November 23

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  1553: Physician and botanist Prospero Alpini born. He will travel around Egypt, serve as the fourth prefect in charge of the botanical garden of Padua, and write several botanical treatises covering exotic plants of economic and medicinal value.

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  1720: Clockmaker Jean-André Lepaute born. He will be an innovator, making numerous improvements to clockmaking, especially his pin-wheel escapement, and his clockworks in which the gears are all in the horizontal plane.

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  1837: Theoretical physicist and academic Johannes Diderik van der Waals born. He will win the 1910 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids.

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  1847: Engineer Charles Renard born. Renard will pioneer the design and construction of airships. He will also propose a set of preferred numbers now known as the Renard series.

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  1924: Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.