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Today in History :: Sunday, 20 May 2012

Birthdays:
1537	Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, surgeon. An outstanding Renaissance anatomist who helped found modern embryology. Born in Acquapendente, Italy.
1799	Honoré de Balzac (b. Honoré Balssa), writer. Best remembered for his "Droll Stories" collection and for his tumultuous life of mounting debts and almost incessant toil, with frequent bouts of writing feverishly for 15 hours at a stretch. His death has been attributed to overwork and excessive coffee consumption. He is generally considered the major early influence on realism, or naturalism, in the novel and one of the greatest fiction writers of all time. Born in Tours, France.
1825	George Phillips Bond, astronomer. Made the first photograph of a double star, discovered a number of comets, and with his father, discovered Hyperion, the eighth moon of Saturn. Born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA.
1851	Emil Berliner, inventor. Developed the phonograph record disc, an improvement on Edison's cylindrical records. He also invented the microphone and the gramophone in 1887, and made important contributions to telephone technology. Born in Hannover, Germany.
1860	Eduard Buchner, biochemist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1907 for demonstrating that the fermentation of carbohydrates results from the action of different enzymes contained in yeast and not the yeast cell itself. He showed that an enzyme, zymase, can be extracted from yeast cells and that it causes sugar to break up. Born in Munich, Germany.
1895	R. J. Mitchell, aircraft designer. Developer of the eight-gun Spitfire, one of the best-known fighters in WW II. He designed no less than 24 aircraft including a series of flying boats and high-speed seaplanes. Born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England.
1908	James Stewart, actor (Rear Window, It's a Wonderful Life, Vertigo, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story). A former architecture graduate of Princeton University who went on to become one of America's most beloved actors. He became the first film star to enlist during WW II when he joined the US Air Force, and rose to the rank of colonel. Following WW II he served in the US Air Force Reserve and became a brigadier general in 1959. Born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, USA.
1913	William Hewlett, electrical engineer. Co-founder, with friend and Stanford classmate David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1939, a leading manufacturer of analytic and measuring equipment, computers, and printers. Their first product, an audio oscillator based on a design developed by Hewlett when he was in graduate school, was produced from their first "factory", a small garage in Palo Alto, California. That garage is now regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
1915	Moshe Dayan, Israeli military leader and politician. Joined the Haganah, a Zionist military organisation in Palestine which later became the Israel Defence Forces, at the age of 14. He commanded over a number of military units on the central front during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and also commanded the Israeli forces during the Suez Crisis. He entered politics in 1959 and ten years later, became Minister of Defence in Golda Meir's government. He was responsible for military planning at the outbreak of the disastrous Yom Kippur War where his complacency, assuming that Israel would win easily, led to heavy defeats and his radical about-turn where he spoke openly of using weapons of mass destruction against the Arabs. He later joined the right-wing Likud party and became foreign minister in the government of Menachem Begin where he was instrumental in drawing up the Camp David Accords, a peace agreement with Egypt. He is remembered as a complicated and controversial individual who had few close friends, and whose mental brilliance and charismatic manner were often combined with cynicism and lack of restraint. Born in the kibbutz Daganya Alef, near Lake Kinneret, Ottoman Empire.
1918	Edward Lewis, geneticist. Shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1995 for discovering the functions that control early embryonic development. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA.
1944	Joe Cocker, singer. Born in Sheffield, England.
1946	Cher, singer. Born Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre in El Centro, California, USA.
Deaths:
1471	Henry VI, King of England (1422 - 61, 1470 - 71). The only son of Henry V, he became King of both England and France when only nine months old, however he didn't take over the governing of these two countries until 1437. Known as an intelligent man, he grew up a pious and studious recluse, who suffered episodes of mental instability. He was also the founder of both King's College, Cambridge in 1440 and Eton College in 1441. He disliked all forms of bloodshed, showing little interest in military matters and was the first English king not to enter the battlefield. He was murdered in the Tower of London, England, aged 50.
1506	Christopher Columbus (b. Cristoforo Colombo), Spanish explorer, mariner, navigator. Widely believed to be the first European to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and successfully land on the American continent. Died in Vallodid, Spain, aged 55.
1622	Osman II, Sultan of Turkey and emperor of the Ottoman Empire (1618 - 22). Son of Ahmed I, he ascended the throne at the age of early age of 14 as the result of a coup d'etat against his uncle Mustafa I. He sought to assert himself as a ruler and personally led the Ottoman invasion of Poland. He was heavily defeated however and returned to Constantinople in shame, blaming the cowardice of the Turkish troops for his humiliation. His accusations invoked an uprising under the leadership of Mustafa I's mother and he was eventually taken prisoner and strangled with a bowstring. Died in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey), aged 17.
1793	Charles Bonnet, Swiss naturalist. Discovered parthenogenesis, reproduction without fertilisation, in female aphids. He also demonstrated the regenerative ability of annelid worms and found that insects breathe through pores which he called stigmata. Died in Genthod, near Geneva, Switzerland, aged 73.
1947	Philipp Lenard, Hungarian physicist. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties. His results had important implications for the development of electronics and nuclear physics. Died in Messehausen, Germany, aged 84.
1982	Merle Antony Tuve, American geophysicist. Developed the radio-wave exploration method for the ionosphere and made observations which provided the theoretical foundation for the development of radar. Died in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, aged 80.
1986	Helen Brooke Taussig, American physician. Regarded as the founder of pediatric cardiology, who pioneered the use of X-rays and fluoroscopy to identify heart defects in newborn children. Died in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, USA, aged 87.
1996	Jon Pertwee, English actor (Dr Who). Best remembered for his role as the Doctor in "Doctor Who" from 1970 - 74. Died of a heart attack in New York City, USA, aged 76.
2002	Stephen Jay Gould, American palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, author. Became interested in biology and evolution when he visited the Museum of American History at the age of 5. He is best remembered for his theory of "punctuated equilibria", a modification of the traditional Darwinian theory of evolution where new species occasionally appear more quickly than the slow, steady, gradual process of Darwinian natural selection accounts for. His books and his popular science essays in Natural History magazine helped to bring evolutionary theory and paleontology to a broad public audience. He's also remembered for his crusade against the pseudo-science of creationism. Died of cancer in New York City, USA, aged 60.
Events on this day:
325 CE	Roman emperor Constantine calls the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical Christian council.
526 CE	An earthquake kills approximately 300,000 people in Syria and Antiochia.
1498	Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrives in Calcutta, India.
1570	Abraham Ortelius publishes the first modern world atlas, containing 70 maps.
1825	Charles X becomes King of France.
1867	The foundation stone of the Royal Albert Hall, London, is laid by Queen Victoria.
1874	Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a US patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. They begin selling for $13.50 per dozen.
1875	The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is established in Sèvres, France, by the International Metric Convention.
1892	George Sampson patents the clothes dryer.
1899	The American Physical Society is founded at Columbia University, USA by scientists from 17 institutions, for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics.
1900	The second modern Olympic Games are opened in Paris, France, lasting for 5 months.
1901	Claude Grivolas of Paris, France, invents a projector that produces three-dimensional pictures.
1902	Cuba gains independence from the USA.
1921	Marie Curie is presented with a gram of radium worth $100,000 at the White House, Washington DC, USA.
1927	The Treaty of Jedda comes into effect and Saudi Arabia becomes independent of the United Kingdom.
1927	Charles Lindbergh takes off from New York at 7:52 am to cross the Atlantic bound for Paris. He arrived at Le Bourget Field at 10:22 pm.
1939	Pan Am begins a regular trans-Atlantic airmail and passenger service across the North Atlantic Ocean.
1940	The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland, under SS commandant Rudolf Höss.
1940	Igor Sikorsky demonstrates his new invention, the helicopter, to the public for the first time.
1959	Murderer Guy Trebert becomes the first person to be arrested using an identikit picture in in Paris, France.
1964	The first atomic-powered lighthouse is put into operation in Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore Harbour, Maryland, USA. It was designed to supply a continuous flow of electricity for ten years without refuelling.
1978	The USA launches Pioneer Venus 1. The craft produces the first global radar map of Venus.
1980	In a referendum, 59.5% of Quebec voters reject separatism.
1990	The Hubble Space Telescope sends its first photograph from space, an image of a double star 1,260 light years away.
1991	The Soviet parliament approves a law allowing citizens to travel abroad.
1993	A meteor, 10 metres in diameter, comes within 150,000 km of Earth.
2002	East Timor gains independence from Indonesia, becoming the first new country of the 21st century.
2010	Scientists in the US create the first "synthetic cell". They used a synthetic genome to build a new, synthetic strain of the bacteria Mycoplasma Mycoides by stitching together short iterations of man-made versions of the four nucleotide bases that were then assembled into a working genome. The final synthetic genome, more than a million base-pairs long, was then inserted into an existing Mycoplasma capricolum cell which then went on to behave as a Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria, producing proteins from the instructions encoded by the synthetic genome and even dividing and growing.
2010	Floyd Landis, a former team mate of Lance Armstrong, testifies that he witnessed Armstrong receiving multiple blood transfusions and dispensing testosterone patches to his team mates on the US Postal Cycling team. He also claimed that Armstrong failed a drug test at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland and that he bribed former UCI president Hein Verbruggen to cover up the positive test. It was later revealed that Armstrong had made donations to the UCI of $25,000 and $100,000.