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Author Topic: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread  (Read 61243 times)

Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #105 on: August 12, 2011, 03:33:21 PM »
Nowadays the treatment of diseases is much more effective than ever before, and in large part this is because we understand better what causes them. The work of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century pinned down Bacteria as the cause of many diseases, and led to new treatments.

Undoubtedly Pasteur's work was made easier by using a microscope, and of course it's vital to be able to see and view the very small if you want to understand it. The first steps, then, to creating a useful and powerful microscope were taken some 200 years earlier, by the Dutchman Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek in the late 1600's.

To put it into context, in the 17th century people had only just realised that there was anything to see in the world of the small - Robert Hooke had just discovered cells. So when Leeuwenhoek started to bang out letter after letter filled with exciting new discoveries of this micro-world, teeming with new life (protozoa, bacteria), even smaller structures within cells, huge amounts of microscopic plant and animal life in water... it came as a huge shock. For a while top scientists weren't sure if this was a hoax or not - though it didn't take long to confirm his work.

The magnifications Leeuwenhoek was able to achieve are phenomenal - 500 times for his best microscopes. At that scale even the cell nucleus, a thing so small that 170,000 of them fit along a centimetre line, becomes clearly visible.

Leeuwenhoek's work opened the world's eyes to the world of the invisible, and allowed us to start to make progress in medicine and biology like never before. The long gap between Pasteur's work and Leeuwenhoek's discoveries is due partly to the fact that other theories for the causes of disease dominated the study of medicine at the time.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #106 on: August 16, 2011, 07:41:16 AM »
In the last post I introduced the father of microbiology, van Leeuwenhoek. But we also saw that there is a 200-year gap between the discovery of bacteria and the discovery that some of them cause diseases. Why is this?

It's not even the case that no-one thought to check on a link - in fact, as early as 36 BC, Marcus Terentius Varro, the Roman Scholar, said that "... there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases," a stunningly accurate prediction. And, after van Leeuwenhoek's work, it took only ten years for someone to suggest a link between his new creatures and disease.

No, the simple problem is that such people were ignored. The dominant theory of disease was the "miasma" or "bad air" theory, that said that diseases were caused by bad smells - hence the fashion for smoking as a health benefit! This made some sense, since diseases are caught often through bad hygiene which in turn causes bad smells. And indeed people who believed miasma theory worked hard to improve hospital conditions and sanitary arrangements - Florence Nightingale is one of the students of this theory and she's famous for her work; and I've already written about Joseph Bazalgette who rebuilt the London Sewage system.

But miasma theory held back progress in medicine for a long time because, once you caught an illness, no-one could treat it just by driving out bad smells. Eventually two people burst on to the scene in the late 1800's. One of them was Louis Pasteur, whose work on disease was partly inspired by losing 3 of his children to typhoid, and who created vaccines against rabies, anthrax and chicken cholera (but not typhoid) and invented the process of pasteurisation.

The second, and in many ways more important, person is Robert Koch, who worked not only to create more vaccines but also, crucially, proved once and for all that bacteria caused some diseases. His work was most useful in treating tuberculosis, a disease that caused almost 15% of all deaths in that era, and cholera, isolating the bacteria responsible.

That's a tricky thing to do, and it's important to understand this. To collar something as the cause of disease, you have to show that it only exists in infected humans, is alive and capable of reproducing, and that injecting it into a previously healthy victim leads to that person catching the disease, with that bacterium still inside his body. Only when you have done that have you shown that there's a causal link between germ and disease. And this is what Koch did. This scientific approach is vital and Koch's students would use it to isolate the causes of all sorts of illness such as diphtheria, pneumonia, tetanus, plague, leprosy, and typhoid, among others.

Koch's methods and his work are probably part of the reason the world population suddenly grew in the early 20th Century. Controlling and treating disease is currently easier than ever before - hence the ease with which threats such as Bird Flu and Swine Flu in the last ten years were dismissed, compared with the same epidemic in 1918 that killed nigh on 100 million. As a result, Koch and Pasteur between them probably have saved more lives than anyone else in history.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #107 on: August 23, 2011, 12:19:26 PM »
I conclude my tributes to medical science with the two men who (almost) cured the world of Polio, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.

Nowadays Polio is very nearly the second disease to have been completely wiped from the face of the earth, although currently there are still cases of the disease in Pakistan and parts of Africa. The first disease to be defeated entirely (and yes, this is a sort of war) was smallpox*, responsible for several hundred million deaths through the last millennium.

But in the 1950's and 1960's, Salk and Sabin separately developed two effective vaccines against polio. Although it took until the 90's for a concerted global campaign to eradicate the disease, many thousands of people in America and Europe were protected from the disease that might otherwise have died or become paralysed.

In the modern world few people have heard of polio - it's become that rare. When the disease was more widespread, though, it was a different story. High-profile cases of people who had caught the disease, such as Donald Sutherland and Alan Alda, Mia Farrow and Lionel Barrymore, Loni Mitchell and Neil Young, and Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project, led to polio being known in the US particularly as "the public's greatest fear after the atomic bomb".

Small wonder, then, that for at least a while in the later half of the 20 Century that Jonas Salk was revered for his work in the US. May 6th, 1985, was "Jonas Salk day", marking the 30th anniversary of the release of his vaccine.

Sabin's contribution to the work is to develop a vaccine that, actually, is a lot more effective than Salk's, but for various reasons is not used as much in the Western World.

*Actually there's another disease that has been wiped out, known as "rinderpest", but it only affects animals such as cattle and buffalo, so is much less well-known. The last case of rinderpest was in 2001, and in June 2011 the disease was finally declared extinct.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #108 on: August 26, 2011, 08:26:33 AM »
From the world of medicine to the media. Our first stop takes us back to the middle of the 19th Century, but first, a bit of background.

Obviously, before the internet, radio, or television, the only way to gain information was through the written word. A few newspapers sprang up in Germany as early as 1605, and then in the early 1700s in America. But compared to today the stories would usually be days, even weeks, old by the time they were reported. What was needed was some way of sending information faster than a horse could run.

Americans rightly remember Samuel Morse as the inventor of the modern telegraph and, of course, his "Morse code", because, if nothing else, Morse's work took the telegraph from local high-speed communication into something that would work globally. But Samuel Morse wasn't the first person to invent a telegraph, not even in America. At any rate, it took Morse's telegraph about 10 years to get off the ground once he'd made it work.

Instead, credit for getting the ball rolling probably should go to the Englishman Charles Wheatstone, whose Telegraph was invented in 1837 (about a year after Morse), but was first used in 1939 (5 years before Morse). The power of the telegraph became clear when only 7 years later it was used to apprehend a murderer by wiring his details to the next stop along the train line. In fact, at least in the UK, it was probably that incident alone that allowed the telegraph to take off.

Anyway, back to Wheatstone, for his work does not end there. From Wheatstone we get the words "telephone" and "microphone" (though, truth be told, he invented neither of these - he'd tried to make a mechanical microphone as opposed to the modern electrical one); an early approximation for the speed of light; the science of spectroscopy that would lead to the discovery of helium; and early studies into 3-dimensional pictures - the effect that's taken off recently with all the 3D films made over the last couple of years. Also we find Wheatstone's work in time-keeping, inventing clocks capable of measuring time to fractions of a millisecond, and the Wheatstone Bridge (a circuit component used to measure resistances).

Finally Wheatstone invented the code known as the Playfair cipher, that was used as late as World War 2 and for a long time was very difficult to break - only the invention of the computer ending its usefulness.

But, ultimately, Wheatstone's most important work is in making the telegraph a viable invention. Morse's work, of course, took it to the next stage. What happened next will be covered in later posts.

Check out my Short introduction... corner and my "Historical figures who should perhaps be better-known" thread!!

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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #109 on: August 29, 2011, 04:06:10 AM »
Possibly the largest volcanic eruption of modern times occurred in April 1815, when Mount Tambora exploded with the force of 800 megatons and released about 100 million tonnes of ash, rock and debris into the atmosphere. 70,000 people died and in 1816 global temperatures fell by about one degree Fahrenheit - enough to make 1816 known as "the year without a Summer".

The point of this, though, is that the story reached England only several months later. For such a major event, that is an incredibly long delay for the story to break. To some extent, news, especially foreign news stories, didn't properly exist in the modern sense until much later.

My last post celebrated the inventors of the telegraph, that opened the world up. For the first decade or so, though, of its history, the telegraph was used primarily in business transactions, railways, and the stock exchange. Even so, it didn't take long for someone to realise the potential of the telegraph to be used in the news industry. That man was Paul Julius Reuter.

Born in 1816 in Germany as Israel Josefat, Reuter was lucky in his early life to meet with the great mathematician Carl Gauss, whose work was vital in driving the telegraph forward (but that's another story). At any rate, Reuter became interested in the power of the telegraph and began setting up a news agency to make use of it. In the early days the telegraph wires were still being laid, so that between the end of one wire and his news desk there was a 50-mile gap, but Reuter got around this by using carrier pigeons (no, really).

As more and more cables were laid, Reuter was able to use them to gather news faster than ever before, and though initially he too was just interested in financial news his company grew and grew. Indeed, Reuter's Telegram Company became the first people in Europe to hear about the death of Abraham Lincoln.

Nowadays, with 24-hour news channels and tickers at the bottom of the screen, you might occasionally see a story preceded by "Reu:". That's because the story comes from a Reuters journalist, and most of the stories shown on the news are covered first by Reuters (in America, the Associated Press seems to dominate). Journalism began with Reuter.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #110 on: September 05, 2011, 02:05:07 PM »
Even in the early days of journalism something of its power can be seen in the story of William Howard Russell, the Irishman who worked as a journalists for the English newspaper The Times.

Pretty much as soon as he started work, Russell went into reporting on wars, and he's most famous today (relatively speaking) for his work covering the Crimean War. Back in the days when War was always happening elsewhere, so that the public didn't know much of what it was like, his reports were vital in opening their eyes to the true nature of war. Indeed, two young women were inspired be his reports to go over to the Crimea and help the soldiers. One of them was Florence Nightingale, who has now popped up in this thread three times without having a post about her (the other was Mary Seacole, whose work tends to be overshadowed by Nightingale's for some reason).

The power of journalism to raise awareness of what is really going on has been a major driving force over the last 150 years or so. In this sense Russell was a pioneer, changing the nature of journalism, particularly with regards to war reporting.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #111 on: September 12, 2011, 03:31:52 PM »
"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems. The best information I can find suggests that the top ten "alternative newspapers" in the US have a circulation totalling about half a million. That's five times smaller than the UK's Sun newspaper. So, if you aren't in that half-million group, I'll just briefly explain what Tabloids are all about - gossip, celebrity, opinion that's usually not very well-informed, all that sort of stuff. Usually headlines that don't leave much secret as to what the editors think about the story - the classic example being "GOTCHA!" after the sinking of an Argentinian ship in the Falklands War of 1982 (323 people died).

So perhaps the Americans are lucky that this sort of paper isn't that common over there. In the UK we have several of them: Sun, Daily Mirror, Star, even to some extent the Daily Mail. And these papers have a combined circulation of 7.5 million daily. Which is a lot. So the "gutter press", filled with stories that might be regarded as fairly trivial, are very popular over here.



We also saw in the last post that the stuff written in newspapers has the power to sway public opinion and effect real change, and not just in small ways either. Those of you who have been following the news might know that Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate, is under pressure in the UK because one of his UK papers (or all of them?) were using illegal means to gather news (on celebs, gossip, ill-informed opinion etc. ...). And he has news companies across the globe - as well as many of the UK's top-selling papers, he also owns many of the papers in Australia; in the US, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News; and he was also trying to take over UK's Sky News.

"This guy owns the media," people say, and they have a point, and Murdoch's also accused of manipulating news to suit his politics. This may or may not be true, we aren't here to discuss that. But in the internet age anyone trying to control the news has a much tougher job, simply because there are more places to get your info from these days.



These two points are linked because, in the UK, it took one person to start both of these traditions up. And he really did use his papers to try and change things and interfere with politics. Perhaps it was because Western Democracy only really got going in the 1920's. Anyway...

Alfred Harmsworth started his long road to power way back in the 1880's, setting up some cheap but successful comics, and used the profits to buy more and more papers. In 1896 he started the first newspaper that resembled the modern tabloid, the Daily Mail. Compared to other papers of the time it probably was a much more exciting read and became a hit pretty much from day one (it was also cheaper than all other papers, which helped). It took six years to become the best-selling paper in the world.

Harmsworth followed this success with his Daily Mirror, which after a stuttering start became the second-biggest paper in the UK; and he went on to buy The Times, The SUnday Times and The Observer. By now this meant that Harmsworth, or Lord Northcliffe as he became in 1904, owned well over 50% of the media in the UK - probably more like three-quarters. Remember, this is before radio, TV, internet, so there was basically no other way to spread information than through Northcliffe's papers. Now he started to make use of this influence.

It started as early as 1899, in the Boer War, with an appeal to raise money for British soldiers' families, but by 1910 and onwards it took a more sinister tone. Articles, short stories, features would come out in his papers that were very "anti-German", and this would certainly have some role in the response the English had to the outbreak of War.

From the small and sinister, to the huge and powerful. In 1915, Northcliffe's papers actually destroyed the British government and helped to set up Lloyd George as Prime Minister. That is serious power.

Northcliffe died in 1922 but he set up a tradition that lasted for a long time, where newspapers would try to influence the news rather than just report it. His brother Lord Rothermere fought to support the policy of appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930's, while another press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, used his Daily Express to expose the relationship between Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

It's a scary thought that the media influences world events. These days, it's more accurate to say that they try - things are too open for it to work any more. But Lord Northcliffe founded a new way of reporting the news, and it sells well even today.
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Offline Marty

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #112 on: September 14, 2011, 07:19:53 AM »
"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.

Lucky them, huh?


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Offline BFM_Kiwi

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #113 on: September 14, 2011, 06:51:47 PM »
"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.

Lucky them, huh?

I think Randolph Hearst preceeded Harmsworth.   And he spun off the National Enquirer, which still exists to this day.  Tabloids do seem a lot more popular and mainstreem in the UK though.  National Enquirer has a circulation of 700K, while the British tabloids are in the millions, and there are a few of them.


Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #114 on: September 15, 2011, 11:34:53 AM »
"Tabloid journalism" never caught on in the US, it seems.

Lucky them, huh?

I think Randolph Hearst preceeded Harmsworth.   And he spun off the National Enquirer, which still exists to this day.  Tabloids do seem a lot more popular and mainstreem in the UK though.  National Enquirer has a circulation of 700K, while the British tabloids are in the millions, and there are a few of them.



I checked the dates and it looks like to all intents and purposes Hearst and Harmsworth did their thing at the same time. The difference is that the Americans have better taste in newspapers.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #115 on: September 29, 2011, 03:00:02 AM »
As can be seen from my last post the printed media dominated in the UK for much of the first half of the 20th Century and is still very strong today, but the Internet, TV, and even radio to some extent (BBC Radio 4 has around 10 million listeners which is about a sixth of the total population) have taken over. Even the BBC World service reaches something close to 200 million listeners so radio is still a huge part of people's lives. Again, the large size of the US seems to have meant that there are a lot of rather smaller stations but still the history of radio broadcasting is quite important in the story of how the media have shaped our lives.

For a change, the person at the front of this story is actually an American after all and not and Englishman or mainland European. Everyone knows how Marconi invented the radio (or was it Tesla? or someone no-one has ever heard of called Oliver Lodge? - bizarrely the answer seems to be that in the US Tesla invented it first but in the UK Marconi invented it first! Anyway...) and Marconi also turned radio into a vital tool, such as for boats to communicate. But it took other people to turn radio into a broadcasting tool - especially for boats and ships.

The pioneer in this field seems to be Charles Herrold, who in 1909 founded a station that broadcast not just useful information but also music and entertainment under the call-sign FN out of San Jose. After the War he called his station KQW and eventually this would turn into KCBS which is still going today. Money matters meant that Herrold himself dropped out of involvement with the station early on but his work in setting the station up and also in teaching others how to operate radio transmitters was very important in the early days of radio.

Herrold's other innovation was to broadcast regular programmes at regular times - which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but someone had to think of it first.

This format would be copied until the world over we have possibly thousands of radio stations keeping people informed, up-to-date, and entertained.
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #116 on: January 03, 2012, 03:28:50 AM »
The mathematician Leonard Adleman recently celebrated his 66th birthday (on New Year's Eve, as it happens). Apparently he was the man who came up with the term "virus" to describe malacious software, and he's also been a pioneer in the concept of using DNA for computing purposes, but I mention him here because he is one of three people, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, to have invented the RSA algorithm.

Without poring over the maths of this (it's not too bad, actually), it the the RSA key that is used probably hundreds of times a second, whenever someone pays for something online by credit card. It's the code that keeps our personal information secret - and, because of that, eventually we all started to feel safe using cards online, and now do it so often in the days of Amazon, ebay, online supermarket shopping, etc., etc..

The RSA algorithm was actually developed before the internet properly took off, in 1978. So although it predates online activities, it's been vital in building our modern world.
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Offline BFM_Edison

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #117 on: January 03, 2012, 04:04:58 AM »
Don't most more secure things use elliptic curve methods nowadays?
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Offline jim360

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Re: The "Famous people you've probably never heard of but should have" thread
« Reply #118 on: January 07, 2012, 01:32:43 PM »
They're both used, and seem to be equally secure. Though maybe RSA will be broken first, as the elliptic methods seem to have more room to grow tougher to break.
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Offline jim360

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The thing about Science as a discipline that makes it so reliable is that it can make testable predictions. Obviously, then, the test would have to be carried out and if it turns out that the prediction does not match the results then it's back to the drawing board... but that's how science works. Come up with a theory, test it by experiment, accept or discard it. Rinse and repeat.

One of the more interesting problems of astronomy in the 19th Century was why the orbit of Uranus (pronounced "yurr an uss" properly, by the way, so we can avoid all them thar childish jokes) was off from it "should" have been. Newton's theory of gravity had been around for almost 200 years and tested, refined, etc., over that time. But Uranus just wasn't fitting the theory as it stood at the time. And this problem hadn't been solved for sixty years or so.

So the mathematicians and theorists got to work, refining their calculations, trying out new ideas, correcting for the elliptical motions of Jupiter here and Saturn's being raised out of the celestial plan there. Still no luck.

Finally a French mathematician named Urbain le Verrier tried introducing a new planet, near to Uranus but as yet unseen, and tried fiddling about with where to put it. Eventually, on September 23rd, 1846, his prediction of where this planet could be found arrived at the Berlin Observatory. That very same evening, astronomers there found the planet almost exactly in the place le Verrier told them to look! This planet is now called Neptune.

Predict, test, accept.

At the other side of the Solar system, Mercury's orbit was also found to be highly irregular, and le Verrier suggested that there might be a new planet even closer to the sun than Mercury. This one, by contrast, was never found (because it isn't there), but later Einstein would come along and account for the problem using General Relativity. Predict, test, discard, try something else. Science moves forward.

le Verrier's name can now be found on the Eiffel Tower, on the North-East side.
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