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March
Important dates in History
March 31: George
Green
(Born July 14, 1793: Died March 31, 1841)
George Green was an English mathematician, born near Nottingham,
who was first to attempt to formulate a mathematical theory of electricity
and magnetism. He was a baker while, remarkably, he became a self-taught
mathematician. In March 1828 he published An Essay on the Application
of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism.
He became an undergraduate at Cambridge in October 1833 at the age
of 40. Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) subsequently saw, was excited
by the Essay. Through Thomson, Maxwell, and others, the general
mathematical theory of potential developed by an obscure, self-taught
miller's son heralded the beginning of modern mathematical theories
of electricity.
March 30: Phototransistor
In 1950, the invention of the phototransistor was announced. This
was a transistor operated by light rather than electric current,
invented by Dr. John Northrup Shive of the Bell Telephone Laboratories
at Murray Hill, N.J. It used a tiny chip of germanium, a semiconductor
material, but only a single collector wire. The tip of this wire
rests in a small dimple ground into one side of the germanium disk.
At this point the germanium disk is only three thousandths of an
inch thick. Light focussed on the opposite, un-dimpled side of the
disk can control the flow of current in the wire, thus making a
control device similar in function to a photo-electric cell.
March 29: Francesco
Zantedeschi
Born 1797: Died March 29, 1873)
Italian priest and physicist. He published papers (1829, 1830) on
the production of electric currents in closed circuits by the approach
and withdrawal of a magnet, thereby anticipating Faraday's classic
experiment (1831). Researching the solar spectrum, Zantedeschi was
among the first to recognize the marked absorption by the atmosphere
of the red, yellow, and green rays. Though not confirmed, he also
thought that he had detected a magnetic action on steel needles
of ultra-violet light (1838), showing the connection between light
and magnetism was suspected many years before the announcement in
1867 by Clerk-Maxwell of the electromagnetic theory of light (1867).
March 28: Jean-Maurice-Emile
Baudot
(Born September 11, 1845: Died March 28, 1903)
French engineer who, in 1874, received a patent on a telegraph code
that by the mid-20th century had supplanted Morse Code as the most
commonly used telegraphic alphabet. He dedicated his life to the
development of a fast-printing telegraph. After successively improved
versions, he demonstrated at the International Exhibition of Electronics
a perfected model which could transmit six simultaneous messages.
The Baudot system was used throughout the world for terrestrial
and undersea links for over 70 years.
March 27: Johann
Wilhelm Hittorf
 (Born
March 27, 1824: Died November 28, 1914)
German physicist who was a pioneer in electrochemical research.
His early investigations were on the allotropes (different physical
forms) of phosphorus and selenium. He was the first to compute the
electricity- carrying capacity of charged atoms and molecules (ions),
an important factor in understanding electrochemical reactions.
He investigated the migration of ions during electrolysis (1853-59),
developed expressions for and measured transport numbers. In 1869,
he published his laws governing the migration of ions. For his studies
of electrical phenomena in rarefied gases, the Hittorf tube has
been named for him. Hittorf determined a number of properties of
cathode rays, including (before Crookes) the deflection of the rays
by a magnet.
March 26: David
Packard
 (Born
September 7, 1912: Died March 26, 1996)
U.S. entrepreneur and electrical engineer who cofounded the Hewlett-Packard
Co., a leading manufacturer computers, computer printers, and analytic
and measuring equipment. In 1939, he formed a partnership known
as Hewlett-Packard Company with William R. Hewlett, a friend and
Stanford classmate. HP's first product was a resistance-capacitance
audio oscillator based on a design developed by Hewlett when he
was in graduate school. The company's first "plant" was
a small garage in Palo Alto, and the initial capital amounted to
$53.
March 25: Henry
Charles Fleeming Jenkin
(Born March 25, 1833: Died June 12, 1885)
British engineer noted for his work in establishing units of electrical
measurement. After earning an M.A. (1851), he worked for the next
10 years with engineering firms engaged in the design and manufacture
of submarine telegraph cables and equipment for laying them. In
1861 his friend William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) procured Jenkin's
appointment as reporter for the Committee of Electrical Standards
of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped
compile and publish reports that established the ohm as the absolute
unit of electrical resistance and described methods for precise
resistance measurements.
March 24: Sir
Edmund Taylor Whittaker
 (Born
October 24, 1873: Died March 24, 1956)
English mathematician who made pioneering contributions to the area
of the special functions, which is of particular interest in mathematical
physics. Whittaker is best known work is in analysis, in particular
numerical analysis, but he also worked on celestial mechanics and
the history of applied mathematics and physics. He wrote papers
on algebraic functions and automorphic functions. His results in
partial differential equations (described as most sensational by
Watson) included a general solution of the Laplace equation in three
dimensions in a particular form and the solution of the wave equation.
On the applied side of mathematics he was interested in relativity
theory and he also worked on electromagnetic theory.
March 23: Max
Mason
 (Born
October 26, 1877: Died March 23, 1961)
American mathematical physicist, educator, and science administrator.
During World War I he invented several devices for submarine detection
- several generations of the Navy's "M," or multiple-tube,
passive submarine sensors. This apparatus focused sound to ascertain
its source. To determine the direction from which the sound came,
the operator needed only to seek the maximum output on his earphones
by turning a dial. The final device had a range of 3 miles. Mason's
special interest and contributions lay in mathematics (differential
equations, calculus of variations), physics (electromagnetic theory),
invention (acoustical compensators, submarine-detection devices),
and the administration of universities and foundations.
March 23:
Pierre-Simon Laplace
(Born March 23, 1749: Died March 5, 1827)
(marquis) French mathematician, astronomer, and physicist who is
best known for his investigations into the stability of the solar
system.
March 23: Hermann
Staudiniger
(March 23, 1881: September 9, 1965)
German chemist who won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for demonstrating
that polymers are long-chain molecules. His work laid the foundation
for the great expansion of the plastics industry later in the 20th
century.
March 22: John
Canton
(Born July 31, 1718: Died March 22, 1772)
British physicist and teacher. After educating himself about science,
he developed a new method of preparing artificial magnets and won
election to the Royal Society (1749). In July 1752, he was the first
Englishman to repeat French experiments verifying Franklin’s hypothesis
that lightning was just a huge electric spark, (as seen from charged
Leyden jars). Following this, he studied the polarity of the charge
on a cloud. He invented a portable electroscope to detect charge
present in a system, and he remains well-known for electrostatic
induction experiments. Canton proved that water is slightly compressible
(1762). Noting compass needle irregularities during a prominent
aurora borealis he made the first observations of magnetic storms
(1756-9).
March 21: Exclusion
principle
In 1925, Wolfgang Pauli published his "exclusion principle."
At the young age of 24, in an article in Zeitschrift für Physik,
Pauli introduced the idea that two nearby electrons cannot be in
exactly the same state at the same time. For this, now fundamental,
contribution to quantum mechanics, he was awarded a Nobel Prize
in 1945.
March 20: Volta
announces his battery
In 1800, Alessandro Volta gave notification of his invention of
the electric battery to Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society, London.
March 19: Louis-Victor
de Broglie
(Born August 15, 1892: Died March 19, 1987)
French physicist best known for his research on quantum theory and
for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons. He was awarded
the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physics.
March 18: Superconductivity
In 1987, the discovery of "high-temperature" superconductivity
was announced to thousands of scientists at a packed meeting of
the American Physical Society in New York City. The phenomenon,
discovered 1911, was at first known to occur at only 4 degrees above
absolute zero, when all electrical resistance in a metal sample
disappeared. In 1986, researchers discovered a ceramic material
that was a superconductor at a temperature of more than 30 degrees
above absolute zero. When published in September of that year, that
news stirred the wider scientific community into action. By the
time of the APS meeting, further discoveries had been made. The
scene of excitement at the meeting was dubbed the "Woodstock
of Physics."
March 17: Charles
Francis Brush
(Born March 17, 1849: Died June 15, 1929)
U.S. inventor and industrialist who devised an electric arc lamp
and a generator that produced a variable voltage controlled by the
load and a constant current. It was adopted throughout the United
States and abroad during the 1880's. The arc light preceded Edison's
incandescent light bulb in commercial use and was suited to applications
where a bright light was needed, such as street lights and lighting
in commercial and public buildings. He assembled his first dynamo
in the summer of 1876, resulting in a patent for his Improvement
in Magneto-Electric Machines, issued April 24, 1877 (US No. 189997).
He then developed an arc light that was regulated by a combination
of electrical and mechanical means limited by a "ring clutch".
March 16:
Georg Simon Ohm (Ohm's Law)
 (Born
March 16, 1789: Died July 6, 1854)
German physicist who showed by experiment (1825) that there are
no "perfect" electrical conductors. All conductors have
some resistance. He stated the famous Ohm's law (1826): "If
the given temperature remains constant, the current flowing through
certain conductors is proportional to the potential difference (voltage)
across it." or V=iR.
March 15: Sir
Henry Bessemer
 (Born
January 19, 1813: Died March 15, 1898)
English inventor and engineer who developed the first process for
manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development
of the Bessemer converter. Bessemer invented his steel making process
to solve a specific problem vexing another of his inventions, the
self-spinning artillery shell. The converter removed impurities
from molten pig iron by oxidation through air being blown through
the molten iron. The oxidation also raised the temperature of the
iron mass, keeping it molten. The oxidation process removed impurities
such as silicon, manganese, and carbon as oxides, which oxides either
escapd as gas or formed a solid slag. He also solved problems about
the chemistry of ores, fuels, and steel. He held 110 patents at
his death.
March 14: Pieter
van Musschenbroek
(Born March 14, 1692: Died September 19, 1761)
Dutch mathematician and physicist who invented the Leyden jar, the
first effective device for storing static electricity. He grew up
in a family that manufactured scientific instruments such as telescopes,
microscopes and air pumps. Before Musschenbroek's invention, static
electricity had been produced by Guericke using a sulphur ball,
with minor effects. In Jan 1746, Musschenbroek placed water in a
metal container suspended on silk cords, and led a brass wire through
a cork into the water. He built up a charge in the water. When an
unwary assistant touched the metal container and the brass wire,
the discharge from this apparatus delivered a substantial shock
of static electricity. The Leyden name is linked to the discovery
having being made at the University of Leiden.
March 13: Elihu
Thomson
(Born March 29, 1853: Died March 13, 1937)
U.S. electrical engineer and inventor whose discoveries in the field
of alternating current phenomena led to the development of successful
alternating current motors. Thomson invented electric welding and
other important inventions in electric lighting and power among
his lifetime total of about 700 patents. Thomson was also a cofounder
of the General Electric Company (in 1892, in a merger with the Edison
Company) industry.
March 12: Leo
Esaki
Born March 12, 1925
Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1973)
in recognition of his  pioneering
work on electron tunneling in solids. From some deceptively simple
experiments published in 1958, he was able to lay bare the tunneling
processes in solids, a phenomena which had been clouded by questions
for decades. Tunneling is a quantum mechanical effect in which an
electron passes through a potential barrier even though classical
theory predicted that it could not. Dr. Esaki's discovery led to
the creation of the Esaki diode, an important component of solid
state physics with practical applications in high-speed circuits
found in computers and communications networks.
March 11: Vannevar
Bush
 (Born
March 11, 1890: Died June 28, 1974)
American electrical engineer and administrator who and oversaw government
mobilization of scientific research during World War II. At the
age of 35, in 1925, he developed the differential analyzer, the
world's first analog computer. It was capable of solving differential
equations. He put into concrete form that which began 50 years earlier
with the incomplete efforts of Babbage, and the theoretical details
developed by Kelvin. This machine filled a 20 x 30 foot room. He
innovated one of the largest growing media in our time, namely hypermedia
as fulfilled in the Internet with hypertext links.
March 10: Charles
Hatchett
(Born January 2, 1765: Died March 10, 1847)
English manufacturer, chemist, and discoverer in 1801 of niobium,
which he called columbium. Forty years later another chemist, Heinrich
Rose of Germany, rediscovered the metal and named it niobium. The
metal itself was first prepared in 1864 by reducing the chloride
by heating it in a hydrogen atmosphere. Niobium is a steel-gray,
lustrous, ductile and malleable metallic element that burns when
heated in air and combines with nitrogen, hydrogen and the halogens.
Niobium is used in arc-welding rods for stabilized grades of stainless
steel. Large amounts of niobium have been used in advanced air frame
systems like the Gemini space program. Superconductive magnets have
been made with Nb-Zr wire.
March 9: Howard
Hathaway Aiken
 (Born
March 9, 1900: Died March 14, 1973)
American mathematician who invented the Harvard Mark I, forerunner
of the modern electronic digital computer. While a graduate student
and instructor Harvard University, Aiken's research had led to a
system of differential equations which could only be solved using
numerical techniques, for which he began planning large computer.
His idea was to use an adaptation of Hollerith's punched card machine.
When eventually built, (1943) it weighed 35 tons, had 500 miles
of wire and could compute to 23 significant figures. There were
72 storage registers and central units to perform multiplication
and division. It was controlled by a sequence of instructions on
punched paper tapes, and used punched cards to enter data and give
output from the machine.
March 8: Emory
Leon Chaffee
(Born April 15, 1885: Died March 8, 1975)
U.S. physicist known for his work on thermionic vacuum (electron)
tubes.
March 7: Ludwig
Mond
(Born March 7, 1839: Died December 11, 1909)
German-born British chemist and industrialist who perfected a method
of soda manufacture by improving the Solvay alkali process. Mond
devised a process for the extraction of nickel when with his assistants,
he accidentally discovered metal carbonyl compounds while investigating
why nickel valves were corroded by carbon monoxide. Further research
led to the synthesis of more metal carbonyls, which Lord Kelvin
described as "metals with wings" and to the Mond nickel
carbonyl process for refining nickel. The term “fuel cell” was coined
in 1889 by Ludwig Mond and Charles Langer, who attempted to build
the first practical device using air and industrial coal gas, to
generate electricity by reacting hydrogen with oxygen.
March 6: First
American AC power plant
In 1886, America's first alternating current power plant began operation
in Great Barrington, Mass. It started producing commercial power
two weeks later, but subsequently became damaged by an accident
and was abandoned. The first successful A.C. electricity generating
plant was opened in November of the same year at Buffalo, NY, by
the Westinghouse Co.
March 5: William
Oughtred
(Born March 5, 1574: Died June 30, 1660)
English mathematician and Episcopal minister who invented the earliest
form of the slide rule, two identical linear or circular logarithmic
scales held together and adjusted by hand. Improvements involving
the familiar inner rule with tongue-in-groove linear construction
came later. He introduced the familiar multiplication sign x in
a 1631 textbook, along with the first use of the abbreviations sin,
cos and tan.
March 4: Cray
supercomputer
 In
1977, the first Freon-cooled Cray-1 supercomputer, costing $19,000,000,
was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, NM, and was used to help
the defense industry create sophisticated weapons systems. This
system had a peak performance of 133 megaflops and used the newest
technology, integrated circuits and vector register technology.
The Cray-1 looked like no other computer before or since. It was
a cylindrical machine 7 feet tall and 9 feet in diameter, weighed
30 tons and required its own electrical substation to provide it
with power (an electric bill around $35,000/month). The inventor,
Seymour Cray, died 5 Oct 1996 in an auto accident. His innovations
included vector register technology, cooling technologies, and magnetic
amplifiers.
March 3: Gerhard
Herzberg
(Born December 25, 1904: Died March 3, 1999)
German-Canadian physicist and winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for
Chemistry for his work in determining the electronic structure and
geometry of molecules, especially free radicals: groups of atoms
that contain odd numbers of electrons. Herzberg is noted for his
extensive work on the technique and interpretation of the spectra
of molecules. He elucidated the properties of many molecules, ions,
and radicals and also contributed to the use of spectroscopy in
astronomy (e.g., in detecting hydrogen in space). His work included
the first measurements of the Lamb shifts (important in quantum
electrodynamics) in deuterium, helium, and the positive lithium
ion.
March 2: Harry
E. Soref
 (Born
March 2, 1887: Died March 1, 1957)
Locksmith, inventor of the laminated steel padlock, and founder
of Master Lock Company (1921). Shortly after WW I, Soref conceived
the idea for a better padlock, built with laminations of layer on
layer of steel for greater strength, as seen with bank vault doors
and battleships. Soref filed for a patent on his laminated padlock.
For the next several years, he was very busy developing a durable
padlock that could be manufactured and marketed at a reasonable
price. In 1924, the patent was granted, and Master Lock opened its
first tiny factory in Milwaukee, Wisc. In 1928 Master Lock gained
national recognition for shipping 147,600 padlocks to federal prohibition
agents in New York for locking up the speakeasies they raided.
March 1: Seymour
Papert
 (Born
March 1, 1928)
Computer scientist who invented the Logo computer programming language,
an educational computer programming language for children. He studied
under Piaget, absorbing his educational theories. He has studied
ways to use mathematics to understand better how children learn
and think, and about the ways in which computers can aid in a child's
learning. With Marvin Minsky, he co-founded the Artificial Intelligence
Lab at MIT. In the mid-80’s he worked in Costa Rica to develop a
nationwide program of intensive computer use throughout the public
education system. Costa Rica, which now has the highest literacy
rate in the Americas, continues to serve as a model for large-scale
deployment of computer technology in education.
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