Gilbert White

Gilbert White was born on July 18, 1720 in the village of Selborne, England, while his parents were living in the house of his grandfather, also named Gilbert White, the vicar of Selborne. When White was one year old, his father and mother moved to a house in the village of Compton. Like any other country boy, Gilbert took many walks through nature, although he did not keep diary of his walks. The family moved back to Selborne when he was nine, after the death of his grandfather. At the age of thirteen or fourteen White went to Basingstoke where he studied under the Reverend Thomas Warton. In April 1740 he entered Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1743.

He spent the following year at Oriel attending lectures on mathematics and was elected fellow the following March. In April 1747 he received Deacon's orders and became the curate for his uncle Charles in Swarraton. In due time he was ordained priest by the bishop of Hereford. He was elected proctor and returned to Oxford for a year in 1753. He returned to Selborn in 1755, although he did not remain there permanently until he became curate in 1784. He remained in Selborne for the rest of his life.

White is most famous for his book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in 1789. The book is a compilation of a series of letters that White wrote to Thomas Pennant, a leading zoologist of the day and Daines Barrington a barrister and member of the Royal Society. In the letters, White describes his observations of nature, among other things describing the feeding habits of bats, the evening maneuvers of rooks and the improvement of horticultural soil by earthworms. In the work White identifies many species for the first time.

White is honored as the first English ecologist and the book, which has been in publication since its first printing, has been recognized as the fourth most published book in the English language, after the Bible, the Works of Shakespeare, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. White lived out his days in Selborne, passing away on June 26, 1793.

References:

Parkins, Keith;"Gilbert White"

Mabey, Richard; Gilbert White:A Biography of the Author of the Natural History of Selborne; University of Virginia Press; 2007

Gilbert White of Selborne; 1899

Gilbert White Wikipedia Entry

Theodore Maiman

Theodore Harold Maiman was born or July 11, 1927 in Los Angeles, California. The next year he moved to Denver, Colorado with his parents. His father, Abraham Maiman, was an electrical engineer and an inventor. Maiman was curious to how things work and was always taking things apart, to the dismay of his parents. In high school he worked in a electronics repair shop to earn money.

He earned a BS in engineering physics from the University of Colorado in 1949 and then went on to Stanford University where he earned a MS in electrical engineering in 1951 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1955 completing a thesis, under Willis Lamb, involving detailed optical measurements of the fine structure splittings in excited helium atoms

He then joined Hughes Laboratories where he worked on the stimulated emission of microwave energy. A MASER (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) had been invented earlier by Charles Townes working at Bell Laboratories. Townes and Arthur Schawlow in their paper suggest that their success, creating the MASER, could be repeated making a device that emits a coherent beam of light in the visual spectrum. This is called a LASER (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).

Maiman was the first to produce a working LASER, announcing his invention at a press conference on July 7, 1960. He published his results in the British journal Nature, after his paper was refused by Physical Review Letters because it was deemed to be to repetitive. Maiman left Hughes Laboratories in 1962 and went on to work for a series of different companies, some of his own founding, working on LASERs and their applications.

Maiman was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize and was a member of the National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering. He won the Oliver E Buckley Prize in 1966 and won the 1983/4 Wolf Prize for Physics. He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in also in 1984.

He died on May 5, 2007.

References:

Day, Lance; McNeil Ian; "Maiman, Theodore Harold" in Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology; Taylor & Francis; 1998

Martin Douglas; "Theodore Maiman Dies, 79; Demonstrated First Laser";New York Times; May 11, 2007

Wycoff, Edwin Britt; Laser Man: Theodore Maiman and His Brilliant Invention; Enslow Publishers Inc; 2007

Theodore Maiman Wikipedia Entry

Charles Schuchert

Charles Schuchert was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 3, 1858 the oldest of six children of German emigrant parents, who had come to Cincinnati only a few years previously. His father, Philip, was a cabinetmaker and built up a successful business. At six, young Charles began attending Catholic parochial school, finishing at age twelve to go on to business school, to train as a bookkeeper for his father's business. While in school, Schuchert worked in his father's shop, first in the varnishing room. He did not last one year in business school, but continued working for his father, gradually working his way up to become general manager of his father's shop. In 1877 a fire destroyed the business, leaving Schuchert to support the family by working in other furniture factories.

Throughout his youth Schuchert collected fossils. In 1869 his father took him to see the museum of William Foster, who had a great quantity of fossil samples from around Cincinnati. Schuchert was amazed to learn that most of the fossils displayed were from under the sea that had once covered Ohio. In 1877 Schuchert met Edward Oscar Ulrich, who had a large collection of fossils and had done college work in paleontology. In 1881 Ulrich began publishing papers on local fossils and Schuchert helped him using lithography to illustrate his work. Ulrich began getting commissions to write and Schuchert helped him with the work. By this time Schuchert had collected a large collection of brachiopods, a phylum of marine animals with hard valves (shells), some collected on his own and some obtained from trading samples with Ulrich and other collectors.

In 1889 James Hall, the state paleontologist of New York came to Cincinnati in order to prepare a work on brachiopods. Hall met with Schuchert and impressed with his collection offered him a position as his assistant. Schuchert went to Albany, New York with Hall and assisted him in preparing his publications. After working in Albany, Schuchert briefly assisted N. H. Whinchel in Minneapolis, and then in 1893 joined the staff of the U.S. Geological survey in Washington. He worked for the Geological Survey until 1904, when he was appointed professor at Yale University. Shuchert remained at Yale until his retirement in 1926.

Schuchert's initial interest in brachiopods widened to the paleontolgic record as his career developed. From this resulted a series of paleogeographic maps, prepared by Schuchert, that showed the distribution of land and sea during the geologic past. In 1910 he published Paleogeography of the United States which was illustrated with a series of fifty maps. Schuchert continued working on these maps and by 1913 the number had grown to 85, eventually reaching 130. The closing years of Schuchert's life were spent preparing Historical Geography of North America, two volumes of which were published and one was in preparation at the time of his death.

Honors won by Schuchert include election as president of the Paleontological Society in 1910 and president of the Geological Society of America in 1922. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1911 and won the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the N.A.S. and the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America in 1934. He won honorary degrees from New York, Yale, and Harvard Universities. The Paleontological Society each year presents the Charles Schuchert Award each year to the person, under 40, whose work reflects excellence and promise in the field of paleontology.

Schuchert died on November 20, 1942.


References:

Knopf, Alfred;"Charles Schuchert: 1858-1942" in Biographical Memoirs (1952) National Academy Press

William Thompson, Baron Kelvin

William Thompson was born on June 26, 1824 in Belfast, Ireland, of Scottish-Irish descent. His father, James Thompson was at the time a mathematics professor at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. His mother, Margaret Gardner, died in 1830 and in 1832 his father took his six children with him to Glasgow, Scotland, where he had been elected chair of mathematics at the University of Glasgow, his alma mater.

William, and his older brother James received their early education at home, from their father. He entered the University of Glasgow in 1834 at the age of ten. At 12 he won a prize for translating Lucian of Samosata's Dialogs of the Gods from Latin into English. His first scientific paper was published in 1841 and in that year he entered St. Peter's College, Cambridge to read for the mathematical tripos. During his time at Cambridge he rowed for his college and remained involved in nautical pursuits throughout his life. He graduated in 1845, second wrangler (the university examiner commented that the Senior Wrangler "was not fit to cut pencils for Thompson") and winning first place in the Smith's Prize competition. He was elected fellow, shortly thereafter.

At the time experimental physics was not taking place at Cambridge, so after graduation he took his fellowship to Paris, and he worked in the laboratory of Henri Regnault for a year, where he determined data on a number of physical constants. In 1846 the chair of natural philosophy at Glasgow University became vacant and Thompson was elected. He remained in the position for fifty-three years until his retirement in 1899, despite many invitations to leave and go elsewhere. He was an inexhaustible worker, producing almost six hundred papers, seventy patents, as well as a number of books during his tenure.

Thompson is most famous for his work on an absolute zero temperature, a temperature at which entropy is reduced to its lowest possible value. The Kelvin temperature scale, named after Thompson, has its zero at -273.15 degrees Celsius or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature nearly all molecular motion stops and pure substance form perfect crystals. It is not possible to reach absolute zero artificially, but there are techniques to get within a billionth of a degree using cooling lasers.

Thompson served as the electrical engineer during the laying of the first successful Transatlantic Telegraph Cable and was knighted for his services. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1851 and won the Copley Medal in 1883. His title, Barron Kelvin, bestowed on him in 1892, origninated from the River Kelvin which runs through the grounds of the University of Glasgow and he is the first scientist who served in the House of Lords.

He died on December 17, 1907.

References:

Fitzgerald, George Francis;Lord Kelvin: Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Glasgow 1846-1899 with an Essay on His Scientific Work;J. MacLehose; 1899

McKie, Dr. Douglas;"William Thompson: Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)";New Scientist(1957)3:11-13

William Thompson, 1st Barron Kelvin Wikipedia Entry

John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams was born on June 5, 1819, in Cornwall, England. His father was a tenant farmer and his mother had a small estate. His early companions were the library of books, some on astronomy, that his mother had inherited from her uncle. At a village school in Laneast he learned algebra before the age of 12. Through his teens he avidly read books on mathematics and astronomy and in 1839 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1843. Soon after graduation he obtained a fellowship and stayed at St. John's as a tutor.

After graduation he directed his attention to the problem of the irregularities in the observed orbit of the planet Uranus. The planet Uranus, visible to the naked eye, had been known since ancient times, but due to its slow orbit it was presumed to be a star. It was not until 1781 that English astronomer William Herschel identified it as a planet. Subsequent observations of its orbit showed that it had an irregular orbit, deviating what had been predicted. Using Newton's law of gravitation, Adams showed that the irregularity in Uranus' orbit was due to the presence of another planet.

In Autumn of 1845 he communicated his finding to James Challis, the director of the Cambridge Observatory, and George Airy, the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, but neither acted upon his results until after Urbain LeVerrier, a French mathematician, published similar results the next summer. Airy attempted to find the planet but because he was using outdated star charts he failed to recognize it when he saw it, and it was instead first recognized by Johan Galle and Heinrich d'Arrest, working in Berlin, using LeVerrier's results. Precedence of the discovery was given to LeVerrier because Adams' results were not published until after the fact.

In 1851 Adams got a fellowship at Pembroke College, which he kept until his death. Also in 1851 he published corrections of the table of the moon's paralax. In 1858 he took a position of professor of mathematics at St. Andrew's University, but stayed for only one year before taking the Lowedean professorship for astronomy and geometry at St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1860 he replaced Challis as director of the Cambridge observatory. He remained at the observatory till his death. Honors won by Adams include the Copley Medal, from the Royal Society, in 1848 and though offered a knighthood during Queen Victoria's 1847 visit to Cambridge, he refused.

He died on January 21, 1892 at the Cambridge Observatory.


References:

Sheehan, William and Thurber, Steven; "John Couch Adams's Asberger syndrome and the British non-discovery of Neptune"; Records and Notes of the Royal Society(2007)61:285-299

"Prof. John Couch Adams"; Journal of the British Astronomical Association(1893)2:196-197

Obituary in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society(1893)53:184-209

John Couch Adams Wikipedia Entry

Sir David Bruce

David Bruce was born in Melbourne, Australia on May 29, 1855 to parents from Scotland. He was educated at Stirling High School and the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1881. Two years later he entered the Army Medical Service and served in Malta and Egypt. While in Malta he isolated the organism responsible for Malta fever, later named Brucella Militensis, from goat's milk. His work was aided by his wife, Mary Elizabeth Bruce who assisted him in his laboratory work.

Bruce left Malta in 1889 and served as assistant professor of pathology at the British Army Medical School at Netley and in 1894 went to South Africa where he served in the South African War earning a special promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1900. In South Africa he studied many tropical diseases including cholera, dysentery, and sleeping sickness. During his investigation of sleeping sickness, called nagana in Africa, he sent the corpse of an infected dog to England, from which the causative organism Trypanasoma brucei was isolated.

Bruce was knighted in 1908 and published many articles published in tropical medicine journals. He served as the commandant of the Royal Army Medical School at Netley from 1904 to 1908.

He died on November 27,1931.

References:

"Sir David Bruce"; American Journal of Public Health (1932)22:179-180

"Sir David Bruce KCB, D.Sc., LL.D., M.B., F.R.C.P., F.R.S."; Canadian Medical Association Journal; (1932)26:216

Sir David Bruce Wikipedia Entry

Williamina Fleming

Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming was born on May 15, 1857 in Dundee, Scotland to Robert Stevens and Mary Walker. Her father was made gilded picture frames and furniture and died when she was seven. "Mina", as she was called, attended public schools in Dundee and did well in school, advancing to become a student teacher when she was 14. In 1877, she married James Orr Fleming and they emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts. Fleming abandoned his pregnant bride and when she looked for domestic work she was hired by Edward C. Pickering, the head of the Harvard Observatory to clean his home.

In 1880, Pickering was working on a project to classify stars based on their spectra and became upset with the low quality work produced by the young man he hired to do the work. Legend is that Pickering declared that his Scottish maid could do a better job and when she was given the chance she excelled. Fleming had the ability to separate stellar spectra based on their characteristics and do the calculations necessary to determine a star's position. She was made a permanent employee of the observatory in 1881 and was put in charge of the star project in 1886.

She and Pickering devised a system to classify stars based on their spectra and published in 1890. When Pickering wanted to make larger catalog of stars he put Fleming in charge of the group of women he hired to do the calculations. In addition to her work on stellar catalogs, Fleming also was the first to identify that variable stars, stars whose light intensity brightened and dimmed regularly over time, could be identified by bright lines in their spectra. In 1907 she published a list of 222 variable stars, many of which she discovered. During her work she discovered 59 gaseous nebula, over 310 variable stars, and 10 novae.

At the time, Fleming was the foremost women astronomer in America. In 1906, she became the first American woman (and the sixth woman overall) to be made a honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Other honors she received include the Guadalupe Almendaro medal, given by the Astronomical Society of Mexico, for the discovery of new stars and she was made an honorary fellow in astronomy by Wellesly College. She also has a crater on the moon jointly named for her and Alexander Fleming.

She died of pneumonia on May 21, 1911 at the age of 54.


References:

Yount, Lisa; "Fleming, Williamina Paton Stevens" in A to Z of Women in Math and Science; Infobase Publishing; 2008

H. H. M.; Obituary in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society(1912)72:261-264

Williamina Fleming Wikipedia entry