This Day in Science History - August 19 - John Flamsteed

August 19th is John Flamsteed's birthday. Flamsteed was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. He was the primary force behind the construction of the Greenwich Observatory and was responsible for gathering precise measurements of nearly 3,000 star positions to aid navigators with the determination of longitude while at sea.

He used his own money to equip the observatory and perform his task of creating the star catalog. This would later cause a rift between himself and the Royal Society's president, Issac Newton. Newton wanted access to Flamsteed's data on lunar orbits for his Principia. Flamsteed did not want to release his data until it was complete but gave Newton the information with the understanding it was to be for his use only. Newton got Edmund Halley to publish Flamsteed's star catalog without his knowledge. Newton felt that any data gathered by the Royal Observatory belonged to the Royal Society and he could publish without Flamsteed's consent. Flamsteed felt the data belonged to him since he did the work with his instruments and the tables were incomplete. Flamsteed managed to collect 300 of the 400 copies of Halley's publication and publicly burned them.

Flamsteed would eventually release his tables before his death in 1719. It was later determined his tables contained a star he named 34 Tauri which would be the earliest observation of the planet Uranus. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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This Day in Science History - August 20 - Werner Forssmann

August 20th is Werner Forssmann's birthday. He was a German physician who first inserted a catheter into a person directly into the heart. He was also the first person to have this procedure done. As an intern in cardiology he believed drugs could be administered directly to the heart with a catheter without killing the patient. To prove it could be done, he inserted a catheter in his own antecubital vein and, catheter dangling from his arm, proceeded to climb two flights of stairs to get an x-ray to document the catheter's position in his right atrium.

This stunt earned him the ire of his superiors and he faced disciplinary action and changed his internship to urology. During World War II, he served in the German army as a doctor until he was captured and sat out the war in a prisoner of war camp. After the war, he worked as a lumberjack and country doctor until in 1956 he was surprised to receive part of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his medical school "stunt".

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This Day in Science History - August 18 - Elizabeth Shankman

August 18th marks the passing of Elizabeth Stern Shankman. Shankman was a Canadian pathologist who researched cervical cancer and studied the way normal cells became cancerous cells. Her cervical cancer studies changed the disease from a certain death sentence to one that was easily detected and treatable, reducing the death rate significantly. She also showed a link between the cancer and the herpes simplex virus and a link between prolonged oral contraceptive use and cervical cancer.

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This Day in Science History - August 17 - Walter Noddack

August 17th is Walter Noddack's birthday. Noddack was a German chemist who discovered the element rhenium with Ida Tacke (who would later become Ida Noddack) and Otto Berg. These three chemists also thought they discovered another element they called masurium. They had been bombarding a mineral called columbite with electrons and analyzing the x-ray energies given off by the resulting compound. One set of energies related to the theoretical values associated with eka-manganese on Mendelev's periodic table. Their results were never reproduced by others and the claim was never verified. Eka-manganese would be eventually artificially produced by a particle accelerator by Emilio G. Segr? and named technetium, after the Greek word for 'artificial'.

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This Day in Science History - August 14 - Hans Christian Ørsted

August 14th is Hans Christian ?rsted's birthday. ?rsted was a Danish physicist and chemist who made the discovery that related electricity to magnetism. He discovered the needle of a compass would point towards the wire when he allowed an electric current to pass through a wire. He also found if he reversed the direction of the current, the needle would point away from the wire.

Although he made this major discovery, he did not pursue it any further. Electromagnetism would have to wait for French physicist Andr?-Marie Amp?re to express this effect through mathematics. Find out more about ?rsted and what else occurred on this day in science history.

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This Day in Science History - August 16 - Robert Bunsen

August 16th is, among other things, the day Robert Bunsen passed away. Nearly everyone who has set foot in a chemistry lab has seen a variation of the burner that carries his name, but did you know he was blind in one eye from a laboratory accident where glassware shattered during an experiment? Read more in a short biography about this remarkable chemist.

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This Day in Science History - August 15 - Victor de Broglie

August 15th is Louis-Victor de Broglie's birthday. De Broglie was a French physicist who hypothesized that any moving particle has an associated wavelength. This is an important part of quantum theory where matter can possess both particle properties and wave properties. This theory would be confirmed by Davisson and Germer in 1927 when they measured the Bragg scattering of electrons beamed into a crystal. They found the wavelength of an electron was dependent on the momentum of the electron. This would be an important step in the development of quantum mechanics.

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