Famous Discoveries and their Discoverers

IAN TAYLOR

FAMOUS

DISCOVERIES

AND THEIR

DISCOVERERS

Fascinating facts from the worlds of science, technology and human achievement

Copyright ©2015 by Ian Taylor

Smashwords Edition

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Mereo Books, an imprint of Memoirs Publishing

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PREFACE

This book deals with a variety of interesting discoveries, mainly relating to the sciences, medicine and geography. There are a few surprises (for example, that Christopher Columbus was not the discoverer of the American continent). I hope this information will be of use to students and that the book will be stocked by libraries. Details regarding the lives of the most famous discoverers, such as Einstein, Newton and Fleming, may interest many readers.

Ian Taylor | February 2015

CONTENTS

Alphabetical list of discoveries and inventions

Chinese inventions

Bibliography

A

Absolute Zero (1862)

Baron Kelvin of Largs

(Sir William Thomson) (1824-1907)

Lord Kelvin was the first to point out that there is an absolute minimum temperature. His ideas followed the acceptance of Charles’ Law. In 1787 Charles said that if a gas is cooled, each degree of cooling leads to the volume decreasing by 1/273 of the volume at 0˚C. Hence it was argued that a gas at -273°C should have a volume of zero. Early in the 1860s, William Thomson - who had recently been elevated to the peerage as Lord Kelvin - decided it was the average molecular energy of a gas that decreased by 1/273 for each degree of cooling. This means that at -273˚C the energy (not the volume) of a gas is 0. Thus -273˚C is the lowest temperature possible, known as absolute zero. (In 1905 the German Hermann Nernst showed that it is not a substance’s energy that becomes zero at absolute zero, but a related property, entropy.)

William Thomson was horn in Belfast, where his father was a professor of engineering. He matriculated at Belfast at the age of ten, and studied at Cambridge University from 1841 to 1845. In 1845 he went to Paris, to work for a time in Regnault’s laboratory. After this - and for the rest of his life - he was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow. His interest in philosophy had been kindled by the enthusiasm for it at the University of Belfast.

Lord Kelvin showed an interest in theory and in instrumentation. His principal concerns were applying the concepts of mechanics to physics and developing sensitive measuring devices. A galvanometer (current measurer) which he designed led, in 1865, to the efficient working of a submarine telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. He was knighted for this achievement. ln his later years, he was rather conservative in outlook; for example, he suggested X-rays were probably a hoax and that radio had no future.

He died in 1907 at Largs, a resort on the Firth of Clyde, Scotland. At that time he was generally regarded as the founder of modern physics. See: Charles’ Law, Entropy.

Acetylcholine (1914)

Sir Henry Dale (1875-1968)

Henry Dale, an English physiologist, was the first to extract this compound. He obtained it from ergot, the fungus Claviceps purpurea, a parasite of rye and other cereals. ln 1914 he described some of the effects of acetylcholine on living organisms. Many resembled the effects of stimulating the vagus nerve (the tenth cranial nerve and the most important part of the sympathetic nervous system). In 1921 a German researcher, Otto Loewi, found acetylcholine in frogs’ hearts. Experiments made it clear that acetylcholine is involved in the transmission of nerve impulses. It is released at nerve endings in voluntary muscle tissue and throughout the autonomic nervous system.

Dale and Loewi shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1936 in recognition of their separate, hut related, significant contributions to understanding the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.

Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) and Respiration (1937)

Fritz Albert Lipmann (1899-1986)

Lipmann was a German-American biochemist who researched intensively into cell metabolism. In 1937 he was working in Denmark, at the Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen, where he accidentally made a discovery of great significance. This was that phosphates are necessary for cells to get energy. It soon became clear that all living cells contain the compound ADP, adenosine diphosphate. This is easily converted to ATP, like this:

ADP + phosphate + energy > ATP

ATP acts as a reserve of energy. The change shown above can reverse very rapidly, releasing energy. The ATP is broken down to ADP, which subsequently builds up again to ATP. Lipmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1953. It is strange that this award was not for his work on ADP and ATP, but for research into enzyme chemistry.

See: Krebs Cycle

Adrenaline (1901)

Jokichi Takamine (1854-1922)

Takamine was the first to isolate a pure hormone. The substance is known as adrenaline in Britain. ln the USA the correct name is epinephrine, but the trade name adrenalin is often used. In 1894 Schäfer and Oliver, in London, showed that an extract of adrenal gland would make a dog’s blood pressure rise. It was not until 1901 that the chemical responsible was isolated, by Takamine. Born in Takaoka, Japan, he graduated in 1879 in Tokyo as a chemical engineer. In 1887 he was responsible for the building of Japan’s first superphosphate works and in 1890 he moved to the USA, establishing a laboratory at Clifton, New Jersey.

Adrenaline has become famous as the ‘fight or flight’ hormone. Its ability to give people above normal strength was dramatically demonstrated at Tampa, Florida, in 1960. Mrs Maxwell Rogers, weighing 55.8 kg (8st 11lb), was near her teenage son when he was working underneath the family car. Suddenly the jack collapsed, trapping her son under the 1.6 tonne (3600 lb) vehicle. Mrs Rogers rescued him by raising one end of the car. The effort cracked some of her vertebrae.

Structure closely resembles that of tyrosine, from which it is derived in the body. Tyrosine is an amino-acid (See: Amino-Acids)

Shaded area is a benzene ring. (See: Benzene Ring)

AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) (1981)

Michael Gottlieb (1947- ) and Wayne Shandera (1942- )

Gottlieb was a doctor at the University of California at Los Angeles, while Shandera was a physician with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. In 1981 they were surprised to encounter five cases of a very rare form of pneumonia (caused by the organism Pneumocystis curinii). The patients were young, gay men, living in the same area, and all became ill at the same time. On 5th June 1981, the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report included an article from the doctors entitled ‘Pneumocystic Pneumonia - Los Angeles’. On 4th July 1981 the same journal reported the findings concerning patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare type of skin cancer. The syndrome usually affects men in their seventies, but all the patients were young. They were also gay. Twenty were from New York City and six were from California. Four of the men also had pneumocystic pneumonia, of which ten new cases had been reported in California since the publishing of the June article.

The experts were baffled, and an investigation task force was quickly set up by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at Atlanta, Georgia. In August 1981 a link between pneumocystic pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma was confirmed. In 1982 the CDC identified AIDS.

Gottlieb and Shandera could have had no idea of the sinister significance behind their report of June 1981. Between 1981 and 1984 over six thousand cases of AIDS were reported. By 1987, according to the World Health Organisation, between five and ten million people had been infected with the virus.

See: HIV.

Air is a Mixture (1775) and Significance of Oxygen (1776)

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Sometimes described as the Newton of chemistry, Lavoisier also had a great interest in geology, scientific agriculture, finance and social reform. A Parisian throughout his life, he was born into a wealthy family. His mother spoiled him, and after her early death he was pampered by an aunt. In 1763 he obtained a degree in law, but his interest in science had already awakened. The next year he began his first important scientific work - investigating the composition of gypsum, a naturally occurring form of calcium sulphate. From then on he worked prodigiously hard, although troubled for years with chronic indigestion. At the age of twenty-five he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences.

In the same year, 1768, he invested in ‘Ferme Générale’, a private tax-collecting company. He did not collect any taxes himself but he started working for the company as an administrator. In 1771 - when he was twenty-eight – he married Marie-Anne, the daughter of an executive of the company. At the time his bride had not yet reached her fourteenth birthday, but she became a very supportive and helpful wife. The marriage did not produce any children.

In 1772 Lavoisier commenced experiments which involved heating various substances in air. One substance was diamond, which was found to give off carbon dioxide gas when burned (and nothing else). A diamond for the experiment was given by a Parisian Jeweller, who curiously was said to be absolutely certain that the combustion of a diamond produces carbon dioxide. (Diamond and graphite were found to be different forms of the same element, carbon; this was confirmed by later experiments of others, such as Guyton de Morveau, who were able to show that diamond could be converted to graphite without a chemical reaction.)

From his first experiments in the early 1770s, Lavoisier came to realise that air is a mixture. Until the seventeenth century, people thought it was a single substance. Then a Flemish scientist, Jan Baptista van Helmont, gained the idea that a number of different gases exist. In 1756, Joseph Black, a Scots chemist, showed that carbon dioxide is a gas differing from air, though a small amount of it is present in air. Ten years later, the Londoner Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen gas.

Lavoisier’s most important experiments were with mercury (quicksilver). He found that when mercury was strongly heated in an enclosed vessel, it combined only with part of the atmosphere. The product, a red powder, floated on the surface of the mercury. The other four-fifths of the atmosphere did not alter or affect the mercury in any way. When Lavoisier carefully scraped off all the red powder and heated it strongly, a colourless gas was given off. He found that combustible substances would burn very brightly in this gas, and a small creature, such as a mouse, became very active if put into a jar of the gas. The active part of the air, the part found to support burning and life, he called ‘oxygen’.

Lavoisier saw that his results were perfectly explained by the idea that strongly heated mercury combines with oxygen from the air:

Mercury + Oxygen (from air) > Mercury Oxide

If the product of the combustion is itself strongly heated, it breaks down into mercury and oxygen:

Mercury Oxide > Mercury + Oxygen

Oxygen gas had been discovered in 1771 by Scheele in Sweden and in 1774 by Priestley in England. Priestley visited Lavoisier in Paris during 1774, when Lavoisier saw that he himself had shown definitely that oxygen is present in air. Unfortunately he later displayed a common tendency of his, which was to try to take all the credit for himself. He seems to have attempted to give the idea that he was the discoverer of oxygen, as well as the first person to explain clearly the nature of combustion.

Lavoisier called the inactive four fifths of air ‘azote’ (‘no life’) but this gas soon became generally known as nitrogen. It had been discovered in 1772 by a Scottish doctor, Daniel Rutherford.

The behaviour of small mammals in air, in oxygen and in nitrogen was investigated by Lavoisier. It became clear that breathing - like burning - uses up oxygen, which comprises one-fifth of the air.

In 1787 Lavoisier published a memorable book, Methods of Chemical Nomenclature. This started the scheme, still