Biographical encyclopedia
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466 [707] HAECKEL
DAIMLER [708] [707] HAECKEL, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August (hek'ul) German naturalist B orn: Potsdam, Prussia, February 16, 1834 D ied : Jena, Thuringia, August 8, 1919 Haeckel, the son of a government official, obtained a medical degree in 1857 at the University of Berlin at his parents’ insistence although it was bot any that was his passion. He studied under such men as J. P. Muller [522], Virchow [632], Kolliker [600], and Ge- genbaur [669]. He practiced medicine for only a year, however, and in 1862 became a professor of comparative anat omy at the zoological institute at Jena. Haeckel was the first German biologist to take up the cudgels for Darwinism (he met Darwin [554] in 1866), and he went all the way, being actually a little ahead of Darwin in expounding on the possibility of sexual selection. Unfortunately, there remained a trace of the “nature philosopher” in Haeckel, and his theories outran his facts in con sequence. He took up Baer’s [478] obser vations that early embryos of various vertebrates resembled each other and carried this to the extreme of supposing that each creature recapitulated the stages of its evolution in its developing embryo. “Ontogeny recapitulates phytog eny” is the phrase he popularized. There is some truth to this but the re capitulation simply cannot be trusted in too great detail and the best proof is that Haeckel used his principle to work up lines of evolutionary descent for various creatures and these lines are now known to be far wide of the mark. Haeckel’s extreme views are not en tirely indefensible, however. He believed that life derived evolutionarily from non life and that psychology was but a branch of physiology, so that mind, too, fitted into the scheme of evolution. There are many biologists now who would be willing to argue in favor of both notions. Haeckel was the first to use the term “ecology” to refer to the study of living organisms in relation to one another and to the inanimate environment. [708] DAIMLER, Gottlieb Wilhelm (dime'ler) German inventor B orn: Schorndorf, Württemberg, March 17, 1834 D ied: Kannstatt, Württemberg, March 6, 1900 Daimler received a technical education in Stuttgart, the capital of then indepen dent Württemberg. In the decade of the 1870s (with Württemberg now part of the newly formed German Empire and sharing in the explosive development that followed this political and military birth) Daimler worked as an assistant to Otto [694], the inventor who had devel oped the four-cycle internal combustion engine. In 1883 Daimler left Otto and began to design engines for himself. He was the first to construct a high-speed engine, making it lighter and more efficient than ever before and adapting it for the use of gasoline vapors as fuel. He fitted such an engine to a boat in his first attempt to make practical use of it, in 1883. It was Daimler’s high-speed internal combustion machine that made the horseless carriage practical, with the energy of burning gasoline taking the place of the horse. Though it is difficult to select one man as the inventor of the automobile, since many scientists of the last three decades of the nineteenth century were working on it and contrib uted, certainly Daimler’s name is among those in the forefront. In 1885 he installed one of his modified engines on a bicycle (adding a pair of small guide wheels to prevent tip ping over) and drove it over the cobbled roads of Mannheim, Baden. That was certainly the world’s first motorcycle. In 1887 he was able to power a four wheeled vehicle and thus had one of the first true automobües. In 1890 he founded the Daimler motor company, which produced the first Mercedes automobfie (named for 467 [709] PLANTÉ
LANGLEY [711] the daughter of the financier backing him) in 1899. The stage was set for Henry Ford [929], who by applying en gineering principles to human beings was to make the automobile not only practi cal but overwhelmingly popular. [709] PLANTÉ, Gaston (plan-tayO French physicist
April 22, 1834 Died: Paris, May 21, 1889 Planté, in 1854, was a lecturer in physics in a Parisian school and achieved professional rank in 1860. By then, he had already accomplished his great ad vance in the field of electric batteries. The chemical batteries constructed during the first half century after Volta’s [337] invention of such devices were one-shots. Planté’s contribution to tech nology was the construction of the first battery that could be recharged after dis charge and, therefore, could be used over and over again. This “storage battery,” first con structed in 1859, was based on lead plates immersed in sulfuric acid and is, in essence, the same battery used in au tomobiles and trucks today. [710] VENN, John English mathematician and logi cian
Born: Hull, Yorkshire, August 4, 1834 Died: Cambridge, April 4, 1923 Venn was descended from a family much involved with the church. He him self graduated from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics in 1857 and then took holy orders in 1858. He resigned as cleric in 1883, being out of sympathy with Anglican orthodoxy, but he re mained devoutly religious. The work of De Morgan [549] and Boole [595] inspired him to write works on logic and probability. He is best known for his use of overlapping Venn circles to represent sets, suitably shaded if empty. They are particularly graphic ways of expressing simple logical state ments and are easily used to introduce youngsters to logic. [711] LANGLEY, Samuel Pierpont American astronomer Born: Roxbury, Massachusetts, August 22, 1834 Died: Aiken, South Carolina, February 22, 1906 Although he never went to college, and although he worked as a civil engi neer and architect to begin with, Lang ley, the son of a merchant, was compe tent enough in astronomy to become an assistant in astronomy at Harvard Uni versity in 1865 and eventually to receive professorial appointments in the subject at various schools. In 1881 he invented a bolometer, an instrument for accurately measuring tiny quantities of heat (amounting to differences of a hundred thousandth of a degree) by way of the size of the minute electric currents set up by that heat in a blackened platinum wire. He used the in strument to make careful measurements of the quantity of solar radiation, both in the visible and in the infrared portion of the spectrum, during an expedition to Mount Whitney, California. In the pro cess, he extended knowledge of the solar spectrum into the far infrared for the first time. A unit of radiation equal to 1 calorie per square centimeter is called 1 langley in his honor. In 1887 he was appointed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and thereaf ter experienced the heartbreak of his near misses in the invention of the air plane (as Fitch [330] missed the steam boat and Trevithick [399] the locomo tive). Langley carefully worked out aero dynamic principles, showing how birds soared without appreciable wing move ments and how air would support thin wings of particular shapes. (His theories were disputed, however, by no less a per son than Kelvin [652] who, in this in stance, was in the wrong.) Langley’s work was good, and in 1896 he constructed an unmanned heavier- than-air device that actually flew. The
[712] YOUNG
NEWCOMB [713] trick was, though, to have it bear the weight of a human being while flying. In principle, it could be done, but in actual practice the failure of the strength of the structural materials he used or of his en gines kept his planes from making suc cessful flights. Encouraged by President William McKinley, Langley spent $50,000 of the government’s money (granted because the Spanish-American War stimulated interest in the possible military applications of heavier-than-air flight) between 1897 and 1903 on three trials and could get no more. After the last failure, the New York Times pub lished a severe editorial castigating what they considered Langley’s foolish waste of public funds on an idle dream. They predicted that man would not fly for a thousand years. Nine days after the edi torial, the thousand years were suddenly up and Orville and Wilbur Wright [995, 961], following in the footsteps of Lil ienthal [793], made the first successful airplane flight. In 1908 the Smithsonian Institution es tablished the Langley medal for achieve ments in aeronautics and the first award went to the Wright brothers. In 1914 Langley’s last plane was fitted with a more powerful engine and was success fully flown, but Langley was eight years dead by then. Langley Field, Virginia, and the Langley Research Center of NASA are named in his honor. [712] YOUNG, Charles Augustus American astronomer Born: Hanover, New Hampshire, December 15, 1834 Died: Hanover, January 3, 1908 Young’s father and maternal grandfa ther were professors of science at Dart mouth College. Young himself entered Dartmouth at fourteen and graduated in 1853 at the top of his class. He then taught at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and in 1856 took a professorial position at Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio (now Case Western Reserve University in Cleve land, Ohio). He served briefly in the Civil War but did not see action. Then in 1866, he took the professorship at Dart mouth that his father and grandfather had held. He was particularly interested in solar spectroscopy. He was a careful observer of solar eclipses in 1869 and 1870 and was the first to note that the dark lines in the spectrum momentarily gleamed brightly at the moment of totality. He thus discovered the “reversing layer” of the sun. He was also the first to photo graph the spectrum of the sun’s corona. Young wrote some of the most popu lar and useful general astronomy text books of the period, and all later Ameri can texts of astronomy were more or less indebted to his. [713] NEWCOMB, Simon Canadian-American astronomer Bom: Wallace, Nova Scotia, March 12, 1835 Died: Washington, D.C., July 11, 1909
Newcomb, the son of a country schoolteacher, was rather an infant prod igy but had little formal education as a youth. He was apprenticed, at the age of sixteen, to a herb doctor of dubious rep utation, but ran away to join his father in the United States in 1853. There, he educated himself, taught school, and finally graduated from Harvard Univer sity in 1858. He joined the navy, was ap pointed professor of mathematics in 1861 at the Naval Observatory, and eventually rose to the rank of rear admi ral. In 1884 he was appointed professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins.
In 1860 he made his first mark in as tronomy with a paper powerfully attack ing the hypothesis that the bodies of the asteroid zone arose through the breakup of a planet once circling in an orbit be tween those of Mars and Jupiter, as Olbers [372] had maintained a half cen tury earlier. For most of his professional career Newcomb, strong in mathematics, en gaged in a gigantic task of producing new tables for the motions of the moon and the planets. He improved on Lever- 4 6 9
[714] SCHIAPARELLI SCHIAPARELLI
rier [564] and all preceding tabulations. He completed this task in 1899. He also worked with Michelson [835] in deter mining the velocity of light. Newcomb was a well-known popular writer on astronomy, as well as other subjects. About the turn of the century he wrote a number of articles maintain ing with considerable vehemence that the hope of heavier-than-air machines was a vain and foolish one. This view seemed to be supported by the failures of Lang ley [711]. His arguments were weakened but not stopped by the successful plane flights of Wilbur and Orville Wright [961, 995]. Newcomb did not live to see the airplane come into its own during World War I. After his death he was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1935 Newcomb was elected to a niche in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. [714] SCHIAPARELLI, Giovanni Vir- ginio (skyah-pah-relflee) Italian astronomer
March 14, 1835 Died: Milan, July 4, 1910 After graduating from Turin Univer sity in 1854 Schiaparelli studied under Encke [475] in Germany and Struve [483] in Russia. On returning to Italy he joined the staff of the Brera Observatory in Milan, becoming its director in 1860. He held that post till his retirement in 1900. Schiaparelli was mainly interested in the solar system. In the 1860s he investi gated comets and, along with J. C. Adams [615], demonstrated their con nection with meteor swarms and in 1861 he discovered the asteroid Hesperia. This was dramatic enough but in the next decade Schiaparelli inadvertently started something that has never quite lost its hold on the general public. In 1877 Mars and the earth reached those points of their respective orbits that are closest together. At such “favorable op positions,” which take place every thirty years or so, the distance between the two planets is only 35,000,000 miles. In 1877, then, telescopes naturally turned on Mars in an attempt to improve still further Proctor’s [724] map of its sur face. Schiaparelli also removed one pos sible source of controversy by removing the names of astronomers with which Proctor had labeled the Martian face and using more objective names instead, which we still use today. Schiaparelli studied the red planet at tentively, making delicate measurements with a micrometer and carefully map ping what he saw. In this opposition Asaph Hall [681] discovered the two small moons of Mars, but Schiaparelli did better. He continued his studies at succeeding (less favorable) oppositions and by 1881 was certain that the fea tures he observed included straight lines that joined in a complicated pattern. He called these lines canali, which means “channels.” However, the Italian word was mistranslated into the English word “canals.” That, combined with the suspicious straightness of the lines, be spoke artificial structures, and this created a furor. Most astronomers couldn’t see the canals, but Schiaparelli stuck to his guns. He also observed vague streaks on Mercury in the 1880s but these were not thin, straight lines and therefore caused no sensation. He maintained, in 1890, through observations of these streaks, that Mercury always kept one face to the sun. His feat was made possible by the fact that he managed to observe Mer cury during the day when it was high in the sky. In 1966, however, he was shown to have misinterpreted his observations. Mercury does not have a “day” as long as its year (which would be required if one face was always to be toward the sun) but one that is only two thirds as long as its year. But it was Mars really that made the big splash, thanks to the “canals.” Specu lations concerning the possibility of intel ligent life on Mars sprang up in the pop ular press. Even astronomers felt the pull of that dramatic possibility. Among the latter were Flammarion [756] and the 4 7 0
[715] STEFAN
RINGER [717] greatest “Martian” of them all, Percival Lowell [860], who carried matters far beyond Schiaparelli. After his retirement, brought on by deepening blindness, Schiaparelli re moved himself from controversy and quietly produced excellent studies in the early history of astronomy, in Babylonia particularly. [715] STEFAN, Josef (shteh'fahn) Austrian physicist Born: St. Peter, near Klagenfurt, Carinthia, March 24, 1835 Died: Vienna, January 7, 1893 Stefan, the son of Slovenian shop keepers, gained his Ph.D. at the Univer sity of Vienna in 1858 and joined its fac ulty with professorial status in 1863. He was director of the Physical Institute in 1866. He was interested in the rate of cool ing of hot bodies. Prévost [356] had made the first qualitative observations a century before, but Stefan carefully ob served hot bodies over a wide range of temperature and was able to place mat ters in quantitative terms. He stated in 1879 that the total radiation of a hot body was proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. If the temperature was doubled, the rate of ra diation increased sixteenfold. This is Ste fan’s fourth-power law and has proved of great importance in the study of stel lar evolution. In 1884 Boltzmann [769] showed that this law could be deduced from thermodynamic principles, so it is some times called the Stefan-Boltzmann law. [716] WISLICENUS, Johannes (vis-lih- tsay'noos) German chemist
June 24, 1835 Died: Leipzig, Saxony, December 5, 1902
Wislicenus’ father was a liberal- minded minister who was ordered arrested in 1853 for his unorthodox Bible studies. The family fled to the United States where Wislicenus attended classes at Harvard University. He re turned to Germany in 1856. Wislicenus completed his studies at the University of Halle and was professor of chemistry at schools both in Germany and in Switzerland. He was interested in isomers; that is, in pairs of molecules made up of the same atoms in different arrangements and, therefore, possessing different prop erties. In some cases, the properties were widely different and it was possible to deduce noticeably different arrange ments with little trouble. Wislicenus called this geometric isomerism. In 1863, however, Wislicenus discov ered two forms of lactic acid (the acid in sour milk), which differed only in the rather subtle way in which they behaved with respect to polarized light. He de cided there must be some subtle difference in their formulas, one that could not be displayed in the ordinary method then used to write formulas. When, in 1874, Van’t Hoff [829] pro posed a method for arranging the atoms of organic molecules in three dimen sions, Wislicenus saw at once this ap plied perfectly to substances such as the lactic acid pair. He lent his influence to the theory and thus drew down on his head the scorn of the old and conser vative Kolbe [610] on this account. It was Wislicenus who was right, just the same.
[717] RINGER, Sydney English physician Born: Norwich, Norfolk, 1835 Died: Lastingham, Yorkshire, Oc tober 14, 1910 Ringer obtained his M.D. at Univer sity College, London, in 1863. He then remained in University College Hospital for the whole of his professional life. Ringer, an excellent teacher, was par ticularly interested in the chemical influences on the heartbeat. A heart,
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