Biographical encyclopedia
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376 [569] OTIS
GALOIS [571] Society. To this day, however, fuel cells have remained laboratory curiosities. In tensive research has not yet devised one capable of withstanding the rugged de mands of practical use. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water and yield energy. Grove showed the reverse was also true. He demonstrated that water in contact with a strongly heated electric wire would ab sorb energy and break up into hydrogen and oxygen. Grove was one of those who ardently supported the notion of conservation of energy in the late 1840s and at that time, too, he served as professor at the Lon don Institution. In later life, Grove felt sufficiently strong to return to a legal career. He was made a judge in 1871 and knighted the following year. [569] OTIS, Elisha Graves American inventor Bom: Halifax, Vermont, August 3, 1811 Died: Yonkers, New York, April 8, 1861 Otis was the son of a well-to-do farmer. Ill health forced him out of his own business and he became a mechanic for a bedmaker. His great moment came in 1852 when, in connection with a new factory the firm was building in Yonkers, New York, he invented the first elevator with an adequate safety guard, one that would keep it from falling even if the cable holding it were severed completely. He established a factory in Yonkers to manufacture such devices. In 1854 he demonstrated one of his el evators in New York City. He got in, had it raised (with himself inside) to a considerable height, and ordered the cable holding it to be cut. He descended safely and was unharmed. The elevator is, of course, as essential to tall buildings as structural steel is, and Otis’s invention is one of the important precursors of the skyscraper, the hall mark of modem cities. [570] BUDD, William English physician Bom: North Tawton, Devon, September 14, 1811 Died: Clevedon, Somerset, January 9, 1880 Budd was the son of a physician and became a physician himself (as did five of his brothers). Budd obtained his med ical degree from the University of Edin burgh in 1838, rather late because his schooling was interrupted by serious illnesses. In 1841 he moved to Bristol. Budd’s importance lies in the fact that he recognized the nature of the conta giousness of infectious disease. He felt that the poisons of the disease, whatever those poisons were, multiplied in the in testines and appeared in the excretions. From the excretions they could be car ried by water to healthy individuals and cause them to sicken. Budd particularly alluded to cholera (where he acknowledged the priority of Snow [576]) and typhoid fever. By fol lowing his own theory, and adopting measures that would limit the contami nation of the town’s water supply, he curbed the spread of cholera during an epidemic that hit Bristol in 1866. While Budd did not take the crucial step of implicating microorganisms as the “poison” associated with the disease, his work was an important precursor to the germ theory of disease that was soon to be advanced by Pasteur [642]. [571] GALOIS, Evariste (ga-lwahO French mathematician Bom: Bourg-la-Reine, near Paris, October 25, 1811 Died: Paris, May 31, 1832 Galois was the son of a town official. He did not do well at school. He was an ardent liberal during the reigns of Louis XVIII and Charles X, those monarchs who presided over the reaction that fol lowed the final fall of Napoleon. He also rapidly moved forward in his own way in the field of mathematics in which he was an absolute genius, far beyond the ability of his teachers to follow.
[572] SHANKS
GALLE [573] When he was seventeen, he thought he had solved the general equation of the fifth degree, unaware that Abel [527] had already shown this was impossible. Galois quickly realized his mistake and then moved forward beyond Abel to study the solubility of equations in gen eral, generating his own mathematical techniques for attacking the problem, techniques that were eventually to be named “group theory” and that were to have the greatest significance in twen tieth-century mathematics. Galois ran into an extraordinary series of misfortunes. One mathematical paper he submitted was lost by Cauchy [463], another by Fourier [393]. Poisson [432] dismissed a paper of Galois’s as incom prehensible. Galois himself invariably did badly on oral examinations partly because he lacked the ability or pa tience to explain himself clearly. His intensifying opposition to Charles X and then to Louis Philippe, who suc ceeded him in 1830, gained Galois the reputation of a flaming radical (which he was) and he was expelled from school. His father, also an opponent of the regime, committed suicide in 1829. Finally, Galois somehow got himself involved in a duel over a girl and, feeling himself sure of death, spent his last night scribbling out his explanation of group theory. The next day he was indeed shot and killed. He had not yet reached the age of twenty-one. [572] SHANKS, William English mathematician
berland, January 25, 1812 Died: Houghton-le-Spring, Durham, 1882 Shanks’s significance to the history of science is a rather odd one. He kept a boarding school and in his spare time en gaged himself in laborious and tedious computations, particularly involving pi. This is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and is roughly 3 Vr. It is impossible to express it exactly for the decimal that results is never end ing and never repeating. The first few digits are 3.14159 . . . To calculate it, not exactly but to as many decimal places as one wishes, one makes use of certain unending series of expressions; each one of which can be calculated from the one before, and the greater the number of expressions used, the more accurate the final value. The catch is that the greater the number of expressions used, the more tedious and lengthy the calculation. Shanks took many years to calculate pi to 707 places, completing his task in 1873. In a very real sense, Shanks had spent a major portion of his life on the task that had no great significance in the oretical mathematics and no significance at all in applied mathematics. For three quarters of a century, no one did better, and Shanks was granted his footnote in the science history books. Two ironical notes eventually fol lowed. In 1944, it was discovered that Shanks had made a mistake at the 528th decimal point so that everything that fol lowed was wrong. Then beginning in 1949, computers could be used to calcu late the value of pi, in a comparatively short time to far more places than Shanks had achieved. The value of pi is now known to over 100,000 places. [573] GALLE, Johann Gottfried (gahl'uh) German astronomer Born: Pabsthaus, Saxony, June 9, 1812
Died: Potsdam, Prussia, July 10, 1910
Galle, the son of a turpentine-maker, entered the University of Berlin in 1830. He studied under Encke [475] and ob tained his doctorate in 1845. He eventu ally became director of the Berlin Obser vatory and was afterward professor of astronomy at the University of Breslau. His great claim to fame is that he was the first actually to see Neptune and to recognize it as a new planet. He had sent his doctor’s thesis to Leverrier [564] among others and Leverrier, in replying, 378 [574] SOBRERO
BESSEMER [575] told him of his prediction of the position of a new planet. Galle’s successful search was made possible by the reluctant agreement of his superior Encke, who, like Airy [523], doubted the value of searching for the postulated planet. Nevertheless, the credit for the discovery is given, and rightly so, to Leverrier and to Adams [615] for their pen-and-paper calculations (although Leverrier is supposed never to have got round to actually looking at Neptune in the sky). Galle also suggested that the parallax of asteroids be used to determine the scale of the solar system. This was finally done, with great success, too, but not till after Galle had been dead for twenty years. This was not due to sheer stub bornness; it was necessary to wait for the right asteroid to be discovered and that took time. Galle worked assiduously into old age, retiring only at eighty-three. Months be fore his death, Galle, at the patriarchal age of ninety-eight, glimpsed Halley’s comet. He had studied it professionally at its earlier appearance in 1835. [574] SOBRERO, Ascanio (sob-ray'- roh) Italian chemist Born: Casale, Monferrato, October 12, 1812 Died: Turin, May 26, 1888 Sobrero studied under Berzelius [425] and Liebig [532]. He was a professor of chemistry at the University of Turin and there made the discovery for which he is famous. In 1847 he added glycerine slowly to a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids and produced nitroglycerine. He observed and reported the remarkable explosive powers of a single drop heated in a test tube. Unlike Schonbein [510] who had made the similar discovery of nitrocellulose two years earlier and had at once at tempted to put it to war work, Sobrero was horrified at the destructive poten tiality of what he had found and made no attempt to exploit it. It was two dec ades before Nobel [703] learned how to do so properly. [575] BESSEMER, Sir Henry English metallurgist Born: Charlton, Hertfordshire, January 19, 1813 Died: London, March 15, 1898 From youth on, Bessemer, the son of an engineer, expended his ingenuity in a variety of inventions. Before he was twenty he had invented a new method for stamping deeds, which the British government promptly adopted, without, however, granting young Bessemer any compensation. Bessemer was more care ful thereafter about seeking patent pro tection. During the Crimean War of the early 1850s (in which England, allied to France, battled Russia), Bessemer bent his energies to the invention of a new kind of rifled projectile that would spin in flight, thus keeping a more stable tra jectory. A cannon firing such a projectile would shoot farther and more accu rately.
The conservative British war office was not interested so Bessemer took his in vention to Britain’s ally, France. (Bes semer was of French descent, his father having emigrated to England at the out break of the French Revolution.) Napoleon III was interested and en couraged experimentation. However, the projectile would have to fit quite tightly in the cannon or the expanding gas of the burning powder would leak past it and lack the force to set it spinning. The greater pressures that would have to exist within the cannon (as a French ar tillery expert rather derisively pointed out) would almost certainly explode the weapon and annihilate the gunners with out harming the enemy. Bessemer felt the justice of this criti cism and set about devising a form of iron that would be strong enough for high-power cannons. Obviously what was needed was steel, but steel at that time was so expensive that it was virtually a precious metal.
[575] BESSEMER
SNOW [576] Iron as it came out of the smelting furnaces was “cast iron,” rich in carbon. It was exceedingly hard, but brittle. The carbon could be painstakingly removed to form practically pure “wrought iron.” This was a tough iron (not brittle at all) that could be beaten into any shape, but it was soft. However, steel, with a carbon content intermediate between wrought iron and cast iron was both hard and tough. The trouble was that in order to make steel one had to convert cast iron into wrought iron and then add the required carbon.
Bessemer considered the method of converting cast iron to wrought iron. To do this iron ore was added in carefully measured amounts to cast iron. The mix ture was heated to the molten stage and the oxygen atoms in the iron ore would combine with the carbon atoms in the cast iron to form carbon monoxide gas which bubbled out and burned off, leav ing pure iron behind. Was there no other way of adding ox ygen to bum off the carbon but in the form of iron ore (which was chiefly iron oxide)? Why not add the oxygen directly as a blast of air? The objections seemed to be that the cold air would cool and solidify the molten iron and stop the whole process. Bessemer tried it anyway and found that just the reverse was true. The blast of air burned off the carbon and the heat of that burning not only kept the iron molten but, indeed, raised its tempera ture so no external source of fuel was needed. By stopping the process at the right time Bessemer found he had steel ready-made without the wrought iron step and without spending money on fuel. Steel could be made at a fraction of its previous cost. In 1856 he announced his discovery. Ironmakers were enthusiastic and invested fortunes in “blast furnaces.” Unfortunately matters went awry. The steel produced was a very poor grade and Bessemer was damned as a charla tan. He returned to his experimentation. It turned out that in his original exper iments he had used phosphorus-free ore, but the ironmakers had used phos phorus-containing ore. The Bessemer method would not work if phosphorus was present. Bessemer announced this, but the ironmakers once bitten were twice shy and would not listen. Bessemer borrowed money, therefore, and put up his own steelworks in Sheffield in 1860. He imported phosphorus-free iron ore from Sweden and began to sell high grade steel for one-tenth the prices of the competition. He grew rich in a very few years and the ironmakers saw the force of that argument. By 1879 he was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society and in that same year he reminded the British government that they were still using his method of stamping deeds without compensation. They did not pay him but they acknowl edged the justice of his complaint by knighting him. With Bessemer, and with those after him, such as Siemens [644], who im proved the steelmaking process even fur ther, began the era of cheap steel. It meant the coming of giant ocean liners, of steel-skeletoned skyscrapers, of huge suspension bridges. Bessemer did not in vent steel but he did make it available to everyone. Yet even as he did so, Sainte-Claire Deville [603] was setting in motion a line of action that would end by producing steel’s closest metallic competitor. [576] SNOW, John English physician Born: York, March 15, 1813 Died: London, June 16, 1858 Snow was the son of a farmer. He was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of fourteen and, through his adult life, was a fanatic teetotaler and vegetarian. He gained his medical degree from the University of London in 1844. The news of the introduction of ether as an anesthetic by Morton [617] in 1846 reached England quickly, and the first operation using it was performed in London before the year was done. Snow studied the procedure, devised an appa 3 8 0
[577] ARCHER
BERNARD [578] ratus for administering it, published a book on the technique in 1847, and be came the most expert anesthetist in the country. He had a sharp controversy with Simpson [567], who favored the use of chloroform and who administered it rather casually by dropping it on a hand kerchief. Snow favored more careful ad ministration that controlled the level of its admixture with air and in this, of course, he was right. Snow was also interested in the man ner of contagion of cholera. When an epidemic struck at London in 1854 he studied the geography of water supply and found a disproportionate incidence of cholera in the area supplied by a com pany that drew its water from the pol luted Thames. Worse yet, he found five hundred cases within a few blocks of a particular water pump used by the pub lic, a water pump drawing water from a well just a few feet from a sewer pipe. He persuaded the local authorities to remove the pump handle and the cholera incidence dropped at once. Snow maintained that cholera infec tion was spread by wastes getting into water. His views inspired the work of Budd [570], helped keep the notion of infection in the air until Pasteur [642] completed the job by identifying the ac tual agents of infection. [577] ARCHER, Frederick Scott English inventor Born: Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, 1813 Died: London, May 2, 1857 Archer, the son of a butcher, began his life as apprentice to a silversmith. He grew interested in photography, however, and worked out a wet collodion process whereby a finely detailed negative could be produced. From this negative, while it was still wet, a series of positive prints could be produced on paper. This was the first time that several identical copies of a photograph could be produced. Talbot [511] claimed that Archer’s process was only an insignificant varia tion of his own and sued for patent in fringement but lost. Archer, however, suffered an all-too-common fate of in ventors: He put all his money into re search and achieved too many failures. He died impoverished. [578] BERNARD, Claude (ber-nahrO French physiologist
July 12, 1813 Died: Paris, February 10, 1878 Bernard was the son of poor vineyard workers and even after he grew famous, he returned home every fall to partici pate in the grape harvest. His youthful ambition was to be a writer. He left the village school where there was not much for a boy to learn and took a position as assistant to a druggist so that he might more effec tively write in his spare time. He wrote a fairly successful vaudeville comedy, then composed a five-act play in the grand tradition, entitled Arthur of Brittany. In 1834 he traveled to Paris to consult a fa mous critic, Saint-Marc Girardin. The critic read the play and advised the young man to strike out for medicine, for which the critic well deserves a medal.
Bernard did as he was told, worked his way through medical school, where he did not do very well, finishing twenty- sixth in a class of twenty-nine, and man aged to obtain his medical degree in 1843. He then came into his own as an assistant to Magendie [438] in 1847. When Magendie died in 1855 Bernard succeeded him as professor. He was also professor of physiology at the Sorbonne, and Napoleon III, himself, saw to it that Bernard’s experimental facilities were ad equate, building him a special laboratory in 1868. Bernard absorbed the philosophy of experimental physiology from Magendie, but unlike his old teacher he planned and integrated his experiments carefully, and under him experimental physiology reached maturity. His most important discoveries began with a study of digestion. He used ani Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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