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386 [587] MAYER
DE LA RUE [589] portant journal he edited. Though Mayer was five years ahead of Joule his paper aroused no interest, and in the end it was Joule, with his imposing experimental background, who received credit for working out the mechanical equivalent of heat. And it was Helmholtz who re ceived credit for announcing the law of conservation of energy because he an nounced it so much more systematically. Yet Mayer went further than either of the other two, for he included the tides, the heating of meteorites, and even living phenomena in the realm of energy con servation (a daring step in a decade when vitalism, with its view that the laws of inanimate nature did not apply to liv ing systems, was still a considerable force).
Mayer argued that solar energy was the ultimate source of all energy on earth, both living and nonliving. He fur ther suggested that solar energy was derived from the slow contraction of the sun, or by the fall of meteors into the sun, in either case kinetic energy being converted to radiant energy. Helmholtz and Kelvin [652] got credit for this latter idea.
Mayer’s failure to be appreciated and the fact that he was on the losing side in controversies as to priority affected him strongly. The year 1848 saw additional disasters, with the death of two of his children and his brother’s involvement with revolutionary activities. Mayer tried to commit suicide in 1849 by jumping from a third-story window but failed in that too, merely injuring his legs se verely, and laming himself permanently. In 1851 he was taken to a mental institu tion where primitive and cruel methods for treating the sick prevailed. He was eventually released but he never fully recovered. He lived in such obscurity that when Liebig lectured on Mayer’s views in 1858 he referred to the man as being dead. That, however, proved a turning point. It was as though the world’s conscience smote it. Helmholtz and Clausius [633] referred favorably to his work. Tyndall [626] lectured on his work during the early 1860s and labored to secure him proper recognition. Mayer was granted the right to add “von” to his name, which was roughly the equivalent of an English knighthood. Then, in 1871, he received the Copley medal. [588] LA WES, Sir John Bennett English agricultural scientist Born: Rothamsted, Hertfordshire, December 28, 1814 Died: Rothamsted, August 31, 1900
Lawes was educated at Eton and at Oxford, but left without taking a degree. It was not chemistry that he studied, but it was chemistry in which he became in terested. Inheriting his father’s estate, he began to experiment with artificial fertil izers. In 1842 he patented a method for manufacturing superphosphate and the next year set up a factory for its produc tion (scandalizing his ladylike mother), thus putting into practice the chemical investigations of Liebig [532] in this field. In 1843 he also organized the Rothamsted Experimental Station, along with Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817— 1901), a chemist who had studied briefly under Liebig. This was En gland’s first agricultural laboratory. There in 1854, for instance, he fed pigs protein in either of two forms—lentil meal and barley meal—and found that the pigs retained much more of the ni trogen in barley meal. These were the first “nitrogen balance” experiments and led the way toward the concept of essen tial dietary components. Lawes was created a baronet in 1882, and Gilbert was knighted in 1893. [589] DE LA RUE, Warren British astronomer
January 15, 1815 Died: London, April 19, 1889 De la Rue, after a college education in Paris, and after having become a close friend of Hofmann [604], entered his fa ther’s printing business and invented the
[590] FORBES
WUNDERLICH [592] first envelope-making machine. He then grew interested in photography. Like W. C. Bond [464], he was one of the first to photograph the moon. He got a picture that was sharp enough to be magnified twentyfold. This first raised the possibility that photography was more than a permanent record of what the eyes could see and that it offered a method of seeing more than the eyes (even with a telescope). In 1858 De la Rue devised a pho toheliograph, a telescope adapted partic ularly to solar photography. Thereafter, taking photographs of the sun became a matter of daily routine, something John Herschel [479] had suggested ought to be done. In 1860 De la Rue observed a total eclipse of the sun in Spain and was able to show that the “prominences” (spurts of red flame) visible about the edge of the moon’s disc during the height of the eclipse were from the sun and not from the moon. This discovery of solar prominences, together with Schwabe’s [466] an nouncement of the sunspot cycle two decades earlier, may be considered as initiating astrophysics (the study of the constitution of stars and of the physical processes within them). This branch of science was carried from the sun to the stars themselves by Secchi’s [606] spec troscopy. [590] FORBES, Edward British naturalist Born: Douglas, Isle of Man, Feb ruary 12, 1815 Died: Wardic, near Edinburgh, Scotland, November 18, 1854 Forbes studied medicine at the Univer sity of Edinburgh but never completed his courses. Interest in natural history claimed him and by 1833 he was touring Norway and collecting botanical data. He developed a particular interest in the natural history of the Mediterranean area and perhaps the most noteworthy single incident of his life was the dredg ing up of a starfish from a quarter-mile depth of that sea. This was the first indi cation that life was not, after all, con fined to the sunlit topmost portions of the ocean but that living things had colo nized the depths. As we now know, the very deepest portions of the ocean have their life forms. He achieved professorial status in 1851 when he was appointed to the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines. [591] REMAK, Robert (ray'mak) German physician Bom: Posen (now Poznan, Po land), July 30, 1815 Died: Kissingen, August 29, 1865 Remak, the son of a Jewish shop- owner, studied at the University of Ber lin under Johannes Muller [522] and ob tained his medical degree in 1838, spe cializing in neurology. In 1847 he joined the faculty at Berlin. He was one of the first to make use of an electric current in treating disorders of the nerves and was thus a founder of electrotherapy. He was also profoundly interested in embryology and in 1845 when he re duced Baer’s [478] four germ layers to three, he gave them the names by which they are still known: ectoderm (“outer skin”), mesoderm (“middle skin”), and endoderm (“inner skin”). [592] WUNDERLICH, Carl Reinhold August (voon'der-likh) German physician Born: Sulz, August 4, 1815 Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Septem ber 25, 1877 A professor of medicine at the Univer sity of Leipzig, Wunderlich, during the 1840s and 1850s was the first to recog nize that fever was not a disease in itself but merely a symptom. He was the first to insist on careful records of the fever’s progress and took such records himself. His advice was not easily followed, however, for in his time the thermom eters that were used to record body tem perature were bulky and inconvenient
[593] WEIERSTRASS BOOLE
and took up to twenty minutes to come to equilibrium. It was not till the inven tion of small and accurate clinical ther mometers by Allbutt [720] that the course of fever could be followed rou tinely by anyone—even the patient. [593] WEIERSTRASS, Karl Theodor Wilhelm (vy'er-shtras') German mathematician Born: Ostenfelde, Westphalia, October 31, 1815 Died: Berlin, February 19, 1897 Weierstrass, the son of a city official, was sent to the University of Bonn in 1834 by his stern father in order that he study law and finance. This Weierstrass did not wish to do so he spent his time in carousing and returned after four years with no degree. However, he came across the work of Abel [527] and Ja cobi [541] on elliptical functions and that turned his thoughts to mathematics. By 1841 he had passed his examina tions and took up a rather miserable and underpaid life as a high school teacher. He continued his mathematical work, however, and his extension of previous work on elliptical functions caused him to be recognized as a first-rate mathe matician. Indeed, he is called the father of modem analysis. In 1856 he was given a position commensurate with his abilities at the University of Berlin and became a member of the Berlin Acad emy.
[594] LONG, Crawford Williamson American physician Born: Danielsville, Georgia, No vember 1, 1815 Died: Athens, Georgia, June 16, 1878
After obtaining his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1839, Long opened his practice in Geor gia.
On March 30, 1842, he used ether to induce insensibility before removing a tumor from the neck of a patient. This was the first recorded use of an anes thetic in surgery, but Long did not bother to publish an account of it. He performed at least eight other such oper ations in the next few years but did not publish until 1849 and by then it was too late. Morton [617] had already received the credit and Jackson [543] was already claiming it for his own. The gentle voice of Long, the real discoverer, could not be heard above the din. [595] BOOLE, George English mathematician and logi cian
Ireland, December 8, 1864 Boole, the son of a shoemaker, pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He thought of entering the church at first but he learned mathematics on his own and by the time he was sixteen he was teaching mathematics at a private school to help support his family. In 1835 he es tablished a school of his own. In 1849 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Queen’s College in Cork (despite his lack of degrees) largely because De Mor gan [549] admired a pamphlet of Boole’s on the subject of logic and mathematics. For the first time he experienced relative security. He remained at the college for the rest of his life. Boole’s great discovery was that one could apply a set of symbols to logical operations, something Leibniz [233] had been groping toward nearly two cen turies before. By careful choice, he made symbols and operations resemble those of algebra. In Boolean algebra the sym bols could be manipulated according to fixed rules to yield results that would hold water logically. Boole’s predecessors had hesitated to work out the implications of the idea. (It involved an improvement on Aristotle [29] and there was always a certain hesi tancy in attempting an improvement on him.)
Boole dared do this, however. In 1847 he published his first, small book on the subject, the one that attracted De Mor
[596] RUTHERFURD LUDWIG
gan’s attention and brought him to Cork. Then in 1854 he published An Investi
treated the subject in full and founded what is now called symbolic logic. This mathematicization of logic (Aris totle set to music, so to speak) was slow in making an impression on the mathe maticians of the day. It seemed perhaps no more than an intricate game with words. However, it was found that sym bolic logic was most useful (and indeed essential) to working out the philosophy of mathematics. The attempt to put mathematics on a rigidly logical basis (fully twenty-one centuries after Euclid [40], who to the ancients and all who followed down to the time of Loba- chevski [484] had seemed to have suc ceeded at this task) was first undertaken by Frege [797] and brought to a climax by Whitehead [911] and Russell [1005], Boolean algebra was used for the pur pose.
Boole died from pneumonia brought on by his insistence on lecturing while wet from a walk through two miles of cold November rain. [596] RUTHERFURD, Lewis Morris American astronomer Born: New York, New York, No vember 25, 1816 Died: Tranquillity, New Jersey, May 30, 1892 Rutherfurd was bom of a wealthy family and could indulge his taste for sci ence freely, even though he had studied law. There was no need for him, after all, to practice at law and he did not. On a visit to Europe, he met Amici [447] and that sharpened his interest in optical instrumentation. In 1856 he set up a small observatory at his home in New York City, and by 1858 he was working on astronomical photography. He was the first to get the notion that a telescope might be used solely for photographic purposes and might have the optical portions omitted where they were for use of the eyes. He devised the first such telescope, produc ing what was really a camera in which the telescope served as the lens. Rutherfurd began to take pictures of star clusters. He devised a micrometer to measure stellar positions on photographs and worked out methods of making the photograhic negatives more stable. He then turned to the photography of spectrographs and obtained the best such photographs that had yet been obtained. He also devised a machine for ruling gratings that were better and more accu rate than anything obtained till the time when Rowland [798] surpassed Ruther- furd’s mark. By 1877 Rutherfurd was ruling over 17,000 lines to the inch. By then, however, his health was be ginning to fail and New York City was growing to the point where astronomic observations were becoming difficult and the observatory was dismantled. [597] LUDWIG, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (lood'vikh) German physiologist
cember 29, 1816 Died: Leipzig, Saxony, April 27, 1895
Ludwig, the son of a cavalry officer, was educated at the universities of Er langen and Marburg, where he was rather a troublemaker and a duelist. He was expelled from school for a while, but finally obtained his medical degree in 1840. He received his first professorial appointment at the latter school in 1846. He proved himself an excellent teacher, second in influence in the field of physi ology only to his older contemporary Müller [522], Ludwig’s most important researches were in connection with the circulatory system and here he took up an an tivitalist position. In the two centuries following Harvey’s [174] discovery of the circulation of the blood, physiologists had been at a loss to account for the me chanical movement of the blood. Conse quently, it was tempting to suppose that a “vital force” drove the blood, a force unamenable to ordinary physical experi mentation. That, at least, made it unnec 390 [598] NÄGEL!
MARIGNAC [599] essary for physiologists to worry about the matter. In 1847, however, Ludwig devised a kymograph, a rotating drum on which the value of the blood pressure could be continuously recorded. The detailed study of blood pressure made possible in this way showed that blood circulation could be explained in terms of ordinary mechanical forces. This about ended vitalism where the mechanical portions of the body were in volved. In the same decade Du Bois- Reymond [611] disproved vitalism where the electrical portions of the body were involved. Vitalism maintained itself chiefly in connection with the chemical aspects of the body and was not laid to rest there until Buchner’s [903] work a half century later. Ludwig placed blood under a vacuum and showed that gases could be made to bubble out of it. For the first time it be came possible to work with the gaseous components of the body tissues them selves, as well as with the liquid and solid components. In 1856 he was the first to remove or gans from the animal body and keep them alive for a period of time by pump ing blood through them (perfusion). [598] NÄGELI, Karl Wilhelm von (na/guh-lee) Swiss botanist
March 27, 1817 Died: Munich, Germany, May 10, 1891
Nägeli, the son of a physician, decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps but to become a botanist. He studied under Candolle [418] at Geneva and graduated from the University of Zürich in 1840. He was particularly interested in the manner of division of plant cells. His careful microscopic investigations con vinced him by 1846 that Schleiden [538] was wrong about cells budding off the nuclear surface. This corrected an im portant flaw in the cell theory, but the elucidation of the detaüs of the connec tion of the nucleus with cell division had to await Flemming [762] a generation later.
Nageli did far more harm to biology than good. He had also studied under Oken [423], and despite his support of Darwin’s [554] rationalist theory of evo lution he retained a large share of mys ticism. He could not accept the random force of natural selection as the only drive behind evolutionary development but postulated some inner push that drove evolutionary changes in a particu lar direction (such as increased size), even past the point where the change benefits the organism. This notion of orthogenesis served no purpose but to confuse evolutionary philosophy. In common with some others, Nageli sus pected that evolutionary change was not smoothly continuous but proceeded in jumps, and this notion, a generation later, was to come to life as De Vries’s [792] mutation theory. Nageli’s most far-reaching mistake, however, was his underestimation of a paper sent him by an obscure monk named Mendel [638]. Mendel’s work was strictly rationalist and completely non speculative and Nageli wasn’t equipped intellectually to handle it. He dismissed the work contemptuously and thus delayed by a full generation the develop ment of genetics. Twenty years later, in 1884, when he wrote a textbook on botany, he never mentioned Mendel. [599] MARIGNAC, Jean Charles Galissard de (ma-ree-nyakO Swiss chemist
Marignac was descended from a Hu guenot family and in 1835 entered the ficole Polytechnique in Paris, where he studied under Dumas [514] among others. In 1840 he spent some time in Liebig’s [532] laboratory at Giessen. In 1841 he gained a professorial appoint ment at the University of Geneva and spent most of his life thereafter, working without assistants in an ill-appointed lab oratory in the basement of the school. Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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