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June
Important dates in History
June 30: Transistor
In 1948, the transistor was invented by three Bell Laboratory scientists
in Murray Hill, NJ.
June 29: Alexander
Parkes
(Born December 29, 1813: Died June 29, 1890)
British chemist and inventor who developed various industrial processes
and materials. Parkes was first an apprentice in the art metal trade.
Moved on to an electroplating firm, he silver-plated diverse objects
such as spider webs and plants. He patented a method of rubber coating
fabrics to waterproof them (1841), an electroplating process (1843)
and the first plastic (1855). By dissolving cellulose nitrate in
alcohol and camphor containing ether, he produced a hard solid which
could be molded when heated, which he called Parkesine (later known
as celluloid). Unfortunately, Parkes could find no market for the
material. (In the 1860s, John Wesley Hyatt, an American chemist,
rediscovered celluloid and marketed it successfully as a replacement
for ivory.
June 28: Klaus
von Klitzing
(Born June 28, 1943)
German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in
1985 for his discovery, made in 1980, of the quantized Hall effect.
Under appropriate conditions the resistance offered by an electrical
conductor is quantized; that is, it varies by discrete steps rather
than smoothly and continuously. His experiments enabled other scientists
to study the conducting properties of electronic components with
extraordinary precision. His work also aided in determining the
precise value of the fine-structure constant and in establishing
convenient standards for the measurement of electrical resistance.
June 27: Telegraph
In 1847, New York and Boston were linked by telegraph wires.
June 26: Yohiro
NakaMats
 (Born
June 26, 1838)
Japanese inventor who holds over 3,000 patents, making him the world's
most prolific inventor. (Thomas Alva Edison is a distant second
with 1,093). NakaMats invented the floppy disk in 1950 at the Imperial
University in Tokyo. After six of Japan's leading corporations turned
him down, he granted the sales license for the disk to IBM. Dr.
NakaMats interests are wide as reflected in his patents, which also
include the CD and digital watch. Other patents range from a "Putting
training device for golfers" to an "Apparatus for converting
radiant energy such as light or heat directly into turning force"
or an "Energy system for applying mixed hydrogen and gasoline
to an engine."
June 25: Sir
William Fothergill Cooke
(Born May 4, 1806: Died June 25, 1879)
English inventor who worked with Charles Wheatstone in developing
electric telegraphy. Of the pair, Cooke contributed a superior business
ability, whereas Wheatstone is generally considered the more important
of the two in the history of the telegraph. After Cooke attended
a demonstration of the use of wire in transmitting messages, he
began his own experiments with telegraphy (1836) and formed a partnership
with Wheatstone. Their first patent (1837) was impractical because
of cost. They demonstrated their five-needle telegraph on July 24,
1837 when they ran a telegraph line along the railway track from
Euston to Camden Town able to transmit and successfully receive
a message. In 1845, they patented a single-needle electric telegraph.
June 24: Martin
Lewis Perl
Born 24 Jun 1927(Born June 24, 1927)
American physicist who received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics
for discovering a subatomic particle that he named the tau, a massive
lepton with a negative charge. The tau, which he found in the mid-1970s,
was the first evidence of a third "generation" of fundamental
particles. It is a superheavy cousin of the electron, identical
in all respects except that the tau is more than 3,500 times heavier
than the electron and survives less than a trillionth of a second,
whereas the electron is stable.
June 23: Wilhelm
Eduard Weber
 (Born
October 24, 1804: Died June 23, 1891)
erman physicist who investigated terrestrial magnetism. For six
years, from 1831, Weber worked in close collaboration with Gauss.
Weber developed sensitive magnetometers, an electromagnetic telegraph
(1833) and other magnetic instruments during this time. His later
work (1855) on the ratio between the electrodynamic and electrostatic
units of charge proved extremely important and was crucial to Maxwell
in his electromagnetic theory of light. Weber's later years were
devoted to work in electrodynamics and the electrical structure
of matter. The magnetic unit, termed a weber, formerly the coulomb,
is named after him.
June 22: James
H. Pomerene
 (Born
June 22, 1910)
American computer pioneer. In April 1946 he joined John von Neumann
and Herman Goldstine in their newly organized Electronic Computer
Project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
This project was to build a parallel stored-program computer. He
designed the adder portion of the arithmetic unit and then was entirely
responsible for the development and construction of the electrostatic
(Williams tube) memory and became the chief engineer of the project
1951-56. Then he joined IBM to assist development of the HARVEST
computer, a special system built for the National Security Agency.
It had two levels of program control and also had a tape and tape
library system that was fully automatic and of great capacity.
June 21: Johannes
Stark
(Born April 15, 1874: Died June 21, 1957)
German physicist who won the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics for his
discovery in 1913 that an electric field would cause splitting of
the lines in the spectrum of light emitted by a luminous substance;
the phenomenon is called the Stark effect.
June 20: Henri-Gaston
Busignies
(Born December 29, 1905: Died June 20, 1981)
French-born American electronics engineer whose invention (1936)
of high-frequency direction finders (HF/DF, or "Huff Duff")
permitted the U.S. Navy during World War II to detect enemy transmissions
and quickly pinpoint the direction from which a radio transmission
was coming. Busignies invented the radiocompass (1926) while still
a student at Jules Ferry College in Versailles, France. In 1934,
he started developing the direction finder based on his earlier
radiocompass. Busignies developed the moving target indicator for
wartime radar. It scrubbed off the radar screen every echo from
stationary objects and left only echoes from moving objects, such
as aircraft.
June 19: Silvanus
Phillips Thompson
 (Born
June 19, 1851: Died June 12, 1916)
British physicist and historian of science. He was a recognised
authority upon electricity, magnetism and acoustics and his writings
are numerous including Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism
published in 1881 which ran through some 40 editions and reprints.
He was also known for contributions in electrical machinery, optics,
and X rays. In 1884, he published his epoch-making work Dynamo-electric
Machinery: a Manual for Students of Electrotechnics. Practically
every designer of electrical machines gleaned his first information
on the subject from this work. His lectures to the Royal Institution
on Light, visible and invisible in book form and Polyphase Electric
Currents and Motors were published in 1896.
June 18: Arthur
Edwin Kennelly
(Born December 17, 1861: Died June 18, 1939)
Irish-American electrical engineer who was a prominent contributor
to the science of electrical engineering. For six years he worked
for Thomas Edison at West Orange Laboratory, then branched out as
a consultant. Upon his co-discovery of the radio reflecting properties
of the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere, the stratum was called
the Kennelly-Heaviside layer.
June 17: Lord
Rosse
(Born June 17, 1800: Died October 30, 1867)
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse was an Irish astronomer who built
the largest reflecting telescope of the 19th century. He learned
to polish metal mirrors (1827) and spent the next few years building
a 36-inch telescope. He later completed a giant 72-inch telescope
(1845) which he named "Leviathan," It remained the largest
ever built until decades after his death.
June 16: Julius
Plücker
 (Born
June 16, 1801: Died May 22, 1868)
German mathematician and physicist whose work suggested the far-reaching
principle of duality, which states the equivalence of certain related
types of theorems. He also discovered that cathode rays (electron
rays produced in a vacuum) are diverted from their path by a magnetic
field, a principle vital to the development of modern electronic
devices, such as television. At first alone and later with the German
physicist Johann W. Hittorf, Plücker made many important discoveries
in spectroscopy. Before Bunsen and Kirchhoff, he announced that
spectral lines were characteristic for each chemical substance and
this had value to chemical analysis. In 1862 he pointed out that
the same element may exhibit different spectra at different temperatures.
June 15: John
Vincent Atanasoff
(Born October 4, 1903: Died June 15, 1995)
U.S. physicist who was belatedly credited (1973) with developing
the first electronic digital computer. Built in 1937-42 at Iowa
State University by Atanasoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry,
it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory,
and logic circuits. These ideas were communicated from Atanasoff
to John Mauchly, who used them in the design of the better-known
ENIAC built and patented several years later. On October 19, 1973,
a US Federal Judge signed his decision following a lengthy court
trial which declared the ENIAC patent invalid and named Atanasoff
the original inventor of the electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-
Berry Computer or the ABC.
June 14: Charles-Augustin
de Coulomb
 (Born
June 14, 1736: Died August 23, 1806)
French physicist best known for the formulation of Coulomb's law,
which states that the force between two electrical charges is proportional
to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the
square of the distance between them. Coulombic force is one of the
principal forces involved in atomic reactions. The inverse-square
relationship is also seen in the relationship of the gravitation
force between masses. In 1777, he invented a torsion balance which
he subsequently modified for electrical measurements. He also did
research on friction of machinery, on windmills, and on the elasticity
of metal and silk fibres.
June 13: William
Harrison Bennett
(Born June 13, 1903: Died September 28, 1987)
American physicist who discovered (1934) the pinch effect, an electromagnetic
process that may offer a way to magnetically confine a plasma at
temperatures high enough for controlled nuclear fusion reactions
to occur. He proposed (1936) the tandem Van de Graaff accelerator,
which later became widely used in nuclear research. He invented
a radio-frequency mass spectrometer, developed in 1950. Since it
required no heavy magnet, it was the first launched into space to
measure the masses of atoms. Sputnik III carried the first R-F mass
spectrometer into space. It was the only space instrument used by
the Russians and credited to an American inventor in their own Russian-language
publications.
June 12: Silvanus
Phillips Thompson
(Born June 19, 1851: Died June 12, 1916)
British physicist and historian of science. He was a recognised
authority upon electricity, magnetism and acoustics and his writings
are numerous including Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism
published in 1881 which ran through some 40 editions and reprints.
He was also known for contributions in electrical machinery, optics,
and X rays. In 1884, he published his epoch-making work Dynamo-electric
Machinery: a Manual for Students of Electrotechnics. Practically
every designer of electrical machines gleaned his first information
on the subject from this work. His lectures to the Royal Institution
on Light, visible and invisible in book form and Polyphase Electric
Currents and Motors were published in 1896.
June 11: Edison
patent
In 1889, Thomas A. Edison was issued a patent for an "Electrical
Distribution System" (U.S. No. 404,902).
June 10: Ben
Frankllin's kite experiment
 Benjamin
Franklin suspected that lightning was an electrical current in nature.
One way to test his idea would be to see if the lightning would
pass through metal. He decided to use a metal key and looked around
for a way to get the key up near the lightning. He used a kite to
prove that lightning is really a stream of electrified air, known
today as plasma. His famous stormy kite flight on June 10, 1752
led him to develop many of the terms that we still use today when
we talk about electricity: battery, conductor, condenser, charge,
discharge, uncharged, negative, minus, plus, electric shock, and
electrician.
June 9: Einstein
published
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his analysis of Planck's quantum
theory and its application to light. His article appeared in Annalen
der Physik. Though no experimental work was involved, it was for
these insights that Einstein earned his Nobel Prize.
June 8:
Arsène d' Arsonval
 Born
8 June 1851; died 31 Dec 1940.
Jacques-Arsène d' Arsonval was a French physician and physicist
known for his researches in electrotherapy. He introduced the first
reflecting moving-coil galvanometers used to measure weak electric
currents (1882), invented mechanisms to obtain high-frequency currents
used to treat diseases of the skin and mucous membranes ("d'Arsonvalization";
1890), and demonstrated how a human being could conduct an alternating
current strong enough to light an electric lamp (1892).
June 7: Sir
John Sealy Edward Townsend
(Born June 7, 1868: Died February 16, 1957)
British physicist who pioneered in the study of electrical conduction
in gases. In 1898 he made the first direct measurement of the unit
electrical charge (e). As a postgraduate, he was a research student
of J. J. Thomson. In 1897, Townsend developed the falling-drop method
for measuring e, using saturated clouds of charged water droplets
(extended by Robert Millikan's highly accurate oil-drop method).
He was first to explain how electric discharges pass through gases
(Electricity in Gases, 1915) whereby motion of electrons in an electric
field releases more electrons by collision. These in turn collide
releasing even more electrons in a multiplication of charges known
as an avalanche.
June 6: Ferdinand
Braum
(Born June 6, 1850: Died April 20, 1918)
Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German physicist who shared the Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1909 with Guglielmo Marconi for the development
of wireless telegraphy. He published papers on deviations from Ohm's
law and on the calculations of the electromotive force of reversible
galvanic elements from thermal sources, and discovered (1874) the
electrical rectifier effect. He demonstrated the first cathode-ray
oscilloscope (Braun tube) in 1897, after work on high-frequency
alternating currents. Cathode-ray tubes had previously been characterized
by uncontrolled rays; Braun succeeded in producing a narrow stream
of electrons, guided by means of alternating voltage, that could
trace patterns on a fluorescent screen.
June 5: Apple
II
 In
1977, first personal computer, the Apple II, went on sale. They
were the invention of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They have the
6502 microprocessor, ability to do Hi-res and Lo-res color graphics,
sound, joystick input, and casette tape I/O. They have a total of
eight expansion Slots for adding peripherials. Clock speed is 1MHz
and, with Apple's Language Card installed, standard memory size
is 64kB. (The Apple I designation referred to an earlier computer
that was not much more than a board. You had to supply your own
keyboard, monitor and case.) The Apple II was one of three prominent
personal computers that came out in 1977. Despite its higher price,
it quickly pulled ahead of the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet.
June 4: Maurice
Fréchet
(Born September 2, 1878: Died June 4, 1973)
René-Maurice Fréchet was a French mathematician known
chiefly for his contribution to real analysis. He is credited with
being the founder of the theory of abstract spaces, which generalized
the traditional mathematical definition of space as a locus for
the comparison of figures; in Fréchet's terms, space is defined
as a set of points and the set of relations. In his dissertation
of 1906, he investigated functionals on a metric space and formulated
the abstract notion of compactness. In 1907, he discovered an integral
representation theorem for functionals on the space of quadratic
Lebesgue integrable functions. He also made important contributions
to statistics, probability and calculus.
June 3: Robert
Noyce
( Born
December 17, 1927: Died June 3, 1990)
Robert (Norton) Noyce was a U.S. engineer and coinventor (1959),
with Jack Kilby, of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected
transistors on a single silicon microchip. He held sixteen patents
for semiconductor devices, methods, and structures. In 1968, he
and colleague Gordon E. Moore cofounded N.M. Electronics, which
later was renamed Intel Corporation. Noyce served as Intel's president
and chairman (1968-75), then as vice chairman until 1979.
June 2: Hydroelectricity
 In
1889, a hydroelectric power plant generated alternating current
electricity which was for the first time made available to consumers
at a significant distance from its origin. A 13 mile power line
linked the Willamette Falls Electric Co. power plant to Portland,
Ore. Two 300 h.p. Stilwell & Bierce waterwheels together drove
a single phase, 720 kilowatt generator. It was not the first hydroelectric
power plant, for one had been demonstrated in Appleton, Wisc., September
30, 1882 with a small dynamo. Rather, it is the use of alternating
current that is significant, for this makes possible long-distance
transmission that overcomes the problems of direct current. AC generators
driven by steam power had been in use elsewhere since 1886.
June 1: E-Lamp
 In
1992, the E-Lamp, an electronic electrodeless 20-year lightbulb,
was announced by Pierre Villere. The E-Lamp is illuminated when
radio waves excite a phosphor coating, an efficient process that
can save as much as 75% of lighting costs. The E-lamp technology
was licensed from Diablo Research Corporation that developed it
in the late 1980s. However, they were not approved for residential
use in the U.S. In Apr 1994, General Electric (G.E.) Lighting announced
that "the world's first practical compact high-tech induction
reflector lamp" would be on the market in Europe within weeks
using the tradename Genura. It is smaller than the incandescent
reflector lamp it replaces.
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