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Mary Anderson:
Mary Anderson invented
the windshield wiper. She invented it in 1903 to help cars
move safely in the rain. She noticed the need for the
invention when she was talking a tour in a street car and
the driver had to constantly wipe rain off of the
windshield. She was teased by many people for her invention
but she didn’t let that discourage her. She received a
patent in 1905. From then on people could clear their
windshields without leaving their cars. However all though
this saved people from having to get out of their cars, they
still needed to turn a crank in order to make the hands
move. Automatic windshields weren't invented until 1921,
which we now have today.
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Roy Chapman Andrews:
Roy Chapman Andrews
(January
26, 1884 - 1960)
was a colorful American
mammologist who
rose from a menial job at the American
Museum of Natural History[?] to
the directorship. He is primarily known for leading a series
of expeditions through the fragmented China of
the early 20th Century into the
Gobi
Desert and Mongolia.
The expeditions made important discoveries including
returning the first known fossil dinosaur eggs
to the Museum.
Andrews was primarily a naturalist and an organizer of
expeditions. His life was a long series of travels and
explorations of desert islands, raging seas, remote
mountains and deserts. Numerous encounters are reported with
everything from angry whales and hungry sharks, to pythons
and several brushes with armed Chinese bandits. He was
erroneously reported dead at least once.
Andrews was
married in 1914 and divorced in 1930. He had two sons.
Andrews is said to have been one of the
models for movie legend Indiana
Jones, and was a graduate of Beloit
College[?], in the town of Beloit,
Wisconsin where
he was born.
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Benjamin Banneker
(November
9,
1731
-
October 9,
1806)
was born in
Maryland. He was an
African-American
astronomer,
clockmaker, and
publisher and was instrumental in surveying the
District of Columbia.
Banneker was the son and grandson of freed
slaves
from
Africa.
His mother and grandmother were indentured servants from
England who freed, and then married, their male
slaves. The original family name was
Banna Ka,
or
Bannakay.
His father, Robert Bannakay, was notable for having built a
series of dams and watercourses that successfully irrigated
the family farm where Bannaker lived most of his life.
Banneker was taught to read and do simple arithmetic by his
grandmother and by a
Quaker
schoolmaster, who changed his name to Banneker.
At age 21, Banneker's life was changed when he saw a
neighbor's patent pocket watch. He borrowed the watch, took
it apart to draw all its pieces, then reassembled it and
returned it running to its owner. Bannaker then carved
large-scale wooden replicas of each piece, calculating the
gear assemblies himself, and used the parts to make the
first striking clock ever built in America. The clock
continued to work, striking each hour, for more than 40
years. This event provided the impetus to turn him from
farming to watchmaking.
His work led him to the study of astronomy at age 58 and he
made the calculations to predict solar and lunar eclipses
and to compile an
ephemeris for his
Benjamin Banneker's Almanac,
which he published from 1792 through 1797. He became known
as the
Sable Astronomer.
In 1791, he was hired to assist
Pierre
L'Enfant[?] in surveying the Federal District.
When L'Enfant was dismissed after numerous blowups, he took
his drawings with him, but Banneker was able to recreate
them from memory, thus preserving the famous
plan
of
Washington, D.C..
Banneker's intellectual achievements convinced many
Americans, among them
Thomas
Jefferson, that African-Americans were not
intellectually inferior to whites.
In 1980, the U.S. Postal Service issued a postage stamp in
his honor.
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Maria Sklodowska-Curie (November
7, 1867- July
4, 1934)
was a pioneer in the early field of radiation.
Born in Warsaw,
Poland, she moved to Paris and
studied chemistry and
physics at
the Sorbonne,
where she became the first woman to teach there. At the
Sorbonne she met another instructor, Pierre
Curie and
married him; together they studied radioactive materials:
specifically the uranium ore
pitch blende,
which had the curious property of being more radioactive
than the uranium extracted from it. The logical explanation
of this was that the pitchblende contained traces of some
unknown radioactive component that was far more radioactive
than uranium. Over several years of unceasing labour they
refined several tons of pitchblende, progressively
concentrating the radioactive components, and eventually
isolated two new chemical
elements. The first they
named polonium after
Marie's native country, and the other was named radium from
its intense radioactivity.
Together with Pierre, she was the first
woman awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physics, 1903:
"in recognition of the extraordinary services they have
rendered by their joint researches on the radiation
phenomena discovered by Professor Henri
Becquerel".
Eight years later, she received the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, 1911 "in
recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by
the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the
isolation of radium and
the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable
element". In an unusual move, Curie intentionally did not patent the
radium isolation process, instead leaving it open so the
scientific community could research unhindered.
She was the first person to win or
share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who
has been awarded a Nobel
Prize in
two different fields, the other being Linus
Pauling.
Her death near Sallanches, France in
1934 was from leukemia,
almost certainly due to her massive exposure to radiation in
her work.
Also her eldest daughter, Irne
Joliot-Curie�, won a Nobel
Prize for Chemistry - in 1935, the year after Marie Curie's
death.
In 1995, Mme. Curie was the first woman
laid to rest under the famous dome of The
Panthon� in
Paris on her own merits.
During a period of hyperinflation in
the 1990s,
she was on the Polish20000-zloty banknote.
There is a biographical
film about
her. An extremely a historical Marie Curie appears as a
character in the comedy Young
Einstein[?] by Yahoo
Serious[?] .
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Pierre Curie (May
15, 1859 - April
19, 1906)
was a pioneer in the study of atomic radiation.
Together with his wife, Marie
Curie, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize in
physics in 1903: "in recognition of the extraordinary
services they have rendered by their joint researches on the
radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri
Becquerel."
He died in a carriage accident in April 1906 after
having his head crushed under the carriage wheel, thereby
avoiding probable death by radiation
poisoning,
which later killed his wife.
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Helen Octavia Dickens:
Helen Octavia Dickens (First African
American Female in the American
College of Surgeons) At twelve years old,
encouraged by her family, her dentist and a
secretary at the local YWCA, Helen decided
to pursue a medical career. In 1934 she was
the only African American woman in her
graduating class at the University of Illinois
School of Medicine. In 1943, she took a year’s
concentration in obstetrics and gynecology
at Penn Graduate School of Medicine. She
was the first African American female in the
American College of Surgeons.
In 1950, Dr. Helen Dickens was the first African American
woman admitted to the American College of Surgeons. The
daughter of a former slave, she would sit at the front of
the class in medical school so that she would not be
bothered by the racist comments and gestures made by her
classmates. By 1969 she was associate dean in the Office for
Minority Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania, and
within five years had increased minority enrollment from
three students to sixty-four.
Helen Octavia Dickens was born in 1909, in Dayton, Ohio. Her
father, Charles Warren Dickens, a former slave and water boy
during the Civil War, was raised by a Union colonel from the
age of 9. A self-educated man, he took the name Charles
Dickens after meeting the famous english novelist. Although
he had "read law" and had a keen intellect, prejudice
confined him to janitorial work. Her mother, Daisy Jane
Dickens, was a domestic servant to the Reynolds family of
paper manufacturers.
Because both her parents had struggled to make a living in
low-paying jobs, they insisted that Helen receive a good
education and follow a professional career, and with their
encouragement she attended a desegregated high school. As a
young adult, Helen Dickens continued to apply to the best
schools and hospitals, refusing to be intimidated at
predominantly white institutions. Inspired by the
achievements of other African American women who had gone
before her, she benefited from the practical advice and
support of such mentors. Dr. Elizabeth Hill, the first
African American physician to graduate from the University
of Illinois, helped her to register for medical school.
Helen Dickens earned her M.D. degree at the same institution
in 1934, the only African-American woman in her class.
Dickens completed her internship at Provident, a black
hospital on the south side of Chicago, treating tuberculosis
among the poor. She was discouraged by the lack of community
done by medical residents, and relished the opportunity to
move away to her first job, at Virginia
Alexander's
Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia in 1935.
In addition to her general practice, Dr. Dickens provided
obstetric and gynecologic care. Once again, she worked in
difficult circumstances to help her patients living in
extreme poverty. In one instance, she arrived at the home of
a woman in labor to find that there was no electricity. She
had to move the bed to the window to conduct the delivery by
streetlight. To address such problems, Dr. Alexander
installed four beds at the three-story row house serving as
the Aspiranto Health Home.
After six years working at Aspiranto, Dr. Dickens decided to
expand her training in obstetrics and gynecology, returning
to Provident Hospital for a specialist residency. In 1943,
she married Purvis Sinclair Henderson, a fellow resident,
and moved to Harlem Hospital in New York City to work under
the guidance of esteemed surgeon and internist, Peter
Marshall Murray. In 1945 she received her master of science
degree from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School,
and in 1946 she completed her residency at Harlem and was
certified by the American Board of Obstetrics and
Gynecology.
Dr. Dickens returned to Philadelphia in 1948 as director of
the Mercy Douglass Hospital Department of Obstetrics and
Gynecology and, in 1950, became the first African
American-woman fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
Toward the end of her directorship in the late 1960s,
Dickens also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Over
the next twenty years, she rose through the ranks, from
instructor, through to professor, culminating in her
appointment as professor emeritus in 1985. At the same time,
she served on the staff of the Woman's Hospital in
Philadelphia and later, the faculty of the Medical College
of Pennsylvania.
In patient care, Dr. Dickens concentrated on preventing some
of the problems she had seen so frequently in her obstetrics
and gynecology practice. Hoping to educate young women to
empower themselves, she led extensive research into teen
pregnancy and sexual health issues. She used the results of
her wide-ranging survey to advise schools, parents, and
health professionals on intervention strategies to lower the
incidence of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted
diseases. She received numerous honors for her work on
sexual health for young and adult women, including awards
from the Girl Scouts of Greater Philadelphia and the
American Cancer Society. Her own daughter, Dr. Jayne
Henderson Brown, has followed in her footsteps and
practices, as her mother did, in Philadelphia.
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Gabriel Fahrenheit,
also called Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit (May
24,1686 - September
16, 1736),
is the physicist for whom the Fahrenheit scale
of temperature is
named. He was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).
Upon the early death of his parents he had to take up
business training. However, his interest in natural sciences
caused him to take up studies and experimentation in that
field. Fahrenheit's studies brought him to Amsterdam,
where he gave lectures in chemistry. In 1724 he became a
member of the Royal
Society. He developed precise thermometers.
The Fahrenheit scale was widely used in Europe until a
switch to the centigrade or Celsius scale.
It is still used by the general population for everyday
temperature measurement in the United. When he first made
the thermometer, he used alcohol instead of mercury. Then
later on he started to use mercury which gave him more of a
result then the alcohol.
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Galileo
(5
February 1564 – 8 January 1642)
Born in Pisa, Italy approximately 100 years after
Copernicus, Galileo became a brilliant student with an
amazing genius for invention and observation. He had his own
ideas on how motion really worked, as opposed to what
Aristotle had taught, and devised a telescope that could
enlarge objects up to 20 times. He was able to use this
telescope to prove the truth of the Copernican system of
heliocentrism. He published his observations which went
against the established teaching of the Church. He was
brought to trial and, although he made a confession of
wrong-doing, he was still imprisoned for life. But it was
too late to lock away the knowledge that Galileo shared.
Other scientists, including Sir Isaac Newton and Johannes
Kepler, seized its importance and were able to learn even
more about the ways of the world and the heavens beyond.
These early scientists' legacy continues to this day. As
time goes on, we use our instruments, science, math,
reasoning, and creativity to learn more about the secrets of
the Universe. In this way, we are directly linked to the
astronomers of centuries ago who gave us direction to
discover more about the dances of the planets and the nature
of the stars.
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Jane Goodall (born April
3, 1934)
is a primatologist and anthropologist
conducting
a forty-year study of chimpanzee social
and family life in Africa.
She was instrumental in recognition of social learning,
thinking, acting, and culture in wild chimps, their
differentiation from the bonobo,
and the inclusion of both species along with the gorilla as Hominids.
One of Goodall's biggest
contributions to the field of primatology was the discovery
of tool use in chimpanzees. She discovered that some
chimpanzees poke twigs into termite holes.
The termites would grab onto the stick with their mandibles and
the chimpanzees would then just pull the stick out and eat
the termites.
One of cartoonist Gary
Larson's The
Far Side cartoons shows
two chimps grooming, one finding Jane Goodall's hair in the
fur of the other. The Goodall institute complained that this
was in bad taste; however an appeal to Jane Goodall herself
revealed that she found the cartoon amusing; since then, all
profits from sales of the t-shirt featuring this cartoon go
to the Jane Goodall Institute.
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Grace
Hopper:
Rear Admiral Grace
Brewster Murray Hopper (born Grace
Brewster Murray) (1906-1992)
was an early computer programmer and
the developer of the first compiler for
a computer programming language. The compiler was known
as the A compiler and its first version was A-0.
Later versions were released commercially as the ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC
compilers.
She graduated from Vassar
College with
a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1928 and
obtained her Ph.D. at Yale in 1934.
By 1941 she
was an associate professor at Vassar
College. In 1943 she
joined the US
Navy and
was assigned to work with Howard
Aiken[?] on
the Mark
I Calculator. She was
the first person to write a program for it. At the end
of the war she was discharged from the Navy, but she
continued to work on the development of the Mark II and
the Mark II Calculators.
In 1949 Hopper
became an employee of the Eckert-Mauchley Computer
Corporation and joined the team developing the UNIVAC
I. In the early
1950s the
company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation
and it was while she was working for them that her
original compiler work was done.
Later she returned to the Navy
where she worked on validation software for the
programming language COBOL and
its compiler. COBOL was defined by the CODASYL[?] committee
which extended her FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas
from the IBM equivalent, COMTRAN. However, it was her
great idea that programs could be written in a language
that was close to English rather than in machine code or
in languages close to machine code, such as the
assemblers of the time. It is fair to say that COBOL was
based very much on her philosophy.
Grace Hopper and associates, while
working on a Mark II computer at
Harvard
University, discovered a moth stuck
in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she
remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though
the term 'bug'
cannot be attributed to Admiral Hopper, this did bring
the term computer 'bug' into popularity. The remains of
the moth can be found in the group's log book at the
Naval Surface Weapons Center.
Grace
Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds.
People (such as generals and admirals) used to wonder
why satellite communication took so long. She started
handing out pieces of wire which were about 1 foot long,
which is the distance that light travels in 1 nanosecond
(1 billionth of a second). The reason satellite
communication is so slow is that the signal must travel
for many nanoseconds on the way up, and then many
nanoseconds on the way down. Even general and admirals
could understand this explanation. At many of her talks,
she handed out nanoseconds to everyone in the audience.
She retired from the Navy in 1986,
and shortly thereafter was hired as a senior consultant
to Digital
Equipment Corporation,
a position she retained until her death.
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Friedrich Mohs (January
29, 1773 - September
29, 1839)
was a German
geologist/mineralogist[?].
Mohs, born in Gernrode[?],
Germany, studied chemistry, mathematics and
physics. He started
classifying minerals by
their physical characteristics, in spite of their chemical
composition, as it was done before. He created a
hardness scale
that is still used as Mohs
scale of mineral hardness.
In 1812, Mohs became professor in Graz;
in 1818, professor in Freiberg,
Saxony[?]; in 1826,
professor in Vienna.
Mohs died during a trip to Italy in Agordo[?] near Belluno[?].
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Louis Pasteur (December
27, 1822 - September
28, 1895)
was a Frenchscientist who
was a pioneer in microbiology.
Louis Pasteur was born in Dole, France,
the son of a tanner.
In his early work as a chemist he
resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric
acid. A solution of this compound derived from
one source rotated the plane of polarization of
light passing through it. The mystery was that tartaric acid
derived by synthesis had
no such effect, even though its reactions were identical and
its composition was the same.
Pasteur noticed, upon examination of the tiny crystals of
tartaric acid, that the crystals came in two asymmetric
forms that were mirror images of one another. Tediously
sorting the crystals by hand gave two forms of tartaric
acid: solutions of one form rotated polarised light
clockwise; the other form rotated light anticlockwise; and
an equal mix of the two had no effect on polarized light.
Pasteur correctly deduced that the tartaric acid molecule
was asymmetric and could exist in two different forms that
resemble one another as a left- and right-hand glove
resemble one another. As the first demonstration of chiral molecules,
it was quite an achievement, but Pasteur then went on to his
more famous work in the field of biology/medicine.
He demonstrated that fermentation and
the growth of microorganisms in
nutrient broths were not due to spontaneous
generation. He exposed freshly boiled broths to
air in vessels that contained a filter to prevent all
particles from passing through to the growth medium and even
in vessels with no filter at all, with air being admitted
via a long tortuous tube that would not allow dust particles
to pass. Nothing grew in the broths; therefore, the living
organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as
spores on dust, rather than being spontaneously generated
within the broth.
With this established, he invented the process of pasteurization,
in which liquids such as milk were heated to kill all
bacteria and molds already present within them.
His later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera.
During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had
spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he
was infecting with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy
chickens, Pasteur discovered that he could not infect them,
even with fresh bacteria: the weakened bacteria had caused
the chickens to become immune to
the disease, although they had not actually caused the
disease.
The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to
the virulent version was not new: this had been known for a
long time for smallpox.
Inoculation with smallpox was known to result in
far less scarring and greatly reduced mortality than with
the naturally acquired disease. Edward
Jenner had also discovered vaccination,
using cowpox to
give cross-immunity to smallpox, and by Pasteur's time this
had generally replaced the use of actual smallpox material
in inoculation. The difference with chicken cholera was that
the weakened form of the disease organism had been generated
artificially, and so a naturally weak form of the
disease organism did not need to be found.
This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases,
and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the
generic name of vaccines,
to honour Jenner's discovery. Pasteur produced the first
vaccine for rabies,
which was first used on 9-year old Joseph Meister on July
6, 1885 after
the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog. This was done at
some personal risk for Pasteur, since he was not a licensed
doctor and could have faced prosecution for treating the
boy. Fortunately, the treatment proved to be a spectacular
success, with the boy avoiding the disease. So Pasteur was
hailed as a hero and the legal matter was not pursued. The
treatment's success laid the foundations for the manufacture
of many other vaccines. The first of the Pasteur
Institutes[?] was also built on the basis of this
achievement.
Pasteur died in 1895 from complications caused by a series
of strokes that had begun plaguing him as far back as 1868.
He was buried in the Cathedral
of Notre Dame, but his remains were soon placed
in a crypt in the Institut
Pasteur[?], Paris.
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Anita B. Roberts (April
3, 1942 – May 26, 2006) was a molecular
biologist who
made pioneering observations of a protein, TGF-β,
that is critical in healing wounds and bone fractures and
that has a dual role in blocking or stimulating cancers.
Roberts was the 49th most-cited scientist in the world and
the second most-cited female scientist as of 2005.
Roberts was born in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She attended Oberlin
College and
earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the University
of Wisconsin–Madison in
1968. After postdoctoral work at Harvard
Medical School, Dr. Roberts joined the National
Cancer Institute in 1976. From 1995 to 2004, she served as
Chief of the institute's Laboratory
of Cell Regulation and Carcinogenesis, and
continued her research there until her death in 2006 by
gastric cancer.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of
the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural
History and Visiting Research Scientist and Lecturer at
Princeton University.
Born
and raised in New York City, he realized he wanted to study
space science when he was young, looking through a pair of
binoculars at the moon. Visiting the Old Hayden Planetarium
at the age of nine, he was first introduced to the stars.
However, in Neil's neighborhood, "being smart is not on the
list of things that gets you respect," he recalls.
African-American boys were expected to be athletes, not
scholars.
At
thirteen, he attended summer astronomy camp in the Mohave
Desert. There, he could see millions of stars in the clear
desert sky. Neil deGrasse Tyson was educated in the public
school system and attended the Bronx High School of Science.
After graduation, he went on to earn his BA in Physics from
Harvard, where he also rowed on the crew team and joined the
wrestling team. After earning a Master's degree from the
University of Texas at Austin, he went home to New York to
do his doctoral work at Columbia and earn his PhD in
Astrophysics from Columbia University.
After
earning his doctorate, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has worked as
an astrophysicist and research scientist at Princeton
University, as a columnist for Stardate magazine, and, from
1996, as the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose
Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City (the
youngest director in the long history of the planetarium).
His association with Princeton continues, where he is a
Visiting Research Scientist in astrophysics and also
teaches.
Dr.
Tyson published the first of six books on astronomy and
astrophysics in 1988. His research interests include star
formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the
structure of our Milky Way. To conduct his research, he uses
telescopes all over the world as well as the Hubble Space
Telescope.
He has
also continued to write prolifically for the public,
including a series of essays in Natural History magazine as
well as the books "One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos"
(coauthored with Charles Liu and Robert Irion) and a Q&A
book on the universe for all ages titled "Just Visiting This
Planet." "One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos" was the
winner of the 2001 American Institute of Physics Science
Writing Award to a Scientist. His most recent book was a
memoir, "The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban
Astrophysicist."
Dr.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is married with two children. The Tyson
family resides in New York City. Dr. Tyson's interests
include collecting fine wines, wrestling, and studying the
stars.
In
2001, He was appointed by President Bush to serve on a
12-member commission that studied the Future of the US
Aerospace Industry. In 2004, Dr. Tyson was once again
appointed by President Bush to serve on a 9-member
commission on the Implementation of the United States Space
Exploration Policy, dubbed the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond"
commission. Recommendations from this group formed the
foundation for President Bush's new space vision.
Nova ScienceNOW
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