Today's theme is ingenuity, with a leitmotif on seeds. The Yankee inventor of the cylinder lock, Linus Yale, was born on this day. (Elihu Yale, for whom Yale University was named, was also born on this date - I'll save that for next year.) Surgery was once a fifty-fifty proposition because so many died of "hospital disease," it was the observation and creative mind of Joseph Lister who changed that. And W Atlee Burpee, an agricultural pioneer who invented seed farming, is also in the birthday list.
In events, the man who first brought tobacco seeds to Virginia got married, and the father of the atomic bomb was honored - after having been maligned and disgraced early in the Cold War. Incidentally, Oppenheimer died of throat cancer after years of heavy smoking, not all ingenuity is good for us.
1614 - John Rolfe, who brought tobacco seeds from Trinidad to Virginia in hopes of breaking the Spanish monopoly on tobacco sold in England, marries Pocahontas at Henrico, Virginia.
1963 - Julius Robert Oppenheimer was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by the Atomic Energy Commission. Having led the development of America's first atomic bomb, he was accused of disloyalty to the US and stripped of his security clearance in 1954, during the anti-communist frenzy led by Senator McCarthy. His clearance was reinstated by President Johnson in 1963.
1969 - Pope Paul VI abolished the galero (red hat) and red shoes and buckles customarily worn by Roman Catholic cardinals.
Ch'ing Ming or Respect for Ancestors Day, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan - also called Tomb Sweeping Day in Taiwan, a day for paying homage to one's forebearers. Observed by tending the graves of ancestors, leaving fresh flowers and food.
1821 - Linus Yale, US locksmith, devised the cylinder lock based on the pin-tumbler mechanism used by the ancient Egyptians. He obtained patents for his design in 1861 and 1865. Yale's cylindrical pin-tumbler lock is the most common design in modern door locks and padlocks. Formed the Yale and Towne Manufacturing Company in Stamford Connecticut in 1868, died on Christmas of that year.
1827
- Joseph Lister, British surgeon and medical researcher, troubled
by 45% mortality rate in surgery expanded on the germ theory of Louis
Pasteur and experimented with washing wounds, instruments, and dressings
with a carbolic acid solution in 1855. Lowered mortality rate to 15% by
1860. Died 10 February 1912.
We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim
that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first
thing we invented, which was human liberty.
- Mark Twain
Men love to wonder. And that is the seed of science.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I invent nothing. I rediscover.
- Auguste Rodin
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