Births which occurred on this date:
1950 National Council of the Churches of Christ
in the United States is founded in Cleveland, Ohio, by Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox denominations. It has would become a strong voices for
its brand of social justice.
1948 The First All-Australian
automobile
Australian Prime Minister Ben
Chifley attends the unveiling of the first car to be manufactured
entirely in Australia — an ivory-colored motor car officially
designated the 48-215, but fondly known as the Holden FX. In
1945, the Australian government had invited Australia's auto-part
manufacturers to create an all-Australian car. General Motors-Holden's
Automotive, a car body manufacturer, obliged, producing the
48-215, a six-cylinder, four-door sedan. The 48-215 was an instant
success in Australia, and 100,000 Holden FXs were sold in the
first five years of production. During the next few decades,
General Motors-Holden's Automotive went on to introduce a number
of other successful marquees, including the Torana and the Commodore.
Four million Holdens, with their trademark "Lion-and-Stone"
emblem, were sold in Australia and exported around the world
by the 1980s. In 1994, General Motors-Holden's Automotive finally
adopted Holden as its official company name, and today Holden
continues its mission of meeting Australia's unique motoring
needs. |
1943 Sue Miller,
novelist, in Boston.
Miller graduated from Radcliffe
College in 1964 and briefly worked as a high school teacher.
She later worked as a model, a cocktail waitress, and administered
psychological tests to rats in a university lab. She took three
different masters' degrees, in creative writing, teaching English,
and early-childhood education. She taught preschool for eight
years and married. When she was 35, she took a creative writing
workshop and almost immediately published several short stories.
In 1986, she published her first
novel, The Good Mother, about a single mother whose ex-husband
sues for custody of their child because she's involved with
another man. Critics praised the book's maturity, grace, and
subtlety, and expressed surprise at finding these qualities
in a first novel. Miller has continued to write accomplished
novels portraying the modern family, including Family Pictures
(1990), about rearing an autistic child; For Love (1993),
about a woman who returns to her childhood home after her mother's
death; and While I Was Gone (1999), about a happily married
veterinarian who flirts with the idea of an affair when an old
lover moves to town. |
1933 Dr David Reuben writer (Everything You Wanted
to Know about Sex)
1932 Jacques Chirac, à Paris, président de France.
1928 Paul Simon (Sen-D-Ill), presidential candidate
1918 Madeleine L'Engle, writer (A Wrinkle in Time).
1911 Konrad Fuchs, German atomic physicist.
1908 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., politician and Civil Rights leader.
1902 Carlo Levi Italy, painter/novelist (Of Fear & Freedom)
1900 Mildred Elizabeth Sisk, aka Axis Sally, Nazi propagandist.
1898 Clive Staples Lewis English writer / scholar (Le Roman de
la Rose, Out of the Silent Planet) CS LEWIS ONLINE: Spirits
in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics, Spirits
in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics.
1895 William V.S. Tubman (Whig), 17th Liberian President (1943-70)
1879 Nikolai
Krylov, mathematician
1874 Antonio Egas Moniz Portugal, lobotomist (Nobel 1949)
1866 Brown,
mathematician
1866 Jozef Pankiewicz, Polish artist who died in 1943.
1863 Jules Alexis Meunier, French artist who died in 1942.
1858 Emil Karl Rau, German artist who died in 1937.
1849 Sir Ambrose Fleming inventor (diode)
1849 Lamb,
mathematician
1847 Greenhill,
mathematician
1846 Konrad Kiesel, German artist who died on 28 May 1921.
1840 Francesco Beda, Italian artist who died on 21 June 1900.
1832 Louisa May Alcott, novelist (Little Women).
1818 George Brown Canada, publisher (Toronto Globe), PM (L) (1858)
1815 Augusta Ada Byron (later
Countess of Lovelace)
Lovelace, a mathematical prodigy
and daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was an important influence
on Charles Babbage, who developed one of the first mechanical
computers. She is sometimes credited with the invention of computer
programming. In June 1833, Lovelace first met Babbage, while
attending one of his celebrated parties. A well-known mathematician
whose frequent salons drew luminaries like Darwin, Longfellow,
and Dickens, Babbage was hard at work on a calculating machine
he called the "Difference Engine." Lovelace became fascinated
by the machine and quickly befriended Babbage. The two kept
up a lively correspondence about the machine for many years.
Lovelace helped spread the ideas behind the Difference Engine
by publishing scientific papers describing the machine. These
papers were published anonymously — women in nineteenth-century
England rarely published under their own names. In 1852, she
died at age thirty-six. |
1803 Christian
Doppler, mathematician, physicist, discoverer of Doppler Effect
(frequency shift)
1789 Jan van Ravensway, Dutch artist who died on 02 March 1869.
1781 Andres Bello Venezuela poet/diplomat/scholar (Selvas Americanas)
1627
John Ray, leading 17th-century English naturalist
and botanist who contributed significantly to progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to botany was
the establishment of species as the ultimate unit of taxonomy.
John
Ray and his friend Francis Willughby made an amazing pact together:
they would make a systematic description of all the plants and
animals! Ray was to do the plants; Willughby the animals. The
two naturalists traveled throughout England and Europe carefully
observing the flora and fauna. Their descriptions were to be
totally based on observations; they would not include the mythical
creatures often included by naturalists in their works. Though
Willughby died in 1672 at the
age of 37, he left Ray a stipend in his will, and Ray faithfully
edited and published Willughby's notes on birds and fishes while
continuing his own work on plants. Ray's true contribution to
science was in his system of organization and definition of
species. If plants were to be arranged logically according to
types or species, what would be the guiding principle? Should
a plant be classified according to its root system, leaf shape,
blossom, fruit, or habitat? Ray's definition of a species was
boldly simple, yet could apply equally to plants and animals.
He asked himself the question, "What fundamental ordering principle
had God used?" Based on Genesis 1, Ray said species were descendants
of a male-female pair created by God, like the human race. A
species, then, was a set of individuals who reproduce new individuals
similar to themselves. Though there might be vast variations
and mutations within a species, Ray believed there was a fixity
of species. The German Lutheran scientist Carl Linneaus based
his famous classification system on Ray's important definition
of species.
Once the detailed observations
of plants and animals had been made, then Ray began the task
of interpreting the significance of physical processes, including
how form and function were adapted to the environment and the
nature of instinctual behavior. For example, Ray asked the question,
"Why are there so many unpleasant creatures like insects?" His
answer looked for God's purpose in creation. Ants were more
numerous than any other tribe of insects because so many other
creatures lived upon them and their eggs. Some insects yielded
medicines for men, while others might be used by God as a scourge
on the wicked.
Ray wrote Catalogus Plantarum
Angliae (1670). After Willughby's death, Ray completed Willughby's
Willughbeii . . . Ornithologia (1676) and Willughbeii
. . . de Historia Piscium (1685).
In 1682 Ray had published Methodus
Plantarum Nova (1682, revised in 1703 Methodus Plantarum
Emendata...), his contribution to classification, which
insisted on the taxonomic importance of the distinction between
monocotyledons and dicotyledons, plants whose seeds germinate
with one leaf and those with two, respectively. On the basis
of the Methodus, he constructed his masterwork, Historia
Plantarum, three huge volumes that appeared between 1686
and 1704. After the first two volumes, he was urged to compose
a complete system of nature. To this end he compiled brief synopses
of British and European plants, Synopsis Methodica Avium
et Piscium (published posthumously, 1713), and Synopsis
Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis (1693).
Much of his final decade was spent on a pioneering investigation
of insects, published posthumously as Historia Insectorum.
In all this work, Ray contributed to the ordering of taxonomy.
Instead of a single feature, he attempted to base his systems
of classification on all the structural characteristics, including
internal anatomy.
In the 1690s Ray also published
three volumes on religion. The Wisdom of God Manifested in
the Works of the Creation (1691), an essay in natural religion
that called on the full range of his biological learning, was
his most popular and influential book. It argued that the correlation
of form and function in organic nature demonstrates the necessity
of an omniscient creator. This argument from design, common
to most of the leading scientists of the 17th century, implied
a static view of nature that impeded the development of evolutionary
ideas even throughout the 19th century. Still working on his
Historia Insectorum, John Ray died on 17 January 1705.
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On
a 29 November: 
