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.
Click
here for previous months
May
April
March
February
January
Photos
courtsey of Today in Science
