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14 Sep 1638
Pierre Vernier |
death Pierre Vernier Died 14 Sep 1638 at age 54 (born 19 Aug 1584). French mathematician who invented the vernier scale, which enabled instruments to make more accurate linear or angular measurements. He first described it in a work entitled La construction, l'usage et les propriétés du cadran nouveau (1631)*. It consists of a small graduated scale or arc made to slide along a larger fixed scale or arc to enable determining the increment between two graduations of the larger scale. The ten divisions of the smaller, vernier scale are equal to nine of the fixed scale. For example, calipers with a larger scale graduated in tenths of inches can be read by use of the vernier scale to within one-hundredths of an inch. Vernier scales are also used on sextants and mercury column barometers. |
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14 Sep 1698
Charles Du Fay |
birth Charles Du Fay Born 14 Sep 1698; died 16 Jul 1739 at age 40. Charles François de Cisternay Du Fay was a French chemist who made early experiments in electricity. In 1733, he distinguished electrical fluid in two types he named “vitreous electricity” and “resinous electricity” depending on the objects that produced the charge (subsequently called “positive” and “negative” by Benjamin Franklin). Du Fay discovered that objects with like charges repel each other, but oppositely charged objects attract. He also noted the effect of electricity shock on his body, and visible spark when making contact with a highly charged object. He observed that electricity may be conducted in the gaseous matter (now called plasma) adjacent to a red-hot body. Du Fay was also a pioneer in crystal optics. |
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14 Sep 1712
Giovanni Domenico Cassini |
death Giovanni Domenico Cassini Died 14 Sep 1712 at age 87 (born 8 Jun 1625). Italian-French astronomer who discovered (1675) the dark gap subdividing Saturn's rings into two parts, now known as Cassini's Division. He stated that Saturn's ring, believed by Huygens to be a single body, was actually composed of small particles. Cassini also discovered four of Saturn's moons: Iapetus (Sep 1671), Rhea (1672) and on 21 Mar 1684, Tethys and Dione. He compiled new tables (1662) on the annual motion of the Sun. He observed shadows of four Galilean satellites on Jupiter (1664), and measured its rotation period by studying the bands and spots on its surface. He determined the period of rotation of Mars (1666), and attempted the same for Venus. His son Jacques was also an astronomer. |
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14 Sep 1712
Giovanni Cassini |
death Giovanni Cassini Giovanni Cassini, Italian-born astronomer (born 1625) |
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14 Sep 1716
First U.S. lighthouse |
First U.S. lighthouse In 1716, Boston Light, the first lighthouse in America was first lighted just before sunset. Located on Little Brewster Island to mark the entrance to Boston, Massachusetts, harbour, has guided ships since then. Building it was authorized 23 Jul 1715 by the Boston Light Bill. In the 1600s, treacherous rocks caused countless loss of lives. False signal fires lit in the wrong places by “wreckers” lured ships aground to plunder. Boston Light was blown up by the British in 1776, but rebuilt in 1783 by Governor John Hancock. The lighthouse is also the last remaining manned station in the U.S. |
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14 Sep 1769
Baron Alexander von Humboldt |
birth Baron Alexander von Humboldt Born 14 Sep 1769; died 6 May 1859 at age 89. (Baron) Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German natural scientist, archeologist, explorer and geographer, who made two major expeditions to Latin America (1799-1804) and to Asia (1829). During the first, equipped with the best scientific instruments, he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants. He charted and made observations on a cold ocean current along the Peruvian coast, now named, the Humboldt Current. In geology, he made pioneering observations of stratigraphy, structure and geomorphology; he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. Humboldt named the Jurassic System. |
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14 Sep 1769
Alexander von Humboldt |
birth Alexander von Humboldt Alexander von Humboldt, naturalist and explorer (died 1859) |
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14 Sep 1781
James Walker |
birth James Walker James Walker, Scottish civil engineer (died 1862) |
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14 Sep 1804
John Gould |
birth John Gould John Gould, zoologist (died 1881) |
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14 Sep 1811
William Budd |
birth William Budd Born 14 Sep 1811; died 9 Jan 1880 at age 68. English physician who followed his father and five of his brothers into the medical profession. He earned his M.D. degree at the University of Edinburgh (1838). From 1841, he practiced in Bristol. At a time before Pasteur's knowledge of microorganisms, Budd recognized that the contagious disease was related to unidentified poisons that multiplied in the intestines and were passed in excretions. In On Malignant Cholera (1849), he warned that disease was transmitted when excretions contaminated drinking water. He was inspired by the similar work of John Snow in London. With a regimen to protect Bristol's water supply from such contamination, in 1866, Budd was able to curb the epidemic spread of cholera. He studied other communicable diseases, including diptheria, scarlet fever, rinderpest and TB. |
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14 Sep 1835
John Brinkley |
death John Brinkley John Brinkley (born 1763), British astronomer. |
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14 Sep 1842
Charles Darwin |
Charles Darwin English naturalist Charles Darwin and his family settle at Down House in Kent. |
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14 Sep 1847
William Edward Ayrton |
birth William Edward Ayrton Born 14 Sep 1847; died 8 Nov 1908 at age 61. English physicist and inventor who was a pioneer in technical education. He collaborated with John Perry, and their numerous inventions include an electric tricycle (1882), the first practical portable ammeter, voltmeter and other instruments for electrical measurement. Earlier in his career, he had spent five years with the Indian Telegraph Service during which time he developed techniques for fault detection in order to maintain the telegraph system. |
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14 Sep 1847
Pavel Yablochkov |
birth Pavel Yablochkov Born 14 Sep 1847; died 31 Mar 1894 at age 46. Pavel Nikolayevich Yablochkov (also called Paul Jablochkov) was a Russian electrical engineer who invented an improved arc lamp, known as the Yablochkov candle (1876). Being cheap and relatively inexpensive, it was used in public buildings and to light streets for several decades before the advent of incandescent lighting which required much less maintenance. A brilliant white light was produced by an electric arc between two parallel carbon rods, using alternating current to ensure that the rods vaporised at equal rates. Yablochkov candles were used from 1877 in Paris, and were installed in London along Victoria Embankment (1878), followed by Billingsgate fish market, the Mansion House and Holborn Viaduct. |
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14 Sep 1849
Ivan Pavlov |
birth Ivan Pavlov Ivan Pavlov (died 1936), Russian physiologist. |
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14 Sep 1853
Hugh Edwin Strickland |
death Hugh Edwin Strickland Hugh Edwin Strickland (born 1811), English geologist and ornithologist. |
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14 Sep 1856
Sergei Winogradsky |
birth Sergei Winogradsky Sergei Winogradsky (died 1953), Russian microbiologist. |
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14 Sep 1879
Carl Bernhard von Cotta |
death Carl Bernhard von Cotta Died 14 Sep 1879 at age 70 (born 24 Oct 1808). German geologist. |
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14 Sep 1879
Margaret Sanger |
birth Margaret Sanger Born 14 Sep 1879; died 6 Sep 1966 at age 86. (née Maragret Louisa Higgins) American birth-control champion who founded the first U.S. birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York (1916), where she had witnessed firsthand the interaction of poverty, uncontrolled fertility, and deaths from botched abortions, together with high rates of infant and maternal mortality. She became an international leader, and is credited with originating the term "birth control." |
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14 Sep 1882
Georges Leclanché |
death Georges Leclanché Died 14 Sep 1882 (born 1839). French engineer who invented the wet cell Leclanché battery (1866), ancestor of the familiar carbon-zinc dry cell batteries used to power portable electric lights and electronic devices. His wet cell, provided an e.m.f. of about 1.5 volts. A porous pot containing manganese dioxide and a carbon rod as current collector was immersed in an electrolyte of ammonium chloride solution with a negative terminal of zinc metal. From 1867, Leclanché gave full-time attention to his invention, which was adopted the following year by the Belgian telegraph service. He opened a factory to manufacture the battery. In 1881, J.A. Thiebaut had the idea of packing the chemicals in a zinc cup. Carl Gassner made the first commercially successful “dry” cell. |
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14 Sep 1883
Alexander Meissner |
birth Alexander Meissner Born 14 Sep 1883; died 3 Jan 1958 at age 74. Austrian engineer whose work in antenna design, amplification, and detection advanced the development of radio telegraphy. In 1907 he joined the Telefunken Company of Berlin, where he conducted research on radio problems. He improved the design of antennas for transmitting at long wavelengths, devised new vacuum-tube circuits and amplification systems, and developed the heterodyne principle for radio reception. In 1911 Meissner designed the first rotary radio beacon to aid in the navigation of the Zeppelin airships. In 1913 he was the first to amplify high-frequency radio signals by using feedback in a vacuum triode; this principle made it possible to build radio receivers more sensitive than any earlier type. |
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14 Sep 1886
Typewriter ribbon patented |
Typewriter ribbon patented In 1886, the first U.S. patent for a typewriter ribbon was issued to George Kerr Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee (No. 349,026). His invention was to provide portions near the ends of a ribbon with a colour contrasting from that of the body of the ribbon. This was intended to notify the operator of the machine to manually change the direction of the ribbon feed. Although the typed result near the end of a ribbon would be in a different colour, it was not lost. Before, in uses such as stenographic work, if a ribbon stopped at the end of its reel, the result gave a rapidly fading imprint while there may still be a need to finish a line before stopping to reverse the ribbon. |
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14 Sep 1887
Karl Taylor Compton |
birth Karl Taylor Compton Born 14 Sep 1887; died 22 Jun 1954 at age 66. American educator and physicist who directed development of radar during WW II. His research included the passage of photoelectrons through metals, ionization and the motion of electrons in gases, fluorescence, the theory of the electric arc, and collisions of electrons and atoms. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked him to chair the new Scientific Advisory Board. When the National Defense Research Committee was formed in 1940, he was chief of Division D (detection: radar, fire control, etc.) In 1941, he was in charge of those divisions concerned with radar within the new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Afterwards he was cited for personally shortening the duration of the war. He was the first recipient William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, and brother of Arthur H. Compton. |
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14 Sep 1891
Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov |
birth Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov (died 1983), Russian mathematician. |
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14 Sep 1895
Charles Valentine Riley |
death Charles Valentine Riley Died 14 Sep 1895 at age 51 (born 18 Sep 1843). British-born American entomologist who pioneered the scientific study of insects for their economic impact in agriculture. He was a keen observer of relationships in nature, and enhanced his written observations with drawings. He initiated biological control. After studying the parasites and predators of the cottony cushion scale, which was destroying the citrus industry in California, he introduced (1888) a natural enemy of the scale from Australia. The effectiveness of the Vedalia cardinalis beetle in reducing the populations of the cottony cushion scale promoted the study of biological control of pests. He helped establish the Division of Entomology of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. |
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14 Sep 1898
William Seward Burroughs |
death William Seward Burroughs William Seward Burroughs (born 1855), American inventor of the adding machine. |
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14 Sep 1905
RAC |
RAC In 1905, the oldest car race still run was first held on the Isle of Man, Great Britain for the Royal Automobile Club Tourist Trophy. |
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14 Sep 1907
Solomon Asch |
birth Solomon Asch Solomon Asch (died 1996), Polish-born social psychologist. |
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14 Sep 1909
Sir Peter Scott |
birth Sir Peter Scott Born 14 Sep 1909; died 29 Aug 1989 at age 79. Sir Peter Markham Scott, son of Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic), was a British naturalist, conservationist, artist, and author. He was a founder of both the Severn Wildfowl Trust (1946, now renamed as the Wildlife and Wetlands Trust) and the World Wildlife Fund. From 1953 to 1970 he hosted the environmental television series Look for the British Broadcasting Corporation. (In 1978, he gave the Loch Ness Monster a scientific name, Nessiteras rhombopteryx. Scottish Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn later anagrammed it: "Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S." ) |
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14 Sep 1909
Peter Scott |
birth Peter Scott Peter Scott (died 1989), English conservationist. |
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14 Sep 1914
Robert S. Dietz |
birth Robert S. Dietz Born 14 Sep 1914; died 19 May 1995 at age 80. Robert Sinclair Dietz was an American geophysicist and oceanographer who set forth a theory (1961) of seafloor spreading (a term he coined), in which new crustal material continually upwells from the Earth's depths along the mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward at a rate of several inches per year. While a student Dietz identified the Kentland structure in Indiana as a meteoric impact site. His professors steered him toward marine geology. He became the founder and director of the Sea Floor Studies Section at the Naval Electronics Laboratory (1946-1963). He also achieved prominence by studying meteorite craters, both on Earth and on the moon and arguing that these impact craters were common. He died of a heart attack. |
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14 Sep 1916
Pierre Duhem |
death Pierre Duhem Died 14 Sep 1916 at age 55 (born 10 Jun 1861). Pierre-Maurice-Marie Duhem was a French physicist, philosopher of science and mathematician who emphasized a history of modern science based on evolutionary metaphysical concepts. He had a wide variety of mathematical interests from mechanics and physics to philosophy and the history of mathematics. Duhem studied magnetism following the work of Gibbs and Helmholtz and also worked on thermodynamics and hydrodynamics producing over 400 papers. He maintained that the role of theory in science is to systematize relationships rather than to interpret new phenomena. |
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14 Sep 1926
Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer |
death Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer Died 14 Sep 1926 at age 74 (born 13 Feb 1852). Danish astronomer who compiled the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, (NGC) in 1888. When he became Director of the Armagh Observatory in 1882, financially it was destitute, with no prospect of replacing its aging instruments. Though Dreyer obtained a new 10-inch refractor by Grubb, the lack of funding for an assistant, precluded him from a continuation of traditional positional astronomy. Instead he concentrated on the compilation of observations made earlier. The NGC he listed 7840 objects and in its supplements (1895, 1908) he added a further 5386 objects. It still remains one of the standard reference catalogs. |
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14 Sep 1927
Julian Sochocki |
death Julian Sochocki Julian Sochocki (born 1842), Polish-born mathematician. |
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14 Sep 1940
Émile Argand |
death Émile Argand Died 14 Sep 1940 at age 61 (born 6 Jan 1879). Swiss geologist who studied the structure of the Alps. He produced a map of the Dent Blanche massif (1908) with a description of his investigation of the strata. In 1915, he coined the term embryotectonics for a new line of research which analyzed the sequential evolution of geological structures back to its origins as a sedimentary terrain. |
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14 Sep 1956
Lobotomy |
Lobotomy In 1956, the first U.S. prefrontal lobotomy surgery was performed. Surgeons J.W. Watts and Walter Freeman operated on a 63-year-old woman at the George Washington University Hospital. |
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14 Sep 1958
rockets |
rockets (astronomy and space ) Two rockets designed by Ernst Mohr (the first post-war German rockets) reach the upper atmosphere. |
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14 Sep 1959
Moon probe |
Moon probe In 1959, the first space probe to strike the moon was the Soviet Luna 2, which crashed east of the Sea of Serenity. Thirty-six hours after its launch on 12 Sep 1959, it was the first man-made object reach a celestial body. |
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14 Sep 1960
Sir Arthur Percy Morris Fleming |
death Sir Arthur Percy Morris Fleming Died 14 Sep 1960 at age 79 (born 16 Jan 1881). English engineer who was a major figure in developing techniques for manufacturing radar components. During WW I, Fleming made important advances in submarine-detection gear. In 1920, as a pioneer in the development of radio, he established in Manchester the second British transmitting station to broadcast programs on a daily basis. His work on demountable, high-power thermionic tubes made it possible to establish radar stations in Great Britain by the time WW II began in 1939. |
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14 Sep 1970
Rudolf Carnap |
death Rudolf Carnap Died 14 Sep 1970 at age 79 (born 18 May 1891). German-American philosopher who made significant contributions to logic and the philosophy of science. To avoid the ambiguities resulting from the use of ordinary language, he made a logical analysis of language. He believed in studying philosphical issues in artificial languages constructed under the rules of logic and mathematics. His applications of such languages included the different interpretation of probability, the nature of explanation and the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, a priori and a posteriori, and necessary and contingent statements. His influential books include The Logical Structure of the World (1928) and The Logical Syntax of Language (1934). |
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14 Sep 2003
Garrett Hardin |
death Garrett Hardin Died 14 Sep 2003 at age 88 (born 21 Apr 1915). American ecologist, microbiologist and author known for his classic essay on ecology and social ethics Tragedy of the Commons (published in Science, 13 Dec 1968), a parable about farmers who, allowed to graze their cattle in one field as much as they wanted to, each acted in their own self-interest, and the field was destroyed. He extended the idea of self-interest beyond the individual to households, villages, companies or nations. His concept of the commons includes ecosystems, rivers, oceans, organisms or mineral resources with actions such as over-fishing, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. He concluded that the Earth will likewise be destroyed by overpopulation. Hardin was a founding member of Planned Parenthood. He died by suicide when in frail health. |