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1786 In Science
The year 1786 in science and technology involved some significant events. Astronomy * January 17 – Pierre Méchain first observes Comet Encke, from Paris. * August 1 – Caroline Herschel becomes the first woman to discover a comet. Biology * Subfossil bones of the Rodrigues solitaire are discovered. Linguistics * February 2 – In a speech before The Asiatic Society in Calcutta, Sir William Jones notes the formal resemblances between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, laying the foundation for comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. Mathematics * Erland Samuel Bring publishes ', proposing algebraic solutions to quintic functions. * Lagrange moves from Prussia to Paris under the patronage of Louis XVI of France. * William Playfair produces the first line and bar charts. Technology * August – James Rumsey tests his first steamboat in the Potomac river at Shepherdstown, Virginia. * Ignaz von Born introduces a method of extracting metals using the patio process in his ''U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erland Samuel Bring
Erland Samuel Bring (19 August 1736 – 20 May 1798) was a Swedish mathematician. Bring studied at Lund University between 1750 and 1757. In 1762 he obtained a position of a reader in history and was promoted to professor in 1779. At Lund he wrote eight volumes of mathematical work in the fields of algebra, geometry, analysis and astronomy, including ''Meletemata quaedam mathematica circa transformationem aequationum algebraicarum'' (1786). This work describes Bring's contribution to the algebraic solution of equations. Bring had developed an important transformation to simplify a quintic equation to the form x^5 + px + q = 0 (see Bring radical). In 1832–35 the same transformation was independently derived by George Jerrard. However, whereas Jerrard knew from the past work by Paolo Ruffini and Niels Henrik Abel that a general quintic equation can not be solved, this fact was not known to Bring, putting him in a disadvantage.J J O'Connor and E F RobertsoErland Samuel Bring/ref> ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scottish People
The Scots ( sco, Scots Fowk; gd, Albannaich) are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic-speaking peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland (or ''Alba'') in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, the Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and the Germanic-speaking Angles of north Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century. In modern usage, "Scottish people" or "Scots" refers to anyone whose linguistic, cultural, family ancestral or genetic origins are from Scotland. The Latin word ''Scoti'' originally referred to the Gaels, but came to describe all inhabitants of Scotland. Cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patio Process
The patio process is a process for extracting silver from ore. Smelting, or refining, was necessary because silver does not occur by itself in a natural state like some metals. Instead, it is made up of a larger ore body. Thus, smelting, or refining, is necessary to remove other byproducts to get at pure silver. The process, which uses mercury amalgamation to recover silver from ore, was reportedly invented by Bartolomé de Medina in Pachuca, Mexico, in 1554. It replaced smelting as the primary method of extracting silver from ore at Spanish colonies in the Americas. Although some knowledge of amalgamation techniques were likely known since the classical era, it was in the New World that it was first used on a large industrial scale. Other amalgamation processes were later developed, importantly the pan amalgamation process, and its variant, the Washoe process. The silver separation process generally differed from gold parting and gold extraction, although amalgamation with mercury ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ignaz Von Born
Ignaz Edler von Born, also known as Ignatius von Born ( hu, Born Ignác, ro, Ignațiu von Born, cs, Ignác Born) (26 December 1742 in Alba Iulia, Grand Principality of Transylvania, Habsburg monarchy – 24 July 1791 in Vienna), was a mineralogist and metallurgist. He was a prominent freemason, being head of Vienna's Illuminati lodge and an influential anti-clerical writer. He was the leading scientist in the Holy Roman Empire during the 1770s in the age of Enlightenment. His interests include mining, mineralogy, palaeontology, chemistry,''Dvaasedmdesát jmen české historie (46/72). Ignác Born.'' (Film document by |
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Shepherdstown is a town in Jefferson County, West Virginia, Jefferson County, West Virginia, United States, located in the lower Shenandoah Valley along the Potomac River. Home to Shepherd University, the town's population was 1,734 at the time of the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census. History 18th century Established on December 23, 1762, by consecutive acts passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses and approved by the governor, Mecklenburg (later renamed Shepherdstown), and Romney, West Virginia, Romney in Hampshire County, West Virginia, Hampshire County are the oldest towns in West Virginia. On a list of more than 30 approved "publick and private bills" of that date, the bill containing ''An Act for establishing the town of Mecklenburg, in the county of Frederick'' immediately follows ''An act for establishing the town of Romney, in the county of Hampshire, and for other purposes therein-mentioned.'' The first British colonial settlers began their migration into the nor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Potomac River
The Potomac River () drains the Mid-Atlantic United States, flowing from the Potomac Highlands into Chesapeake Bay. It is long,U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map. Retrieved August 15, 2011 with a drainage area of 14,700 square miles (38,000 km2), and is the fourth-largest river along the East Coast of the United States and the 21st-largest in the United States. Over 5 million people live within its watershed. The river forms part of the borders between Maryland and Washington, D.C. on the left descending bank and between West Virginia and Virginia on the right descending bank. Except for a small portion of its headwaters in West Virginia, the North Branch Potomac River is considered part of Maryland to the low-water mark on the opposite bank. The South Branch Potomac River lies completely within the state of West Virginia except for its headwaters, which lie in Virginia. Course The Potomac River runs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Rumsey
James Rumsey (1743 – December 21, 1792) was an American mechanical engineer chiefly known for exhibiting a boat propelled by machinery in 1787 on the Potomac River at Shepherdstown in present-day West Virginia before a crowd of local notables, including Horatio Gates. A pump driven by steam power ejected a stream of water from the stern of the boat and thereby propelled the boat forward. Early life Little is known about Rumsey until he was living in Bath, Virginia, (now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia) in 1782. He likely had moved to the area with his family some years before the American Revolution, from Cecil County, Maryland, where he had helped to run the family water mill at Bohemia Manor. His cousin was Benjamin Rumsey, a notable Maryland jurist and statesman, who also grew up at Bohemia Manor. In Bath, he built houses, became a partner in a mercantile business, and helped to run a boarding house and tavern called the "Sign of the Liberty Pole and Flag." Early efforts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bar Chart
A bar chart or bar graph is a chart or graph that presents categorical data with rectangular bars with heights or lengths proportional to the values that they represent. The bars can be plotted vertically or horizontally. A vertical bar chart is sometimes called a column chart. A bar graph shows comparisons among discrete categories. One axis of the chart shows the specific categories being compared, and the other axis represents a measured value. Some bar graphs present bars clustered in groups of more than one, showing the values of more than one measured variable. History Many sources consider William Playfair (1759-1824) to have invented the bar chart and the ''Exports and Imports of Scotland to and from different parts for one Year from Christmas 1780 to Christmas 1781'' graph from his ''The Commercial and Political Atlas'' to be the first bar chart in history. Diagrams of the velocity of a constantly accelerating object against time published in ''The Latitude of Forms'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line Chart
A line chart or line graph or curve chart is a type of chart which displays information as a series of data points called 'markers' connected by straight line segments. It is a basic type of chart common in many fields. It is similar to a scatter plot except that the measurement points are ordered (typically by their x-axis value) and joined with straight line segments. A line chart is often used to visualize a trend in data over intervals of time – a time series – thus the line is often drawn chronologically. In these cases they are known as run charts. History Some of the earliest known line charts are generally credited to Francis Hauksbee, Nicolaus Samuel Cruquius, Johann Heinrich Lambert and William Playfair. Example In the experimental sciences, data collected from experiments are often visualized by a graph. For example, if one collects data on the speed of an object at certain points in time, one can visualize the data in a data table such as the following: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Playfair
William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823), a Scottish engineer and political economist, served as a secret agent on behalf of Great Britain during its war with France. The founder of graphical methods of statistics, Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 the pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations. As a secret agent, Playfair reported on the French Revolution and organized a clandestine counterfeiting operation in 1793 to collapse the French currency. Biography Playfair was born in 1759 in Scotland. He was the fourth son (named after his grandfather) of the Reverend James Playfair of the parish of Liff & Benvie near the city of Dundee in Scotland; his notable brothers were architect James Playfair and mathematician John Playfair. His father died in 1772 when William was 13, leaving the eldest brother John to care for the family and his education. After his appren ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
