Παρασκευή 21 Σεπτεμβρίου 2012

Newsletter for Friday 21 September

 

Newsletter - September 21 - Today in Science History  

TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY
 NEWSLETTER - SEPTEMBER 21
Before you look at today's web page, see if you can answer some of these questions about the events that happened on this day. Some of the names are very familiar. Others will likely stump you. Tickle your curiosity with these questions, then check your answers on today's web page.
Frank Hornby - The Boy Who Made $1,000,000 With A ToyOn 21 Sep 1936, Frank Hornby died, the English toy manufacturer who invented the Meccano construction toy with its familiar perforated metal strips in 1901 (copied by Erector Set). He introduced Hornby model trains in 1920 and the Dinky range of model cars from 1933. Today's Science Store picks are The Toy Story: The Life and Times of Frank Hornby, by Anthony McReavy, new $29.99, Price: $19.79; and Frank Hornby: The Boy Who Made $1,000,000 With A Toy, by M. P. Gould, reproduced from the original 1915 biography. Price: $19.95.
Yesterday's pick: The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth. For picks from earlier newsletters, see the Today in Science Science Store home page.
Quotations for Today
"The native hospital in Tunis was the focal point of my research. Often, when going to the hospital, I had to step over the bodies of typhus patients who were awaiting admission to the hospital and had fallen exhausted at the door. We had observed a certain phenomenon at the hospital, of which no one recognized the significance, and which drew my attention. In those days typhus patients were accomodated in the open medical wards. Before reaching the door of the wards they spread contagion. They transmitted the disease to the families that sheltered them, and doctors visiting them were also infected. The administrative staff admitting the patients, the personnel responsible for taking their clothes and linen, and the laundry staff were also contaminated. In spite of this, once admitted to the general ward the typhus patient did not contaminate any of the other patients, the nurses or the doctors. I took this observation as my guide. I asked myself what happened between the entrance to the hospital and the wards. This is what happened: the typhus patient was stripped of his clothes and linen, shaved and washed. The contagious agent was therefore something attached to his skin and clothing, something which soap and water could remove. It could only be the louse. It was the louse." - Charles-Jules-Henri Nicolle, French bacteriologist who received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery (1909) that typhus is transmitted by the body louse (born 21 Sep 1866)

"According to my views, aiming at quantitative investigations, that is at establishing relations between measurements of phenomena, should first take place in the experimental practice of physics. By measurement to knowledge (door meten tot weten) I should like to write as a motto above the entrance to every physics laboratory." - Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, 1913 Nobel prize winner in physics for low-temperature research (born 21 Sep 1853)

"Quinquies exscriptus, maneat tot millibus annis. (I wrote it out five times, may it last the same number of millennia.)" Final line of his Ars magna - Gerolamo Cardano, Italian physician, mathematician, first to clinically describe typhus fever (died 21 Sep 1576)

QUIZ
Births
Donald A. Glaser, born 21 Sep 1926, is an American physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1960 for his invention, used to observe the behaviour of subatomic particles.
What was this scientist's invention?
John McAdam, born 21 Sep 1756, was a Scottish inventor who developed new methods of road construction.
In what words are this scientist's invention remembered?
Deaths
Earle Dickson (1892-1961) found his wife prone to kitchen accidents - cuts or burns and he frequently was dressing her small wounds with cotton gauze and adhesive tape.
He devised a new dressing. How did this lead to a now familiar product?
Events
On 21 Sep of a certain year, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company became the first auto manufacturer to open in the U.S. The Duryea brothers had built the first automobile two years earlier, a horseless carriage, believed to be the first gasoline-powered automobile built in the United States
In what decade did their company open?
Answers
When you have your answers ready to all the questions above, you'll find all the information to check them, and more, on the September 21 web page of Today in Science History.

Or, try this link first for just the brief answers.
 

Fast answers for the previous newsletter for September 20:  table salt; Sir James Dewar; mumps; uranium; decade containing the year 1954.
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