American physicist who received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering a subatomic particle that he named the tau, a massive lepton with a negative charge. The tau, which he found in the mid-1970s, was the first evidence of a third "generation" of fundamental particles. It is a superheavy cousin of the electron, identical in all respects except that the tau is more than 3,500 times heavier than the electron and survives less than a trillionth of a second, whereas the electron is stable. "The Particle Garden: Our Universe As Understood by Particle Physicists" by Gordon Kane, Heather Mimnau
Sir Fred Hoyle
Born 24 Jun 1915; died 20 Aug 2001.
English mathematician and astronomer, best known as the foremost proponent and defender of the steady-state theory of the universe. This theory holds both that the universe is expanding and that matter is being continuously created to keep the mean density of matter in space constant. He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on The Nature of the Universe, and he recalled coining the term "Big Bang" in the last of those talks. Although over time, belief in a "steady state" universe as Hoyle had proposed was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries, Hoyle never accepted the now most popular "Big Bang" theory for the origin of the universe. William Penney
Born 24 Jun 1909; died 3 Mar 1991.
(Baron Penney of East Hendred) British nuclear physicist who led Britain's development of the atomic bomb. Penney was to Britain as Oppenheimer was to the U.S. He was a prominent part of the British Mission at Los Alamos during WW II, where his principal assignment was studying the damage effects from the blast wave of the atomic bomb, but he became involved in implosion studies as well. Penney's combination of expertise, analytical skill, effective communication, and the ability to translate them into practical application soon made him one of the five members of the Los Alamos "brain trust" that made key decisions. He was the only Briton to be part of the ten man Target Committee that drew up the list of targets for the atomic bombing of Japan.
Victor Francis Hess
(source) Born 24 Jun 1883; died 17 Dec 1964.
Austrian-born physicist who was a joint recipient (with Carl D. Anderson of the United States) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of cosmic rays, high-energy radiation originating in outer space. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and was later naturalized. By means of instruments carried aloft in balloons, Hess and others proved that radiation that ionizes the atmosphere is of cosmic origin. He c (1939) a 27-day cycle of cosmic-ray intensity to the magnetic field of the sun and correlated it with the 27-day period of rotation of the sun. He also worked on devising methods for detecting minute quantities of radioactive substances. Hess made basic contributions to an understanding of radiation and its effects on the human body.
Oswald Veblen
(source) Born 24 Jun 1880; died 10 Aug 1960.
American mathematician who made important contributions to differential geometry and early topology. Many of his contributions found application to atomic physics and relativity. Along with his interest in the foundations of geometry he developed an interest in algebraic topology, or analysis situs as it was then called and by 1912 was writing papers on this subject. Gradually he became more interested in differential geometry. From l922 onward most of his papers were in this area and in its connections with relativity. His work on axioms for differentiable manifolds and differential geometry contributed directly to the field.
Henry Chapman Mercer
(source) Born 24 Jun 1856; died 9 Mar 1930.
American archaeologist, collector, and tilemaker. In his early years, he pursued archaeology. In 1897, while searching for fireplace tools in a junk dealer's barn, Mercer found a jumble of American Pioneer handicraft tools made obsolete by the Industrial Revolution. He realized these pre-1850 work related implements might one day be the prized findings of future archeologists. Mercer seized upon opportunity to preserve such endangered artifacts. He spent a lifetime building his collection, which he called "The Tools of the Nation Maker." In 1898, he founded the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, PA., to manufacture hand-worked relief-decorated ceramic tiles by a system he developed and patented.
"Ancient Carpenter's Tools: Illustrated and Explained..." by Henry Chapman Mercer
Friedrich August Johannes Löffler
(source) Born 24 Jun 1852; died 9 Apr 1915.
German bacteriologist who discovered the organism that causes diphtheria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, (1884) which had first been observed by the German physiologist Theodor Klebs in the throats of diphtheria patients (the organism became known as the Klebs-Löffler bacillus). The isolation and cultivation of pure cultures involved a number of formidable technical problems; Löffler found it necessary to develop a new medium, thickened serum, as the conventional gelatin used by Koch required temperatures far too low for the diphtheria pathogen. In 1898, with Paul Frosch, he showed that viruses could cause diseases in animals by passing foot-and-mouth disease in cows by inoculation with cell-free filtrates taken from lesions.
Gustavus Swift
(source) Born 24 Jun 1839; died 29 Mar 1903.
American manufacturer and inventor of the first refrigerated railroad cars. These improved his handling of the supply of beef from western states to the Chicago meat company of which he was a partner. No longer was it necessary to ship live cattle for slaughter in the East. Upon the huge success of this venture, he founded a new companywith his brother, Swift and Company, worth $25 million at his death. The alliances he made with two other major meat suppliers, J.O. Armour and Edward Morris, formed such a monopoly that the "Beef Trust" was broken up by action of the Supreme Court in 1905. Swift further pioneered products such as glue, soap, and margarine to make use of the parts of cattle previously discarded.
Karl Heinrich Ferdinand Rosenbusch
(source) Born 24 Jun 1836; died 20 Jan 1914.
German geologist who laid the foundations of the science of microscopic petrography (the study of rocks in thin section, based on the optical properties of constituent mineral grains). He was appointed professor (extraordinary) of petrography at Strasbourg in 1873 and ordinary professor of mineralogy at Heidelberg in 1878.
Johannes Wislicenus
(source) Born 24 Jun 1835; died 5 Dec 1902.
Johannes (Adolph) Wislicenus was a German chemist whose pioneering work led to the recognition of the importance of the spatial arrangement of atoms within a molecule. He is noted for his work on the lactic acids, and in particular for his discoveries in the study of the geometrical isomerism (the existance of identical formulae with differing chemical properties) of organic compounds.
Stephan Endlicher
(source) Born 24 Jun 1804; died 28 Mar 1849.
Austrian botanist who formulated a major system of plant classification. In 1830, he had issued his first botanical treatise, that on the flora of Pressburg. In 1836, he was curator of a museum botanical department, and in 1840, a professor of botany and director of the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna. While a curator he united the various distinct herbaria into one scientifically arranged general herbarium, to which he contributed his own 30,000 species of plants. His classification remained until 1885. His botanical system is explained in his well-known and most important work: Genera plantarum secundum ordines naturales disposita (Vienna, 1836-50), a work regarded as one of the fundamental writings of systematized botany.
Ernst Heinrich Weber
(source) Born 24 Jun 1795; died 26 Jan 1878
German anatomist and physiologist whose fundamental studies of the sense of touch introduced a concept, important to psychology and sensory physiology, that of the "just-noticeable difference", the smallest difference perceivable between two similar stimuli. With his brother Eduard Friedrich Weber (1806-71) he discovered the inhibitory power of the vagus nerve (1845). With another brother, W. E. Weber, he made studies of acoustics and wave motion. He formuled Weber’s law: that the increase in stimulus necessary to produce an increase in sensation is not fixed but depends on the strength of the preceding stimulus.
Thomas Blanchard
(source) Born 24 Jun 1788; died 16 Apr 1864.
American inventor who made major contributions to the development of machine tools. He invented a number of machines before he created the famous lathe that bears his name. At age 13, he developing an apple-paring machine. While employed by his brother in the monotonous job of making tacks, which all had to be headed by hand, Blanchard came up with a machine for mass-producting the tacks. He went into the armory business, for which he developed a specialized lathe which could turn irregularly shaped parts, such as gunstocks. Blanchard's profile lathe also revolutionized other industries that manufactured standardized, asymmetrical items, such as axe handles, shoe lasts, and wheel-spokes.
Johann Heinrich von Thünen
(source) Born 24 Jun 1783; died 22 Sep 1850.
German agriculturalist best known for his work on the relationship of the costs of commodity transportation to the location of production. He used his farm as a source of facts for his theoretical work in agricultural economics. He built a theoretical model which he used to find the important factors that determined the most profitable location of various branches of agriculture in relation to their sources of demand. His theory of rent was similar to that of Ricardo. He set out a theory of distribution based on marginal productivity, using calculus, and he could be considered one of the founders of marginal analysis. Nearing his death, he asked that his famous equation for the marginal product of labor be carved into his tombstone.
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