Biographical encyclopedia
[879] KEELER TSIOLKOVSKY [880]
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[879] KEELER
TSIOLKOVSKY [880] then it represented the nine-year-old level of intelligence. The tests proved popular and were quickly accepted in France and other countries. Other tests were developed, following the principles pioneered by Binet, and the phrase “intelligence quo tient” (usually abbreviated IQ) became popular. It represents the ratio of the mental age to the chronological age. Thus, if a six-year-old can pass a ten- year-old test, his IQ is 10/6 multiplied by a hundred, or 167. Naturally, an IQ of 100 is considered average. This sort of testing has given rise to the whole battery of personality tests, achievements tests, aptitude tests, and others that now permeate our civili zation; and the value of which may per haps be overestimated. [879] KEELER, James Edward American astronomer
ber 10, 1857 Died: San Francisco, California, August 12, 1900 Keeler graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1881. He spent a year in Germany, 1883-1884, studying under Helmholtz [631] among others. After re turning to the United States, Keeler ac companied Langley [711] on his expedi tion to the Rockies to measure the radia tion of the sun. After a year of graduate study in Germany, he, like Barnard [883], went to work at Lick Observatory, where he was to rise to the rank of di rector in 1898. In 1888 he used Lick’s 36-inch tele scope to try to confirm Schiaparelli’s [714] observation of the Martian canals but failed. In 1895 he took the spectrum of Saturn and its rings and, from the in clination of the spectral lines, measured the rate of rotation of the system. He showed that the rings were not rotating as a unit but that the inner boundary had a considerably shorter period than the outer. This was the first observa tional evidence that the rings were not solid but consisted of discrete particles, something Maxwell [692] had predicted from theoretical considerations a half century before. Keeler measured the radial motion of gaseous nebulae such as that in Orion and showed that their motions were simi lar to those of stars; thus they were part of the stellar system. He also photo graphed numerous spiral galaxies and showed that the spiral form was the rule rather than the exception. [880] TSIOLKOVSKY, Konstantin Eduardovich (tsyul-kuv'skee) Russian physicist
ber 17, 1857 Died: Kaluga, September 19, 1935
Handicapped by almost total deafness from a streptococcus infection at the age of nine, and by the scientific back wardness of tsarist Russia, Tsiolkovsky, the son of a forester, nevertheless edu cated himself to the point where he could serve as a teacher and write schol arly papers in chemistry and physics. In 1881 he worked out the kinetic theory of gases, unaware that Maxwell [692] had already done so more than a decade earlier. By 1895 he was begin ning to mention space flight in his papers and in 1898 was referring to the neces sity for liquid-fuel rocket engines. In 1903 he began a series of articles for an aviation magazine in which he went into the theory of rocketry quite thoroughly, and on this his reputation as a pioneer of space flight rests. During the 1920s he suggested some of the de vices Goddard [1083] was soon to de velop. He had enormous difficulties. His son committed suicide in 1902, his daughter was arrested for revolutionary activity in 1911, a flood destroyed many of his papers, and he himself went unappre ciated. He had his dream, however, and after the 1917 revolution, the authorities began to listen. Tsiolkovsky wrote of space suits, satel lites, and the colonization of the solar system and was the first to suggest the possibility of a space station. In later life
[881] SHERRINGTON KOLLER
he also wrote a science fiction novel, Outside the Earth, in which he presented his theories for those who would rather read adventure than equations. By the 1930s he was a well-known figure in the Soviet Union, which was already inter ested in some sort of space program. The tombstone on Tsiolkovsky’s grave carries the message “Mankind will not remain tied to earth forever,” and so it proved. Twenty-two years after his death the Soviet government planned to launch the first man-made satellite on the hun dredth anniversary of Tsiolkovsky’s birth. The launching was twenty-nine days late, but even so Sputnik I made a wonderful memorial for the man. [881] SHERRINGTON, Sir Charles Scott
English neurologist Born: London, November 27, 1857
Died: Eastbourne, Sussex, March 4, 1952 Sherrington, the stepson of a physi cian, was encouraged by his stepfather to undertake a medical career. He obtained his medical degree from Cambridge in 1885 and traveled to Berlin to study under Virchow [632] and Koch [767], In 1891 he was appointed professor of physiology at the University of London, then Liverpool in 1895, then Oxford in 1913.
He was primarily interested in the workings of the nervous system, and modern knowledge of neurophysiology dates back largely to him—as knowledge of neuroanatomy dates back to Golgi [764] and Ramon y Cajal [827]. Sher rington’s first paper in the field was pub lished while he was still at medical school. In 1894 Sherrington presented evi dence that nerves going to muscles were not concerned only with stimulating con traction of the muscle. Some one third to one half of the nerve fibers were sensory, carrying sensations to the brain. In other words, the brain was able to judge the tensions upon the muscles and joints and therefore possessed a sense of position and equilibrium. This helped explain cer tain nervous disorders marked by loss of the ability to coordinate muscular move ments. He studied the effect of cutting the spinal cord or removing the cere brum on the muscular control of ani mals. By 1906 he had developed a theory of reflex behavior of antagonistic muscles that helped explain the way the body, under the coordinating guidance of the nervous system, behaved as a unit. Through the later years he continued to study reflex action and how it coordi nates behavior; how, for instance, a man stands in balance without conscious real ization of the manner in which his mus cles play against one another to maintain that balance. Sherrington’s work, as well as that of Pavlov [802], helped foster the mechanistic philosophies of men such as Loeb [896], Sherrington also mapped out with greater accuracy than had been done be fore the motor areas of the cerebral cor tex, showing which region governed the motion of which part of the body. Dur ing World War I, he spent three months as an unskilled laborer (incognito, so as not to be sent back to his laboratory) in a munitions factory. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1920, was knighted in 1922, and for his work on the nervous system received a share of the 1932 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. He was one of the patriarchs of science, living into his ninety-fifth year.
[882] ROLLER, Carl Austrian-American physician Born: Schiittenhofen, Bohemia (now Susice, Czechoslovakia), December 3, 1857
March 21, 1944 Roller was an intern at the University of Vienna (from which he had gradu ated in 1882) when Freud was working with cocaine. Freud [865] suggested its possible use as a pain-relieving agent (rather like the modem aspirin). Roller, however, went a step further and
[883] BARNARD
BARNARD [883] thought of it as an anesthetic during op erations. He experimented on animals first and then in 1884 attempted an eye operation while using it. The operation was successful and marked the beginning of the use of local anesthesia. This was the most important step forward in the field since Morton’s [617] work a generation earlier. It made it unnecessary to put the patient alto gether under and eliminated the compli cated ritual of protecting lung and heart action. Why not only put out of action those few nerve endings in the immedi ate vicinity of the operation? Local anes thesia is now routine and, indeed, in dispensable in dentistry. Roller emigrated to the United States in 1888, establishing his practice in New York City, and became an American cit izen in 1902. [883] BARNARD, Edward Emerson American astronomer Born: Nashville, Tennessee, December 16, 1857 Died: Williams Bay, Wisconsin, February 6, 1923 Barnard was of a poverty-stricken family. His father died before the child was bom and young Edward had only two months of formal schooling. At the age of nine, he was put to work in a por trait studio to help support his family, and he worked there for seventeen years. He grew interested first in photog raphy, then in astronomy, in which he was encouraged by Newcomb’s [713] kindly interest. Barnard began his astro nomic findings, as an amateur, by dis covering a comet, then made his way into college and finally graduated from Vanderbilt University at the age of thirty but without a degree. By that time, how ever, he was skilled enough in astronomy to have been placed in charge of the col lege observatory. He never had the mathematics for theory but he was a peerless observer. After graduation he joined the Lick Observatory at Mount Hamilton, Cali fornia. In 1892 he studied a nova that appeared in the constellation Auriga and was the first to note the puff of gaseous matter it had given off (a clear sign that a nova involved some sort of explosion). In that same year he showed (as did Keeler [879] likewise) that the solar sys tem itself contained material for discov ery. Galileo [166] had initiated the tele scopic age by discovering four large sat ellites of Jupiter, and in all the nearly three centuries that had elapsed since, no new satellites of the giant planet had been detected. In 1892 Barnard discov ered a fifth. It was closer to Jupiter than the first four and far smaller. It is often called Barnard’s satellite, the only satel lite to be named in honor of its discov erer. It is also called Jupiter V, since it is the fifth to be discovered. It was named Amalthea by Flammarion [756] after the goat that served as wet nurse for Zeus (Jupiter, in the Latin version) dur ing the god’s infancy. It was the last sat ellite discovered without photography. About then, he also detected craters on Mars but did not publish this finding since he felt it might be an illusion. It wasn’t—but science had to wait three- quarters of a century before Mars probes showed that Barnard’s peerless eyes had been right. In 1895 Barnard became professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago and worked at Yerkes Observatory. There he used the 40-inch telescope that Hale [974] had brought into existence to make photographs of the Milky Way. He and Wolf [927] were the first to realize that the dark patches in the Milky Way were clouds of obscuring gas and dust. In 1916 Barnard discovered a dim star that had a fast proper motion, the fastest, in fact, ever discovered. It moves the width of the moon in a hundred and eighty years. This may not seem fast to the nonastronomer, but to astronomers it is fast enough to give the star the dra matic name of Barnard’s Runaway Star. One of the reasons for its fast proper motion is that it is one of the closest stars to our solar system. It is dim only because it is a red dwarf, cool and small. In 1914 Barnard developed diabetes. He was childless and after his wife died at the end of 1922, he lost the will to live and died soon after. 569 [884] DUBOIS
PICKERING [885] [884] DUBOIS, Marie Eugène François Thomas (dyoo-bwah') Dutch paleontologist Born: Eijsden, the Netherlands, January 28, 1858 Died: Halen, Belgium, December 16, 1940 Dubois studied medicine and natural history and grew interested in the prob lem of the “missing link.” After Dar win’s [554] theories had been published, it occurred to a number of men that evolutionary principles ought to be appli cable to the development of the human species. Lyell [502], Huxley [659], and finally Darwin himself wrote on the sub ject.
For a generation after that, however, the evidence for human evolution contin ued to rest chiefly on primitive stone tools, the presence of vestigial remnants in the human body, and so on. Of direct fossil evidence there was none. To be sure, Neanderthal men had been found, in skeleton form, in the 1850s. There was enough of the primitive about those skeletons for men such as Broca [653] to consider them examples of an earlier species of man. However, they were not so primitive that others, Vir chow [632], for example, could not maintain they were ordinary men de formed by disease or accident. What was needed were fossil creatures, so markedly more primitive than man, yet so markedly more advanced than apes as to form a connecting link be tween man and his apelike ancestors. This link was still missing. Dubois was on fire with the hope of finding it. He believed that primitive manlike creatures might be found in areas where apes still abounded, that is, either in Africa, home of the gorilla and chimpanzee, or in southeast Asia, home of the orangutan and the gibbon. He was particularly interested in the latter possi bility because he was influenced by Haeckel’s [707] belief (now considered erroneous) that the gibbon was the ape most closely related to man. He was serving in the army and in 1889 he had his great chance, for he was commissioned by the government to search deposits in Java (a Dutch posses sion at the time) for fossils. He accepted eagerly and, considering everything, had quite unbelievable luck. Within a very few years he had discov ered a skullcap, a femur, and two teeth of what was undoubtedly a primitive man. The skullcap was considerably larger than that of any living apes, and yet considerably smaller than that of any living man. The teeth, too, were interme diate between ape and man. Dubois called the creature of which the bones were remnants Pithecanthropus erectus (“erect ape-man”) and published the de tails in 1894. Tremendous controversy was aroused by this discovery, for the evolution of man was a touchy matter and to have it attested to by so dubious a find as a few scraps of bone was hard to take. However, other and similar finds were made later in China and Africa. The slow accumulation of evidence made it quite certain that missing links had in deed been found. The case for man’s ev olution was no longer a matter of theory alone. Dubois was rewarded with a profes sorship at the University of Amsterdam in 1899. Oddly enough, in his later years, when he was old and cranky with long controversy, he suddenly switched views. With the anthropological world convinced that Pithecanthropus, or “Java Man,” was a real subman, Dubois sud denly began to maintain stubbornly that the skeletal remains were only those of an advanced fossil ape. [885] PICKERING, William Henry American astronomer Born: Boston, Massachusetts, February 15, 1858 Died: Mandeville, Jamaica, January 16, 1938 Pickering graduated from the Massa chusetts Institute of Technology in 1879 and after serving on its staff he joined the department of astronomy at Harvard in 1887. With his elder brother, Edward Charles Pickering [784], he established an astronomical observatory in Peru, in 1891.
5 7 0 [886] DIESEL
PLANCK [887] In 1899 Pickering discovered Phoebe, the outermost of Saturn’s satellites, and noted that it revolved about its planet in retrograde fashion (clockwise with re spect to a viewer far above earth’s north pole, rather than counterclockwise). It was the first satellite discovered by pho tography. In 1905 he reported a tenth satellite, which he named Themis, but this seems to have been an error. Much of his work in later life consisted of his observations of the planet Mars, in competition, so to speak, with Percival Lowell [860]. Pickering’s opposition to Lowell was not that of a conservative, for as a result of his own detailed studies of the moon, Pickering suspected the existence of forms of life there. That is certainly as startling and as unlikely a conclusion as that of canals on Mars, and both were finally proven untrue in the 1960s by the instruments of the space age. Pickering also calculated the orbit of a possible trans-Neptunian planet, with re sults that were close to Lowell’s. [886] DIESEL, Rudolf (dee'zel) German inventor
1858
Died: English Channel, September 30, 1913 Diesel was bom in France of German parents. On the outbreak of the Franco- Prussian War, the family was rounded up by the French police and sent to Lon don. From there they went to Germany. He was educated both in France and in Germany. He studied engineering in Munich where he passed his examina tions with the highest mark on record. During the 1880s he worked as manager of Linde’s [758] ice factory. He then re turned to Paris, defying nationalist feel ings, for he was an ardent pacifist and internationalist. In the 1890s he experimented with in ternal combustion engines and by 1897 had perfected his invention of what is now known as the diesel engine. This works in a fashion similar to the Otto [694] engine but does not depend on an electric spark for ignition of the fuel-air mixture.
Instead, it works on the heat devel oped by compressing the fuel-air mix ture. The energy of the compressive force is converted into heat energy and the temperature of the mixture can be raised in this manner to the point where ignition will take place. His financial backing in this work came from a St. Louis brewer and the first diesel engine was built in the United States. A diesel engine can use heavier frac tions of petroleum than an Otto engine —kerosene rather than gasoline. This means that diesel fuel is cheaper and, being less inflammable, safer. However, the diesel engine is a large and heavy structure and unsuitable for the light passenger cars that Ford [929] was about to make a household word. Nor was it suitable for the airplanes about to be in vented by the Wright brothers [961, 995]. The diesel engine, however, proved admirable for heavy transport vehicles so that oil begin to replace coal in locomo tives and ships, particularly during the interval between World Wars I and II, and Diesel quickly became a millionaire. Oil, in its various fractions, became the world’s prime fuel, largely replacing coal (except in the steel industry) as coal had displaced wood nearly two centuries ear lier.
In 1913 the British Admiralty called Diesel in for consultations, but while crossing the Channel on the way to Lon don he fell overboard and drowned. It may even have been suicide, for he was quite neurotic and given to chronic headaches and occasional breakdowns. Furthermore, it didn’t take much fore sight to see that each year the danger of a European war was increasing, and that was something Diesel couldn’t face. [887] PLANCK, Max Karl Ernst Lud wig German physicist Born: Kiel, Schleswig, April 23, 1858
Died: Gottingen, October 3, 1947 Planck was the son of a professor of civil law. His family moved to Munich
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