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491 [756] FLAMMARION VOGEL
and that verbalizing them consciously offered a chance of a cure. This was important in itself and was even more important in that he described his theories to Freud [865], who carried the matter further. Breuer was thus the most important precursor of psycho analysis. Breuer, himself, did not wish to continue in the field and willingly left its future development to Freud. Freud quarreled with Breuer in 1896 and they never spoke again, but then Freud was a difficult person who quar reled with many people. [756] FLAMMARION, Nicolas Camille (fla-mah-ree-ohn') French astronomer Born: Montigny-le-Roi, Haute Marne, February 26, 1842 Died: Juvisy-sur-Orge, June 3, 1925
As a youngster, Flammarion, the son of a storekeeper, was already caught in the allure of astronomy and wrote a 500-page manuscript on the universe. When Flammarion was ill, the doctor tending him came across that manuscript and was sufficiently impressed to bring it to the attention of Leverrier [564], who helped him get a position at the Paris Observatory in 1858. There was nothing wrong with either Flammarion’s nerve or his imagination. He made numerous balloon ascensions and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the Martian canal controversy that had been initiated by Schiaparelli [714], coming down hard on the side of the ex istence of the canals and of intelligent life on Mars, a life perhaps more ad vanced than earth’s. Meanwhile, he had also reported detecting changes in one of .the craters of the moon and maintained they were the result of growing vegeta tion. He believed ardently, in fact, that all worlds were inhabited by living beings.
Late in life (perhaps not surprisingly) he took to psychical research. His great service, however, was in science popu larization. His book Popular Astronomy, published in 1879 and translated into English in 1894, was the best book of its sort produced in the nineteenth century. He published several science fiction novels as well. [757] VOGEL, Hermann Carl (foh'-gul) German astronomer
1841
Died: Potsdam, August 13, 1907 A pioneer of spectroscopic astronomy, Vogel, the son of a high school principal, graduated from his father’s school but had trouble going on to college when his father’s death left him with financial problems. He accepted help from an older brother, found work, accumulated the necessary funds, and was finally able to get university training in astronomy. He became an assistant at the Leipzig Observatory in 1867 and director of a private observatory in 1870. He was one of those who, along with Huggins [646] and Janssen [647], tried to analyze the planetary atmospheres by spectroscope in the 1870s. In 1882 he became the director of the Potsdam Observatory, and about 1890 made his most spectacular discovery. Studying the velocities of stars in the line of sight by the shifting of spectral lines according to Fizeau’s [620] principle, he found that in some stars the lines shifted first one way then the other. The star, in other words, was alternately receding from us and advancing. This was inter preted as a revolution with some dimmer companion about a center of gravity. The star was actually two stars, so close that no telescope existing (then or now) could show them separate, yet clearly shown to be double by spectroscope. Thus were spectroscopic binaries discov ered. There are large numbers of them and the component stars of such binaries are sometimes so close as to be almost in contact, colossal whirling dumbbells of flaming gas. He also showed that Algol was indeed an eclipsing binary as Goodricke [381] had suggested a century before.
[758] LINDE
DEWAR [759] [758] LINDE, Karl Paul Gottfried von (lin'duh) German chemist Born: Berndorf, Bavaria, June 11, 1842 Died: Munich, Bavaria, Novem ber 16, 1934 Linde, the son of a minister, studied engineering at Zürich Polytechnic, where Clausius [633] was one of his teachers. Beginning in 1870, when he became a professor of theoretical engineering in a Munich school of technology, Linde grew interested in the task of obtaining low temperatures. In 1876 he devised the first practical refrigerator, basing it on liquid ammonia. In 1895 Linde saw that the Joule- Thomson effect could be made to pull temperature down by its own bootstraps, so to speak. After allowing condensed gas to expand and cool, he led the cool gas back so that it might bathe a con tainer holding another sample of com pressed gas. This second sample was thus cooled far below the original tempera ture of the first sample. When the second sample was now allowed to expand, its temperature dropped lower stül and could be used to cool a third sample of compressed gas. This was repeated, with lower temperatures reached at each step. Using this principle he set up a con tinuous process by which large quantities of liquefied gases (instead of mere cup fuls) could be produced. Liquid air be came a commercial commodity instead of a laboratory curiosity. Linde further developed methods of separating the ox ygen and nitrogen and producing both in liquid form in quantities large enough for industrial use. Linde was ennobled in 1897. [759] DEWAR, Sir James (dyoo'er) Scottish chemist and physicist Born: Kincardine, Fife, Septem ber 20, 1842 Died: London, England, March 27, 1923 Dewar, the son of an innkeeper, was educated at the University of Edinburgh and studied abroad under Kekule [680]. In 1875 he obtained a professorial posi tion at Cambridge and, two years later, at the Royal Institution in London, hold ing both posts throughout his life. His researches covered a wide field, for he published papers on organic chemistry, on the measurement of high temperatures, on the effect of light upon the retina, and on spectroscopy. His most important work, however, was in the field of extremely low temper atures. His interest was kindled in the 1870s, when Cailletet [698] and Pictet [783] simultaneously and independently announced the liquefaction of gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon monox ide and attained temperatures less than eighty degrees above the absolute zero. In 1891 Dewar constructed a device that produced liquid oxygen in quantity and he was able to study the substance in some detail. He showed that it was at tracted by a magnet, as was liquid ozone (a variety of oxygen). In 1892 he constructed double-walled flasks with a vacuum between the walls. The vacuum would not transmit heat by conduction or by the convection of air currents. It would do so only by radia tion. By silvering the walls so that ra diated heat would be reflected rather than absorbed, Dewar cut down on that variety of heat transmission as well. In such flasks the extremely low-tempera ture liquid oxygen could be kept for much longer periods than it could or dinarily, simply because heat entered the interior of the flask from the outside world only very slowly. Such flasks are called Dewar flasks and have been adapted to everyday uses, for keeping hot coffee hot during trips, for instance, or keeping cold milk cold (since heat transfer is barred in either direction). The home variety of the Dewar flask is better known as a Thermos bottle. Dewar then began to experiment with hydrogen, which still resisted liquefac tion. He made use of the Joule-Thomson effect, first discovered by Joule [613] and Kelvin [652] to produce low tempera tures, as Cailletet and Pictet had done, but used the system of regeneration that Linde [758] had introduced. He built a
[760] RAYLEIGH
RAYLEIGH [760] large-scale machine in which this process could be carried out more extensively and efficiently than ever before. The re sult was that hydrogen was liquefied in 1898 and solidified in 1899. In this way Dewar reached a temperature of only fourteen degrees above absolute zero. At this temperature, all substances were reduced to a solid state, except for a new gas, helium, that had just been discovered by Ramsay [832] and that, at that temperature, was not even liquefied. It resisted all efforts at liquefaction for another decade, when Kamerlingh Ormes [843] finally succeeded. In 1891, while Dewar was engaged in these projects of importance to basic chemistry and physics, he was also in volved in the highly practical study of explosives. Together with Abel [673], he developed cordite, the first practical smokeless powder. The development of cordite did not come about, however, until after long discussions with Nobel [703]. Nobel indignantly protested the patent issued Dewar and Abel and sued. He lost his case, but some justice seems to have been on his side. Dewar was knighted in 1904. [760] RAYLEIGH, John William Strutt, 3d Baron English physicist
den, Essex, November 12, 1842 Died: Witham, Essex, June 30, 1919
Strutt at the age of thirty-one inherited his father’s title, so that he is almost in variably referred to as Lord Rayleigh. At school, where he attended the lec tures of Stokes [618], his mathematical talent was evident and in 1865 he finished at the head of his class in math ematics at Cambridge. He suffered an at tack of rheumatic fever in 1871 and on a rest-and-recuperation visit to Egypt, he rested and recuperated by beginning work on a monumental text on sound. In 1873, the same year in which he became Lord Rayleigh, he was elected to the Royal Society, and in 1879 he suc ceeded Maxwell [692] as director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, holding the post till 1884. Through most of his professional life he was interested in wave motion of all varieties. As far as electromagnetic waves were concerned he worked out an equation to account for the variation of light-scattering with wavelength and was able to confirm Tyndall’s [626] view of light-scattering by atmospheric dust as accounting for the blueness of the sky. (Dewar [759], who had discovered that liquid oxygen was blue, wrongly sus pected that the sky was blue because of the oxygen in the atmosphere.) Rayleigh also worked out an equation to account for the manner of distribution of wavelengths in black-body radiation, a question that had been raised by Kirchhoff [648]. Rayleigh’s equation, however, advanced toward the end of the century, proved to hold only for long-wave radiation, as another equation evolved at about the same time by Wien [934] held only for short-wave radia tions. Both equations were soon to be hurled into limbo by the shattering work of Planck [887]. Rayleigh studied sound waves, too, as well as water waves and earthquake waves. His careful work helped to estab lish the accurate determination of abso lute units in electricity and magnetism, the work of Rowland [798] in America also contributing. And yet Rayleigh’s most famous dis covery was in chemistry and not in phys ics at all. It began in a theoretical man ner, for he became interested in Prout’s [440] hypothesis, according to which all the atoms of the various elements were built up out of hydrogen atoms, so that all atomic weights ought to be exact multiples of that of hydrogen. This had been a dead letter for over half a cen tury, and it was as certain as anything could be, thanks to Stas [579] and others, that atomic weights were not exact multiples of hydrogen. Nevertheless, Rayleigh felt like trying again. He went about it by measuring densities of gases very accurately. In this manner he was able to show in 1882 that the ratio of the atomic weights of oxygen and hydrogen was not 16:1 as the hy
[760] RAYLEIGH
FLEMMING [762] pothesis would require but 15.882:1. Once again Prout’s hypothesis was killed, making perhaps the hundredth time in all. (And yet, by one of the supreme ironies of scientific history, the hypothe sis was to undergo a startling resur rection within a generation, in a new and much more sophisticated guise.) However, in doing all this, Rayleigh came across a curious puzzle. With oxy gen, he always obtained the same den sity, regardless of how the oxygen might be produced, whether from one particu lar compound, from a second compound, or from the air. The situation was different with nitrogen. The nitrogen he obtained from air consistently showed a slightly higher density than the nitrogen he obtained from any of various com pounds. Rayleigh could think of several ways in which the nitrogen obtained from air might be contaminated but none of the possibilities checked out experimentally. He was so frustrated that he went so far as to write to the journal Nature asking for suggestions. Ramsay [832], a brilliant Scottish chemist, asked permission to tackle the problem and received it. The upshot was that a new gas, somewhat denser than nitrogen, was discovered to exist in the atmosphere. Its existence was announced on August 13, 1894. It was named argon and, it was the first of a series of rare gases of unusual properties whose existence had never been sus pected.
The year 1904, then, presented the scientific world with a curious spectacle. Rayleigh received the Nobel Prize in physics while Ramsay received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Rayleigh donated the cash reward that accompanied the prize to Cambridge. In 1905 Rayleigh was elected president of the Royal Society and in 1908 became chancellor of Cambridge University. Like several other scientists of the time, notably William James [754] and Oliver Lodge [820], he grew interested in psy chic research about the turn of the cen tury. The Second Scientific Revolution, after all, was under way then and cherished views were being upset. How far was the iconoclasm to go? How many more things were there on heaven and earth than were dreamt of in New ton’s [231] philosophy? [761] FERRIER, Sir David Scottish neurologist
1843
Died: London, England, March 19, 1928 Ferrier obtained his medical degree in 1868. He did not like general practice and spent his time on neurological re search instead. He worked, of necessity, where the neurological mechanisms were to be found—on living animals. As a re sult, he was accused of cruelty to ani mals and suit was brought against him in 1882. In the courtroom he upheld the necessity and value of animal experi mentation and won his case. He followed the work of Hitzig [731] in the stimulation of the cortex, using not only dogs as Hitzig did, but other animals, primates in particular, up to and including apes. He showed that in the brain’s cortex there were both motor regions, controlling the responses of muscles and other organs, and sensory regions, receiving sensations from mus cles and other organs. He was also able to map out the location of the various parts of the body affected on both re gions. He was knighted in 1911. [762] FLEMMING, Walther German anatomist Born: Sachsenberg, Mecklenburg, April 21, 1843 Died: Kiel, Schleswig, August 4, 1905
Flemming, who was of Flemish de scent, obtained his medical degree in 1868, served as assistant to Kiihne [725] the next year, and then did his duty as a physician on the Prussian side of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. His first professorial appointment was at the University of Prague in 1872, where he was plagued by the growing re sentment of Czech students against Ger 495 [762] FLEMMING
GILL [763] man domination. He escaped in 1876 by becoming professor of anatomy at the University of Kiel, a position he held for the rest of his life. Since the time Schleiden [538] and Schwann [563] had enunciated the cell doctrine a generation earlier, research into the inner workings of cells had lagged. The trouble was that cells are quite transparent so that little inner de tail can be made out under the micro scope. As the mid-century passed, how ever, the age of the synthetic dyestuff dawned, thanks largely to Perkin [734], and in the 1870s cytologists learned how to apply these dyes to cells. Flemming and Ehrlich [845] were among the pio neers in this respect. Parts of the cell were found to absorb some dyes, while other parts did not, so that the transparent cell was converted into a panorama in color. In this way Strasburger [768] was able to observe and describe the changes that went on in plant cells during cell division. Flemming studied animal cells and produced the classic work on the subject. He found that scattered within the cell nucleus was material that strongly ab sorbed the dye he was working with. He called this absorptive material chromatin, from the Greek word for color. When he dyed a section of growing tissue, cells were caught at different stages of cell division and he could sort out the successive stages through which the chromatin material passed. As the process of cell division began, the chro matin coalesced into short threadlike ob jects, which eventually came to be called chromosomes (“colored bodies”). Be cause these threadlike chromosomes were so characteristic a feature of cell division, Flemming named the process mitosis, from a Greek word for thread. As cell division proceeded, the chro mosomes doubled in number. After that came what seemed the crucial step. The chromosomes, entangled in the fine threads of a structure which Flemming named the aster (“star”) were pulled apart, half going to one end of the cell, half to the other. The cell then divided and the two daughter cells were each left with an equal supply of chromatin mate rial. And, because of the doubling of the chromosomes before the division, each daughter cell had as much chromatin as the original undivided cell. Flemming summarized his observa tions in a masterly book, Cell Substance, Nucleus, and Cell Division, published in 1882.
At the time, Flemming did not see the genetic significance of all this, for he was unaware of Mendel’s [638] work. How ever, when Mendel was rediscovered by De Vries [792] two decades later, the work of Flemming and of Beneden [782] provided the physical basis for the rules of inheritance Mendel had discovered empirically. [763] GILL, Sir David Scottish astronomer
24, 1914 Gill, the son of a watchmaker, at first intended to continue his father’s busi ness, and did so. At the University of Aberdeen, however, he had attended classes taught by Maxwell [692] and grew more and more interested in as tronomy. He turned dreams to reality when he accepted the post of private as tronomer to a Scottish lord who was building an observatory. A great deal of Gill’s effort was ex pended on determining the exact dis tance of the sun. This is the astronomic unit against which all the remaining dis tances within the solar system are com pared.
In order to determine the astronomic unit, Gill headed an expedition to the In dian Ocean island of Mauritius in 1874 to observe a transit of Venus, and in 1877 he headed another expedition to the Atlantic Ocean island of Ascension to observe Mars at its time of close ap proach. The place where he did his work is still called Mars Bay. Both expeditions were designed to determine a distance (of Venus in one case, of Mars in the other) from which the astronomic unit could be computed. The results were not what was hoped for because both Venus and Mars have
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