting the Red Planet. The Mars Observer was to be the first U.S. spacecraft to study Mars since the Viking missions 18 years earlier. The fate of the $980 million mission remains unknown, though a commission studied possible causes for the failure. | |||
File:Richard Smalley.jpg|link=Richard Smalley (nonfiction)|1995: [[Richard Smalley (nonfiction)|Richard Smalley]] uses carbon nanotubes to detect and prevent [[crimes against mathematical constants]]. | File:Richard Smalley.jpg|link=Richard Smalley (nonfiction)|1995: [[Richard Smalley (nonfiction)|Richard Smalley]] uses carbon nanotubes to detect and prevent [[crimes against mathematical constants]]. | ||
Revision as of 17:18, 16 August 2018
1660: Physician, mathematician, and engineer Hubert Gautier dies. He authored the first book on bridge building, Traité des Ponts, in 1716, as well as books on roads, fortifications, antiquities, geology, and a first manual for watercolor practitioners.
1910: Astrophysicist, astronomer, and mathematician Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar dies. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars".
1944: Extract of Radium distributor and alleged crime boss Baron Zersetzung programs the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory to fatally irradiate physicist and crime-fighter Harry Daghlian.
1945: Physicist Harry Daghlian is fatally irradiated in a criticality accident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1945: The Custodian stops Baron Zersetzung from stealing the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
1993: NASA loses contact with the Mars Observer.
1995: Richard Smalley uses carbon nanotubes to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.
2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars broadcasts a minute of silence in recognition of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the loss of the Mars Observer.