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| NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER 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. | |
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| Quotations for Today | |
| "In 1909, the only time during his twenty–four years at Columbia, Morgan gave the opening lectures in the undergraduate course in beginning zoology. It so happened that C. B. Bridges and I were both in the class. While genetics was not mentioned, we were both attracted to Morgan and were fortunate enough, though both still undergraduates, to be given desks in his laboratory the following year (1910–1911). The possibilities of the genetic study of Drosophila were then just beginning to be apparent; we were at the right place at the right time. … In the latter part of 1911, in conversation with Morgan … I suddenly realized that the variations in strength of linkage, already attributed by Morgan to differences in the spatial separation of the genes, offered the possibility of determining sequences in the linear dimension of a chromosome. I went home and spent most of the night (to the neglect of my undergraduate homework) in producing the first chromosome map, ... in the order and approximately the relative spacing that they still appear on the standard maps." (193) - Alfred H. Sturtevant, American geneticist (born 21 Nov 1891) "I am doing my own research because I love intimacy with chemistry. I love to carry out experiments with my own hands, to see, and smell transformations of matter." - Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff, Russian-born U.S. chemist who developed a process to manufacture high-octane gasoline (born 21 Nov 1867) (source) "As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress." - Lewis Henry Morgan, American ethnologist (born 21 Nov 1818) | |
| QUIZ | |
| Births | |
| Hieronymus Theodor Richter, born 21 Nov 1824, was a German mineralogist who in 1863 was a co-discoverer of a new element present in samples of an ore. When he placed some of the sample in a loop of platinum wire and heated it in the flame of a Bunsen burner, he observed a brilliant indigo line characteristic of this as a new element. Which element did he co-discover? | |
| Deaths | |
| Abdus Salam (1926-1996) was a Pakistani nuclear physicist who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics. He had independently formulated a theory explaining the underlying unity of two of the fundamental forces. One of these, he postulated, must be transmitted by hitherto-undiscovered particles known as W and Z bosons. To which two fundamental forces did his theory relate? | |
| Events | |
| On 21 Nov 1953, a 40-year-long hoax ended when the British Museum revealed that it was a "perfectly executed and carefully prepared fraud." The forgery was conceived, planned and executed sometime between 1907 and 1911. A faux hominid skull was constructed from the remains of a recent human cranium, half the lower jaw of an orangutan from which telltale parts had been removed and whose teeth had been filed to resemble worn human teeth; and a doctored canine tooth, probably from the same lower jaw. In all, thirty-seven pieces of bone and stone were involved, each carefully selected, each altered and stained. By what name had this purported homonid been known? | |
| On 21 Nov 1877, Thomas Edison announced his invention of his "talking machine" - a cylinder recorder that preceeded the phonograph. He appears to have envisioned it as a business dictation machine. In Sep 1877, he wrote that its purpose was "to record automatically the speech of a very rapid speaker." The surface he used, however, would survive only a few playings. What was this early cylinder's surface? | |
| On 21 Nov of a certain year, Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis Francois Laurant d'Arlandes, made the first flight in a balloon. These first men to fly lifted off from La Muettte, a royal palace in The Bois de Boulogne, Paris. They flew 25 minutes, reaching an altitude of around 300 feet, and landed nearly 6 miles away. In what decade did this flight take place? | |
| 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 November 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 November 20: elliptical, spiral, and irregular; the first air pump and used it to study the phenomenon of vacuum; a device that separates atoms or molecular fragments of different mass and measures those masses; the decade containing the year 1861; automatic traffic signal. | |
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