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1732 In Science
The year 1732 in science and technology involved some significant events. Chemistry * Herman Boerhaave publishes the authorized edition of his ''Elementa chemiae'' in Leiden. Exploration * March 3 – English Captain Charles Gough rediscovers Gough Island in the South Atlantic. * August – Mikhail Gvozdev with navigator Ivan Fyodorov in the ''Sviatoi Gavriil'' make the first known crossing of the Bering Strait, from Cape Dezhnev to Cape Prince of Wales, and explore the Alaskan coast. Metrology * French astronomer in Russian service Joseph-Nicolas Delisle invents the Delisle scale for measuring temperature (recalibrated in 1738). Technology * Henri Pitot develops the Pitot tube used for measuring flow velocity under the Seine bridges. * The world's first lightship is moored at the Nore in the Thames Estuary of England. Awards * Copley Medal: Stephen Gray Births * January 11 – Peter Forsskål, Finnish naturalist (died 1763) * October 6 – Nevil Maskelyne, English A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Delisle Scale
The Delisle scale is a temperature scale invented in 1732 by the French astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768). Delisle was the author of ''Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et aux progrès de l'Astronomie, de la Géographie et de la Physique'' (''Memories to Serve the History and Progress of Astronomy, Geography and Physics'') (1738). The Delisle scale is notable as one of the only temperature scales that is inverted from the amount of thermal energy it measures; unlike most other temperature scales, higher measurements in degrees Delisle are colder, while lower measurements are warmer. History In 1732, Delisle built a thermometer that used mercury (element), mercury as a working fluid. Delisle chose his scale using the temperature of boiling water as the fixed zero point and measured the contraction of the mercury (with lower temperatures) in hundred-thousandths. Delisle thermometers usually had 2400 or 2700 gradations, appropriate to the winter in Saint Petersb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1763 In Science
The year 1763 in science and technology involved some significant events. Astronomy * Publication posthumously of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille's ''Coelum australe stelliferum'', cataloguing all his data from the southern hemisphere and including about 10,000 stars and a number of brighter star clusters and nebulae. * Publication of Edward Stone's ''The whole doctrine of parallaxes explained and illustrated by an arithmetical and geometrical construction of the transit of Venus over the sun, June 6th, 1761. Enriched with a new and general method of determining the places where any transit of this planet, and especially that which will be June 3d, 1769, may be best observed''. Mathematics * December 23 – Thomas Bayes' solution to a problem of "inverse probability" is presented posthumously in his " Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" read by Richard Price to the Royal Society, containing a statement of a special case of Bayes' theorem. Medicine * Edward St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finns
Finns or Finnish people ( fi, suomalaiset, ) are a Baltic Finnic ethnic group native to Finland. Finns are traditionally divided into smaller regional groups that span several countries adjacent to Finland, both those who are native to these countries as well as those who have resettled. Some of these may be classified as separate ethnic groups, rather than subgroups of Finns. These include the Kvens and Forest Finns in Norway, the Tornedalians in Sweden, and the Ingrian Finns in Russia. Finnish, the language spoken by Finns, is closely related to other Balto-Finnic languages, e.g. Estonian and Karelian. The Finnic languages are a subgroup of the larger Uralic family of languages, which also includes Hungarian. These languages are markedly different from most other languages spoken in Europe, which belong to the Indo-European family of languages. Native Finns can also be divided according to dialect into subgroups sometimes called ''heimo'' (lit. ''tribe''), although suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Forsskål
Peter Forsskål, sometimes spelled Pehr Forsskål, Peter Forskaol, Petrus Forskål or Pehr Forsskåhl (11 January 1732 – 11 July 1763) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish explorer, orientalist, naturalist, and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus. Early life Forsskål was born in Helsinki, now in Finland but then a part of Sweden, where his father, Finnish priest , was serving as a Lutheran clergyman, but the family migrated to Sweden in 1741 when the father was appointed to the parish of Tegelsmora in Uppland and the archdiocese of Uppsala. As was common at the time, he enrolled at Uppsala University at a young age in 1742, but returned home for some time and, after studies on his own, rematriculated in Uppsala in 1751, where he completed a theological degree the same year. Linnaeus's disciple In Uppsala Forsskål was one of the students of Linnaeus, but apparently also studied with the orientalist Carl Aurivillius, whose contacts with the Göttingen orientalist Johann David Michae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Gray (scientist)
Stephen Gray (December 1666 – 7 February 1736) was an English dyer and astronomer who was the first to systematically experiment with electrical conduction. Until his work in 1729 the emphasis had been on the simple generation of static charges and investigations of the static phenomena (electric shocks, plasma glows, etc.). He also first made the distinction between conduction and insulation, and discovered the action-at-a-distance phenomenon of electrostatic induction. Early life Gray was born in Canterbury, Kent, and after some basic schooling, he was apprenticed to his father (and later his elder brother) in the cloth-dyeing trade. His interests lay with natural science and particularly with astronomy; he managed to educate himself in these developing disciplines, mainly through wealthy friends in the district, who gave him access to their libraries and scientific instruments. Science was very much a rich man's hobby at this time. He ground his own lenses and construc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copley Medal
The Copley Medal is an award given by the Royal Society, for "outstanding achievements in research in any branch of science". It alternates between the physical sciences or mathematics and the biological sciences. Given every year, the medal is the oldest Royal Society medal awarded and the oldest surviving scientific award in the world, having first been given in 1731 to Stephen Gray (scientist), Stephen Gray, for "his new Electrical Experiments: – as an encouragement to him for the readiness he has always shown in obliging the Society with his discoveries and improvements in this part of Natural Knowledge". __TOC__ History The medal was created following a donation of Pound sterling, £100 to be used for carrying out experiments by Sir Godfrey Copley, 2nd Baronet, Sir Godfrey Copley, for which the interest on the amount was used for several years. The conditions for the medal have been changed several times; in 1736, it was suggested that "a medal or other honorary prize s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thames Estuary
The Thames Estuary is where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea, in the south-east of Great Britain. Limits An estuary can be defined according to different criteria (e.g. tidal, geographical, navigational or in terms of salinity). For this reason the limits of the Thames Estuary have been defined differently at different times and for different purposes. Western This limit of the estuary has been defined in two main ways: * The narrow estuary is strongly tidal and is known as the Tideway. It starts in south-west London at Teddington Lock and weir, Teddington/Ham. This point is also mid-way between Richmond Lock which only keeps back a few miles of man-made head (stasis) of water during low tide and the extreme modern-era head at Thames Ditton Island on Kingston reach where slack water occurs at maximal high tide in times of rainfall-caused flooded banks. In terms of salinity the transition from freshwater to estuarine occurs around Battersea; east of the Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nore
The Nore is a long bank of sand and silt running along the south-centre of the final narrowing of the Thames Estuary, England. Its south-west is the very narrow Nore Sand. Just short of the Nore's easternmost point where it fades into the channels it has a notable point once marked by a lightship on the line where the estuary of the Thames nominally becomes the North Sea. A lit buoy today stands on this often map-marked divisor: between Havengore Creek in east Essex and Warden Point on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Until 1964 it marked the seaward limit of the Port of London Authority. As the sandbank was a major hazard for shipping coming in and out of London, in 1732 it received the world's first lightship. This became a major landmark, and was used as an assembly point for shipping. Today it is marked by Sea Reach No. 1 Buoy. The Nore is an anchorage, or open roadstead, used by the Royal Navy's North Sea Fleet, and to its local Command. It was the site of a notorious mu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lightvessel
A lightvessel, or lightship, is a ship that acts as a lighthouse. They are used in waters that are too deep or otherwise unsuitable for lighthouse construction. Although some records exist of fire beacons being placed on ships in Roman times, the first modern lightvessel was off the Nore sandbank at the mouth of the River Thames in England, placed there by its inventor Robert Hamblin in 1734. The type has become largely obsolete; lighthouses replaced some stations as the construction techniques for lighthouses advanced, while large, automated buoys replaced others. Construction A crucial element of lightvessel design is the mounting of a light on a sufficiently tall mast. Initially, it consisted of oil lamps that could be run up the mast and lowered for servicing. Later vessels carried fixed lamps which were serviced in place. Fresnel lenses were used as they became available, and many vessels housed them in small versions of the lanterns used in lighthouses. Some lightship ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seine
) , mouth_location = Le Havre/Honfleur , mouth_coordinates = , mouth_elevation = , progression = , river_system = Seine basin , basin_size = , tributaries_left = Yonne, Loing, Eure, Risle , tributaries_right = Ource, Aube, Marne, Oise, Epte The Seine ( , ) is a river in northern France. Its drainage basin is in the Paris Basin (a geological relative lowland) covering most of northern France. It rises at Source-Seine, northwest of Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plateau, flowing through Paris and into the English Channel at Le Havre (and Honfleur on the left bank). It is navigable by ocean-going vessels as far as Rouen, from the sea. Over 60 percent of its length, as far as Burgundy, is negotiable by large barges and most tour boats, and nearly its whole length is available for recreational boating; excursion boats offer sightseeing tours of the river banks in the capital city, Paris. There are 37 bridges in P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
