Isaac Roberts, a Welsh engineer, manufacturer, and amateur astronomer, was born Jan. 27, 1829. After he made a tidy nest egg in Liverpool, Roberts retired so that he could take photographs of the heavens. He acquired a 20-inch reflector, mounted a 7-inch refractor on...
On Jan. 26, 1700, there was a massive earthquake in the Pacific Northwest of North America, which rippled the landscape, devastated the forests of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and probably killed thousands of Native Americans. The odd thing about the...
Theodosius (Theodore) Dobzhansky, a Ukrainian-born American geneticist, was born Jan. 25, 1900. After studying in Kiev (Kyiv), and St. Petersburg, Dobzhansky came to Columbia University in the United States in 1927 to study with Thomas Hunt Morgan, the “Lord of the...
Joseph Wolf, a German/English animal artist, was born Jan. 22, 1820. Wolf came to London from his native Germany in 1848 and hooked up with the Zoological Society of London, where for many years he did drawings of London zoo specimens for specialized articles in such...
Luiz Cruls, a Belgian/Brazilian astronomer, was born Jan. 21, 1848. Cruls trained as an engineer, spent some time in the army, and then in 1874, he resigned and sailed to Brazil, seemingly just for a change of scenery. He fell in with the right sorts, served well on...
André-Marie Ampère, a French mathematician and chemist, was born Jan. 20, 1775. Ampère was one of the pioneeres in the study of electrodynamics, the science that deals with the effects of electricity in motion, and of electromagnetism. In the spring of 1820, the...