Robert August Bosch

 

Robert August Bosch was a German inventor, engineer and industrialist who founded Robert Bosch GmbH, one of the world’s leading engineering firms, in 1886. Robert Bosch is also noted for inventing the spark plug and the electrical magneto for automobiles.

Early Life and Education:

Born on September 23, 1861, near Ulm in Württemberg, south-western Germany, Robert Bosch attended the Technical University at Stuttgart. He also received training in mechanics in Ulm, Great Britain and the United States.

Contributions and Achievements:

Robert Bosch established the Robert Bosch GmbH Corporation, one of the leading producers of automotive technology who also manufactured numerous other products. Bosch made important contributions to the expansion of the automobile industry and related sectors.

Bosch started his own company, “Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering”, when he was only 25. He invented a magneto for gas engines in 1887, which was used in an automobile engine almost ten years later. He also invented the first spark plug, an invention which revolutionized the operation of automobiles. His company largely benefited from the war, but Bosch open-heartedly donated more than ten million marks back to the German public.

Bosch Industries faced severe crisis after the war due to the depressing economic downfall, but the company massively restructured in 1927, expanding into the manufacture of cameras, power tools, television sets, refrigerators and radios.

Later Life and Death:

Robert Bosch died on March 12, 1942 in Stuttgart, Germany, of complications resulting from an inflammation of the middle ear. He was 80 years old.

Father of Nuclear Physics

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867).

In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester) in the UK, where he and Thomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium ions.^[5][6] Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. In 1911, although he could not prove that it was positive or negative, he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton.^[9]

Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.

Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England.^[10] James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, "to raise a little flax and a lot of children". Ernest was born at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled 'Earnest' when his birth was registered.^[11]

He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand where he participated in the debating society and played rugby.^[12] After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research during which he invented a new form of radio receiver, in 1895 Rutherford was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851,^[13] to travel to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.^[14] He was among the first of the 'aliens' (those without a Cambridge degree) allowed to do research at the university, under the inspiring leadership of J. J. Thomson, and the newcomers aroused jealousies from the more conservative members of the Cavendish fraternity. With Thomson's encouragement, he managed to detect radio waves at half a mile and briefly held the world record for the distance over which electromagnetic waves could be detected, though when he presented his results at the British Association meeting in 1896, he discovered he had been outdone by another lecturer, by the name of Marconi.

In 1898 Thomson offered Rutherford the chance of a post at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was to replace Hugh Longbourne Callendar who held the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics and was coming to Cambridge.^[15] Rutherford was accepted, which meant that in 1900 he could marry Mary Georgina Newton (1876–1945) to whom he had become engaged before leaving New Zealand; they had one daughter, Eileen Mary (1901–1930), who married Ralph Fowler. In 1900 he gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand. In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain to take the chair of physics at the University of Manchester.

At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the conductive effects of X-rays on gases, work which led to the discovery of the electron which Thomson presented to the world in 1897. Hearing of Becquerel's experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, discovering two types that differed from X-rays in their penetrating power. Continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. He then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and would coat other substances. He found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its "half-life" (11½ minutes in this case).

From 1900 to 1903, he was joined at McGill by the young chemist Frederick Soddy (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1921) for whom he set the problem of identifying the thorium emanations. Once he had eliminated all the normal chemical reactions, Soddy suggested that it must be one of the inert gases, which they named thoron (later found to be an isotope of radon). They also found another type of thorium they called Thorium X, and kept on finding traces of helium. They also worked with samples of "Uranium X" from William Crookes and radium from Marie Curie.

In 1902, they produced a "Theory of Atomic Disintegration" to account for all their experiments. Up till then atoms were assumed to be the indestructable basis of all matter and although Curie had suggested that radioactivity was an atomic phenomenon, the idea of the atoms of radioactive substances breaking up was a radically new idea. Rutherford and Soddy demonstrated that radioactivity involved the spontaneous disintegration of atoms into other types of atoms (one element spontaneously being changed to another).

In 1903, Rutherford considered a type of radiation discovered (but not named) by French chemist Paul Villard in 1900, as an emission from radium, and realised that this observation must represent something different from his own alpha and beta rays, due to its very much greater penetrating power. Rutherford therefore gave this third type of radiation the name of gamma ray. All three of Rutherford's terms are in standard use today – other types of radioactive decay have since been discovered, but Rutherford's three types are among the most common.

In Manchester, he continued to work with alpha radiation. In conjunction with Hans Geiger, he developed zinc sulfide scintillation screens and ionisation chambers to count alphas. By dividing the total charge they produced by the number counted, Rutherford decided that the charge on the alpha was two. In late 1907, Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Royds allowed alphas to penetrate a very thin window into an evacuated tube. As they sparked the tube into discharge, the spectrum obtained from it changed, as the alphas accumulated in the tube. Eventually, the clear spectrum of helium gas appeared, proving that alphas were at least ionised helium atoms, and probably helium nuclei.

Rutherford performed his most famous work after receiving the Nobel prize in 1908. Along with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden in 1909, he carried out the Geiger–Marsden experiment, which demonstrated the nuclear nature of atoms by deflecting alpha particles passing through a thin gold foil. Rutherford was inspired to ask Geiger and Marsden in this experiment to look for alpha particles with very high deflection angles, of a type not expected from any theory of matter at that time. Such deflections, though rare, were found, and proved to be a smooth but high-order function of the deflection angle. It was Rutherford's interpretation of this data that led him to formulate the Rutherford model of the atom in 1911 – that a very small charged ^[7] nucleus, containing much of the atom's mass, was orbited by low-mass electrons.

Before leaving Manchester in 1919 to take over the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, Rutherford became, in 1919, the first person to deliberately transmute one element into another.^[4] In this experiment, he had discovered peculiar radiations when alphas were projected into air, and narrowed the effect down to the nitrogen, not the oxygen in the air. Using pure nitrogen, Rutherford used alpha radiation to convert nitrogen into oxygen through the nuclear reaction ¹⁴N + α → ¹⁷O + proton. The proton was not then known. In the products of this reaction Rutherford simply identified hydrogen nuclei, by their similarity to the particle radiation from earlier experiments in which he had bombarded hydrogen gas with alpha particles to knock hydrogen nuclei out of hydrogen atoms. This result showed Rutherford that hydrogen nuclei were a part of nitrogen nuclei (and by inference, probably other nuclei as well). Such a construction had been suspected for many years on the basis of atomic weights which were whole numbers of that of hydrogen; see Prout's hypothesis. Hydrogen was known to be the lightest element, and its nuclei presumably the lightest nuclei. Now, because of all these considerations, Rutherford decided that a hydrogen nucleus was possibly a fundamental building block of all nuclei, and also possibly a new fundamental particle as well, since nothing was known from the nucleus that was lighter. Thus, Rutherford postulated hydrogen nuclei to be a new particle in 1920, which he dubbed the proton.

In 1921, while working with Niels Bohr (who postulated that electrons moved in specific orbits), Rutherford theorized about the existence of neutrons, (which he had christened in his 1920 Bakerian Lecture), which could somehow compensate for the repelling effect of the positive charges of protons by causing an attractive nuclear force and thus keep the nuclei from flying apart from the repulsion between protons. The only alternative to neutrons was the existence of "nuclear electrons" which would counteract some of the proton charges in the nucleus, since by then it was known that nuclei had about twice the mass that could be accounted for if they were simply assembled from hydrogen nuclei (protons). But how these nuclear electrons could be trapped in the nucleus, was a mystery.

Rutherford's theory of neutrons was proved in 1932 by his associate James Chadwick, who recognized neutrons immediately when they were produced by other scientists and later himself, in bombarding beryllium with alpha particles. In 1935, Chadwick was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

Rutherford's research, and work done under him as laboratory director, established the nuclear structure of the atom and the essential nature of radioactive decay as a nuclear process. Rutherford's team, using natural alpha particles, demonstrated induced nuclear transmutation, and later, using protons from an accelerator, demonstrated artificially-induced nuclear reactions and transmutation. He is known as the father of nuclear physics. Rutherford died too early to see Leó Szilárd's idea of controlled nuclear chain reactions come into being. However, a speech of Rutherford's about his artificially-induced transmutation in lithium, printed in the 12 September 1933 London paper The Times, was reported by Szilárd to have been his inspiration for thinking of the possibility of a controlled energy-producing nuclear chain reaction. Szilard had this idea while walking in London, on the same day.

Rutherford's speech touched on the 1932 work of his students John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton in "splitting" lithium into alpha particles by bombardment with protons from a particle accelerator they had constructed. Rutherford realized that the energy released from the split lithium atoms was enormous, but he also realized that the energy needed for the accelerator, and its essential inefficiency in splitting atoms in this fashion, made the project an impossibility as a practical source of energy (accelerator-induced fission of light elements remains too inefficient to be used in this way, even today). Rutherford's speech in part, read:

We might in these processes obtain very much more energy than the proton supplied, but on the average we could not expect to obtain energy in this way. It was a very poor and inefficient way of producing energy, and anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine. But the subject was scientifically interesting because it gave insight into the atoms.

Happy National Sports Day (August 29) ...

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. - See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. - See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. - See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. - See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand.

National Sports Day is mainly celebrated in educational institutes and sports academies all over the country. Various sports events especially hockey matches, prize distribution functions are organized on this day. Celebrations for National Sports Day are more common in Punjab and Chandigarh side.

Special Award distribution event at Rastrapati Bhawan makes this day memorable for many stars of the Indian sports world. Popular and renowned sport-related awards like Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, Arjuna Award and Dronacharya Award are presented by honorable president of India, to great sportsmen of the year.

Dhyan Chand Award is India’s highest award for Lifetime Achievement in sports. This award is bestowed annually to sporting figures and sportsperson who have not only contributed through their performance but have also worked for the promotion of the sport after their retirement. The Indian Postal Service after Major Dhyan Chand's death in 1979 issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. The National Stadium, Delhi was renamed Dhyan Chand National Stadium in 2002 to honor India’s greatest Hockey Legend.

- See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

Dhyan Chand (29 August Tuesday 1905 – 3 December 1979) was an Indian field hockey player, who is widely considered as the greatest field hockey player of All Time.^[1] Chand is most remembered for his extraordinary goal-scoring feats, in addition to earning three Olympic gold medals (1928, 1932, and 1936) in field hockey, during an era where India was the most dominant team in Hockey.

Known as “The Wizard” for his superb ball control, Chand played his final international match in 1948, having scored more than 400 goals^{[citation needed]} during his international career.^[2]

Dhyan Chand was born in AllahabadUttar pradesh,Dhyan Chand was born in Bais Kshatriya family.^[3][4] He was the elder brother of another player Roop Singh. His father Sameshwar Dutt Singh was in the British Indian Army, and he played hockey in the army. Dhyan Chand had two brothers - Mool Singh, and Roop Singh. Because of Sameshwar Dutt's numerous army transfers, the family had to move to different cities and as such Chand had to terminate his education after only six years of schooling. The family finally settled in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh, India. Being in the military, Dhyan's father got a small piece of land for a house.

Young Chand had no serious inclination towards sports, though he loved wrestling. He stated that he did not remember whether he played any hockey worth mentioning before he joined the Army, though he said that he occasionally indulged in casual games in Jhansi with his friends.

Chand joined the Indian Army at the age of 16, The Hindi word Chand literally means the moon. Since Dhyan Singh used to practice a lot during night after his duty hours, he invariably used to wait for the moon to come out so that the visibility in the field (during his era there were no flood lights) improved, hence he was called "Chand", by his fellow players, as his practice sessions at night invariably coincided with the coming out from the moon.

In 1933, Chand's home team, the Jhansi Heroes participated in and won the Beighton Cup, which he considered the most prestigious of Indian hockey tournaments. Later, he would state,^{[citation needed]}

“

If anybody asked me which was the best match that I played in, I will unhesitatingly say that it was the 1933 Beighton Cup final between Calcutta Customs and Jhansi Heroes. Calcutta Customs was a great side those days; they had Shaukat Ali, Asad Ali, Claude Deefholts, Seaman, Mohsin, and many others who were then in the first flight of Indian hockey. I had a very young side. Besides my brother Roop Singh, and Ismail, who played for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway in Mumbai, I had no other really great player in the team. But I had a team which was determined to do or die. It was a great match, full of thrills, and it was just opportunism that gave us the victory. Customs were pressing hard and our goal was at their mercy. Suddenly I broke through and from midfield gave a long through pass to Ismail, who ran with Jesse Owens' speed half the length of the ground. A misunderstanding occurred between the Customs left-half and the goalkeeper, and Ismail, taking every advantage of it, cut through and netted the only goal of the match. We felt very proud of our triumph.

”

In Kolkata, the Heroes also won the Lakshmibilas Cup tournament, which was open only to Indian teams. In 1935, they successfully defended their Beighton Cup title, though lost the subsequent year.

In December 1934, the IHF decided to send a team to New Zealand in the new year. Chand and his brother were immediately selected. When the Nawab of Manavadar declined to play, Chand was appointed captain. In the subsequent tour, the team played a total of 48 matches on this tour, with 28 in New Zealand and the remainder in India, Ceylon and Australia. India won every match, scoring 584 goals and conceding only 40. Of these 48 matches, Chand played 43 and scored a total of 201 goals.

Upon returning to India, Chand resumed his duties in the barracks. In December 1935 the IHF decided to stage the Inter-Provincial tournament to select the Olympic team. Chand was again denied permission to leave his platoon, though once again he was selected without formalities. The final team assembled in Delhi on 16 June and played against the Delhi Hockey XI. Incredibly, they lost 4-1. After this inauspicious start, the team went on a successful tour of the subcontinent, finally departing for Marseilles on 27 June. They arrived on 10 July, and after an uncomfortable journey in third-class compartments, reached Berlin on 13 July. On 17 July, the Indian team played a practice match against Germany and lost 4-1. As such, manager Pankaj Gupta informed the IHF that Ali Dara had to be sent immediately to replace the out of form Mirza Masood.

On 5 August, India won its first match against Hungary 4-0. India won the rest of the group matches against USA (7-0, with Chand scoring 2 goals) and Japan (9-0, with Chand scoring 4). On 10 August, Ali Dara arrived. Their fourth match was the semi-final against France, whom they defeated 10-0, with Chand scoring 4 goals. Meanwhile, Germany had beaten Denmark 6-0, beaten Afghanistan 4-1 and in the play-offs, had defeated the Netherlands 3-0. Thus, India and Germany were to clash in the 1936 Berlin Olympics field hockey final on 15 August.

On the morning of the final, the entire team was nervous since they had been defeated the last time they had faced Germany. In the locker room, Pankaj Gupta[who?] produced a Congress tricolour. Reverently the team saluted it, prayed and marched onto the field. The German team was successful in restricting the India side to a single goal until the first interval. After the interval, the Indian team launched an all-out attack, easily defeating Germany 8-1, incidentally the only goal scored against India in that Olympic tournament. Chand top-scored with 3 goals, Dara scored 2 and Roop Singh, Tapsell and Jaffar one each. Describing the game, the Special Correspondent of The Hindu wrote,^{[citation needed]}

“

Every member of the team was feeling the strain of the defeat to the Germans in the practice match, and no one was in his usual self. I never saw a hockey team from India, where the game is definitely of a superior standard compared to the rest of the world, being so obsessed on the eve of the match. The players were nervous as to what the result of the match would be, which was heightened by the feeling that the burden of the country's honour was on their shoulders. The game was played at a fast pace and was packed with thrilling incidents. The Germans undercut and lifted the ball, but the Indian team countered with brilliant half-volleying and amazing long shots. Twice Dara attempted to score but was declared offside. Dhyan Chand discarded his spiked shoes and stockings and played with bare legs and rubber soles and became speedier in the second half. The vigorous German attacks were brilliantly saved by Allen and Tapsell. The goal scored by Weiss of Germany was the only goal scored against the Indians throughout the tournament. The whole Indian team put up a splendid display. Dhyan Chand and Dara impressed by their combination, Tapsell by his reliability and Jaffar by his tremendous bursts of speed.

”

There have been many erroneous media reports over the years claiming that Dhyan Chand scored 6 goals in India's 8-1 victory over Germany in the 1936 Olympic final. However, Major Dhyan Chand in his autobiography titled “Goal!” published in 1952 by Sport & Pastime, Chennai, writes as follows:

“When Germany was four goals down, a ball hit Allen's pad and rebounded. The Germans took full advantage of this and made a rush, netting the ball before we could stop it. That was the only goal Germany would score in the match against our eight, and incidentally the only goal scored against India in the entire Olympic tournament. India's goal-getters were Roop Singh, Tapsell and Jaffar with one each, Dara two and myself three.”

The record for most goals by an individual in an Olympic final has belonged to Balbir Singh, Sr. another famous Indian hockey hero since the 1952 Helsinki Olympic games. He set this record by scoring 5 goals in India's 6-1 victory over the Netherlands for the gold medal win. The previous holder of this record was England's Reggie Pridmore with his 4 goals in England's 8-1 victory over Ireland in the 1908 Olympic final.

International Hockey Federation records also attribute only 3 of the 8 goals to Dhyan Chand in the Berlin Olympic final.

The final was included in the Leni Riefenstahl film on the 1936 Olympics, Olympia. Overall, in 3 Olympic tournaments, Chand had scored 33 goals in 12 matches.

Even today, Dhyan Chand remains a legendary figure in Indian and world hockey. His astounding skills have been glorified in various apocryphal stories and anecdotes. A number of such these revolve around the fact that Singh had a magical control over dribbling the ball. 29 August, Chand's birthday, is celebrated as National Sports Day in India. The President gives away sport-related awards such as the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, Arjuna Award and Dronacharya Award on this day at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, India.

The Union Minister of India gives away 20th National Award 2012, namely Gem of India, to the magician of hockey i.e. Major Dhyan Chand. The award was received by his son Ashok Dhyan Chand (hockey Olympian himself) on behalf of his late Hon'ble father; award was given by Journalist Association of India under the flagship of Journalists Federation of India, Sirifort Auditorium, New Delhi, India, on 22 September 2012.

India's highest award for lifetime achievement in sports is the Dhyan Chand Award which has been awarded annually from 2002 to sporting figures who not only contribute through their performance but also contribute to the sport after their retirement. The National Stadium, Delhi was renamed Dhyan Chand National Stadium in 2002 in his honour.

He scored over 1000 goals in his career, from 1926 to 1948.

August 29 is celebrated as National Sports Day all across the country.  August 29 is instituted as National Sports Day in tribute to the legendary hockey player of India.  The day marks the birth anniversary of hockey wizard, Major Dhyan Chand. - See more at: http://www.festivalsofindia.in/NationalSportsDay/#sthash.cQOC0xI7.dpuf

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was born into a wealthy family in Edinburgh, Scotland on June 13, 1831. His father was a lawyer, and his mother died when he was only eight years old.

He attended high school in Edinburgh – Edinburgh Academy – where he published his first academic paper, ‘Oval Curves’ at the age of just 14. By this age, he had also completely memorized the Bible. Maxwell was an evangelical protestant, who believed his religion was a private affair. Like Isaac Newton, he saw no disagreements between his science and his religion.

Unable to properly understand the genius in their class, some of the boys at school gave Maxwell the name ‘Dafty.’ Maxwell was usually completely unconcerned by this, and made firm friends with Lewis Campbell, who went on to became a professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews and Peter Guthrie Tait, who became a professor of physics at Edinburgh University.

Aged 16, Maxwell entered Edinburgh University for three years, taking courses in physics (it was then called natural philosophy), mathematics, and philosophy. He found the courses rather easy, leaving plenty of free time for his own private scientific research. Maxwell continued to publish serious scientific papers while studying for his degree.

Aged 19, he moved to Cambridge University, studying mathematics, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College when he was 24, sharing the Smith’s Prize for theoretical physics and mathematics with Edward Routh.

In 1856, aged 25, he was awarded Edinburgh’s highest prize in mathematics, the Straiton Gold Medal, and in the same year, he was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen University, where he stayed for four years.

During this time he formulated and published his brilliant analysis of how Saturn’s rings could be stable for a long time. Britain’s top astronomer of the time, the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Biddell Airy said of the work:

It is one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen.

While at Aberdeen, he gave a weekly, free lecture at a working men’s college. He also married Katherine Mary Dewar, the daughter of the University’s principal. Maxwell lost his job at Aberdeen when a merger of University colleges left him redundant.

In 1860, aged 29, he took a professorship at King’s College, London.

In this year, he established that each molecule of air at room temperature and pressure collides 8 billion times a second with other molecules on average.

Maxwell stayed in London until 1865, carrying out much of his most notable work.

He then returned to his family home in Scotland for six years, which he devoted to experiments, calculations and writing away from the duties his professorship had involved. In 1866 he wrote:

I have now my time fully occupied with experiments and speculations of a physical kind, which I could not undertake as long as I had public duties.

During this time he wrote much of the groundbreaking ‘Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism’, which was published in 1873.

In 1871, he became Cavendish Professor at Cambridge University, where he remained until his death in 1879, aged just 48.

Mother Teresa

The Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, M.C., commonly known as Mother Teresa (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), was a Roman Catholic Religious Sister and missionaryof Albanian origin who lived for most of her life in India.

Mother Teresa founded the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic religious congregation, which in 2012 consisted of over 4,500 sisters and is active in 133 countries. They run hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis; soup kitchens; dispensaries and mobile clinics; children's and family counselling programmes; orphanages; and schools. Members of the order must adhere to the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, and the fourth vow, to give "wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor".

Mother Teresa was the recipient of numerous honours including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2003, she was beatified as "Blessed Teresa of Calcutta". A second miracle credited to her intercession is required before she can be recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church.

A controversial figure both during her life and after her death, Mother Teresa was widely admired by many for her charitable works, but also widely criticised, particularly for her campaigns against contraception and for substandard conditions in the hospices for which she was responsible.

An ethnic Albanian born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu (Albanian: [aˈɲɛz ˈɡɔɲdʒe bɔjaˈdʒiu]) (gonxha meaning "rosebud" or "little flower" in Albanian) on 26 August 1910, she considered 27 August, the day she was baptised, to be her "true birthday".^[6] Her birthplace of Skopje, now capital of the Republic of Macedonia, was at the time part of the Ottoman Empire.^[6][7]

She was the youngest of the children of Nikollë and Dranafile Bojaxhiu (Bernai).^[8] Her father, who was involved in Albanian politics, died in 1919 when she was eight years old.^[6][9] After her father's death, her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. Her father may have been from Prizren, Kosovo^[a] while her mother may have been from a village near Yakova.^[10]

According to a biography written by Joan Graff Clucas, in her early years Agnes was fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and their service in Bengal, and by age 12 had become convinced that she should commit herself to a religious life.^[11] Her final resolution was taken on 15 August 1928, while praying at the shrine of the Black Madonna of Letnice, where she often went on pilgrimage.^[12]

She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary. She never again saw her mother or sister.^[13]

Agnes initially went to the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland, to learn English, the language the Sisters of Loreto used to teach school children in India.^[14] She arrived in India in 1929, and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, near the Himalayan mountains,^[15] where she learnt Bengali and taught at the St. Teresa's School, a schoolhouse close to her convent.^[16] She took her first religious vows as a nun on 24 May 1931. At that time she chose to be named after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries,^[17][18] but because one nun in the convent had already chosen that name, Agnes opted for the Spanish spelling Teresa.^[19]

She took her solemn vows on 14 May 1937, while serving as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in Entally, eastern Calcutta.^[6][20][21] Teresa served there for almost twenty years and in 1944 was appointed headmistress.^[22]

Although Teresa enjoyed teaching at the school, she was increasingly disturbed by the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta (Kolkata).^[23] The Bengal famine of 1943 brought misery and death to the city; and the outbreak of Hindu/Muslim violence in August 1946 plunged the city into despair and horror.^[24]

Mother Teresa said "By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus."^[44]

In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas.^[45] Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she travelled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients.^[46]

When Eastern Europe experienced increased openness in the late 1980s, she expanded her efforts to Communist countries that had previously rejected the Missionaries of Charity, embarking on dozens of projects. She was undeterred by criticism about her firm stand against abortion and divorce stating, "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work." She visited the Soviet republic of Armenia following the 1988 earthquake,^[47] and met with Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers.^[48]

Mother Teresa travelled to assist and minister to the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia.^[49][50][51] In 1991, Mother Teresa returned for the first time to her homeland and opened a Missionaries of Charity Brothers home in Tirana, Albania.

By 1996, Mother Teresa was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centres around the world. The first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York; by 1984 the order operated 19 establishments throughout the country. Mother Teresa was fluent in five languages: Bengali,^[54] Albanian, Serbian, English, and Hindi.

Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, after a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico, she suffered further heart problems. She offered to resign her position as head of the Missionaries of Charity, but the sisters of the order, in a secret ballot, voted for her to stay. Mother Teresa agreed to continue her work as head of the order.

In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone. In August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. She had heart surgery but it was clear that her health was declining. The Archbishop of Calcutta, Henry Sebastian D'Souza, said he ordered a priest to perform an exorcism on Mother Teresa with her permission when she was first hospitalised with cardiac problems because he thought she may be under attack by the devil.

On 13 March 1997, she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity. She died on 5 September 1997.

At the time of her death, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters, and an associated brotherhood of 300 members, operating 610 missions in 123 countries. These included hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, personal helpers, orphanages, and schools. The Missionaries of Charity were also aided by Co-Workers, who numbered over 1 million by the 1990s.

Mother Teresa lay in repose in St Thomas, Kolkata for one week prior to her funeral, in September 1997. She was granted a state funeral by the Indian government in gratitude for her services to the poor of all religions in India.^[61] Her death was mourned in both secular and religious communities. In tribute, Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan said that she was "a rare and unique individual who lived long for higher purposes. Her life-long devotion to the care of the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged was one of the highest examples of service to our humanity." The former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said: "She is the United Nations. She is peace in the world."

Hearty Congratulations . . .

Students selected to Tech-Mahindra

Gottlieb Daimler was born in Schorndorf in Germany in 1834. He was an engineer, industrial designer, industrialist, pioneer of the modern internal combustion engine and a workaholic before the term was invented. A persistent perfectionist, he drove himself and his co-workers mercilessly. Daimler was a cosmopolitan man, instrumental in founding auto industries in Germany, France and England. His core ability was engines, and he didn’t care whether they were powering cars, boats, trams, pumps or airships. He is also known for inventing the first high-speed petrol engine and the first four-wheel automobile.

Talking about Daimler’s early life, his father wanted his son to become a municipal employee, but the young, mechanically inclined Daimler instead apprenticed himself to a gunsmith. After four years of his apprenticeship Daimler worked in a steam-engine factory and eventually completed his schooling at the Stuttgart Polytechnic. He spent the next three decades working as an engineer and technical director of engine development for several companies.

It was during this period that he worked with Nikolaus August Otto, the inventor of the four-cycle internal combustion engine, and Wilhelm Maybach, who become Daimler’s lifelong collaborator.

Daimler’s and Maybach’s dream was to create small high speed engines to be mounted in any kind of locomotion device. They designed a precursor of the modern petrol engine which they subsequently fitted to a two-wheeler and considered the first motorcycle and, in the next year, to a stagecoach, and a boat. They are renowned as the designers of this Grandfather Clock engine. This helped push them ahead of other inventors who were emerging as competitors. In 1882 Daimler and Maybach set up a factory in Stuttgart to develop light, high-speed, gasoline-powered internal combustion engines. Their aim from the start appears to have been to apply these engines to vehicles.

In 1890 Daimler and Maybach formed the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in Stuttgart, but they left the company only a year later in order to concentrate on various technical and commercial development projects. A Daimler-powered car won the first international car race–the 1894 Paris-to-Rouen race. Of the 102 cars that started the competition, only fifteen completed it, and all finishers were powered by a Daimler engine.

The success of the Paris-to-Rouen race may also have been a factor in Daimler’s and Maybach’s decision to rejoin the Daimler Motor Company in 1895. In the following year, the Daimler Company produced the first road truck, and in 1900 the company produced the first Mercedes automobile (named for the daughter of the financier backing Daimler).

The man who is widely credited with pioneering the modern automobile industry apparently did not like to drive and may never have driven at all. Certainly Gottlieb Daimler was a passenger in 1899 during a rough, bad weather journey that accelerated his declining health and contributed to his death the following spring of heart disease on March 6, 1900, in Stuttgart, Germany, after a lifetime as an inventor in the forefront of automobile development. Daimler’s auto company merged with the Benz Company (also of Germany) in 1926, forming the Mercedes-Benz automobile company later.

Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer who is known for inventing the Celsius temperature scale. Celsius also built the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1740, the oldest astronomical observatory in Sweden.

Early Life and Career:

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Anders Celsius was raised a Lutheran. His father, Nils Celsius, was an astronomy professor. Celsius completed his education in his home town; north of Stockholm. He showed an extraordinary talent in mathematics from childhood. He studied at Uppsala University where, like his father, he joined as a professor of astronomy in 1730.

Contributions and Achievements:

In his efforts to build a astronomical observatory in Sweden, Celsius visited several of the famous European astronomy sites from 1732 to 1734. At the time, English and French astronomers debated about the actual shape of the earth. To resolve this dispute, teams were sent to the “ends” of the world to assess the precise local positions. Pierre Louis de Maupertuis headed the expedition to the north and Celsius joined as his assistant.

The expedition to Lapland, the northernmost part of Sweden, continued from 1736 to 1737. Newton’s theory about the flattening of the earth at the poles was finally confirmed in 1744 after all measurements were taken.

Celsius went back to Uppsala after the expedition. He is considered to be the first astronomer to analyze the changes of the earth’s magnetic field at the time of a northern light and assess the brightness of stars with measuring tools.
At Uppsala Observatory, Celsius favored the division of the temperature scale of a mercury thermometer at air pressure of 760mm of mercury into 100°C, where 100 was taken as the freezing point and 0 as the boiling point of water.

Due to the elaborated fixation of the measuring environment and methods, this account was thought to be more precise compared to that of Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit and Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur.

Celsius was an avid admirer of the the Gregorian calendar, which was adapted in Sweden in 1753, just nine years after his death. “Degree Celsius”, the unit of temperature interval, has been named after this brilliant scientist.

Later Life and Death:

Celsius became the secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1725 where he remained until his death. He died of tuberculosis in 1744.

టంగుటూరి ప్రకాశం పంతులు

 

Tanguturi Prakasam Pantulu (టంగుటూరి ప్రకాశం పంతులు ; 23 August 1872 – 20 May 1957) was an Indian politician and freedom fighter, Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency, and subsequently became the first Chief Minister of the new Andhra State, created by the partition of Madras State along linguistic lines. He was also known as Andhra Kesari (literally, the "Lion of Andhra").The Andhrapradesh Government issued G.O on 10-AUG-2014 declaring his Birth Anniversary as state festival.

He was born to Subbamma and Gopala Krishnaya, in a Niyogi Telugu Brahmin family, in the village of Vinodarayunipalem (or Vinoda Rayudu Palem), 26 km from Ongole in Madras Presidency (now Prakasam district, Andhra Pradesh). When he was 11, his father died and his mother had to run a boarding house at Ongole, a profession that was looked down upon at the time.

When E. Hanumantha Rao Naidu, his teacher at school, moved to Rajahmundry, he took Prakasam along with him as that place had better opportunities for education. He acted in Gayopakhyanam by Chilakamarti Lakshmi Narasimham in 1890 along with his teacher. He was interested in becoming a lawyer since childhood, but Prakasam failed his matriculation examination. However, he managed to go to Madras and become a second-grade pleader. Returning to Rajahmundry, he eventually became a successful lawyer. He was elected as Municipal Chairman of Rajahmundry in 1904 when he was 31 years old. This election was a tough one at that point in time.

After completing the barrister course with a certificate of honour in London, Prakasam relocated to Madras high court. He was one of the only Telugu barristers to be successful; until then, most of the successful lawyers were either European or Tamil. He dealt with both civil and criminal cases. Of the latter, one of the important cases was the Ashe murder case. Ashe was the Collector of Tirunelveli and was shot dead in 1907. This was at a time when Bipin Chandra Pal, the nationalist leader from Bengal, was touring the region, making fiery speeches on nationalism. Prakasam defended one of the accused and ensured that he got away with a light sentence. Prakasam also edited Law Times, a legal magazine. The same year he presided over Bipin Chandra Pal’s lecture at Madras when others were afraid to come forward, given that the government of the day considered Pal’s speeches to border on sedition. He started attending the Congress Party sessions regularly after the Lucknow Pact and signed the Satyagraha pledge in October 1921. He gave up his lucrative law practice. He also started and was the working editor of a newspaper Swarajya (literally self-rule). The paper was published simultaneously in English, Telugu and Tamil.

Prakasam ran a national school and a khādī production centre. He was elected the general secretary of the Congress Party in December 1921 at the Ahmedabad session. Whenever there was unrest or strife such as a riot, he tried to be there so as to comfort people. He visited Punjab during Akali Satyagraha and the Hindu-Muslim riots in Multan. He toured Kerala during the Moplah rebellion despite a ban on visitors from outside the area and had his property at Ooty attached by the government as a consequence. In 1922, during the Non-cooperation movement, he organised a demonstration by 30,000 Congress volunteers at Guntur. In 1926, he was elected to the Central Legislative Assembly on a Congress Party ticket.

When the Simon Commission visited India, the congress party decided to boycott it with the slogan "Simon, go back". There were a host of reasons for this boycott, the most important being that the commission did not have a single Indian in its ranks. The commission was greeted with demonstration of black flags wherever it went. When the commission visited Madras on 3 February 1928, the police did not allow protests in some sensitive areas of Madras. Nevertheless, the crowd grew large and restive near the Madras High Court at Parry's Corner and the police resorted to firing with a view to control it. A young man named Pardha Saradhi was killed on the spot. The police warned the people that they would shoot if anyone tried to come near the body. At this, Prakasam grew enraged and tore open his shirt, baring his chest and daring the police to shoot at him. Understanding the situation, the police gave way to him and other supporters.^{[citation needed]} After this incident, he was known respectfully as "Andhra Kesari" (the Lion of Andhra).

In 1930, when the Congress party wanted all the legislators to resign, he did so but was not convinced about its alternative programme and hence contested and won the by-election. He joined the Congress Party led by Madan Mohan Malaviya but resigned from it as well and persuaded others to do so after Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party broke the salt tax law with the Dandi March. Prakasam also resigned as a legislator and was at the forefront in breaking the tax law at Madras. In the meantime, he had to suspend the publication of Swarajya due to the high deposit demanded by the government. It was revived after the Gandhi–Irwin Pact of 1931 but it had to be suspended again due to cash flow problems. Unsuccessful attempts were made to restart it again in 1935.

In 1937, Congress Party contested the provincial elections and achieved majority in Madras province, among others. Though Prakasam was in the running for Chief Minister’s post, he made way for Rajaji, who returned to active politics as per the wishes of the Congress Working Committee. Prakasam became the revenue minister – his major contribution was the founding and chairing of the Zamindari Enquiry Committee which looked at the structural distortions in agriculture perpetrated due to the Zamindari system followed by the British Government. With the onset of World War II, the Congress ministries resigned from office as they were not consulted by the government about India’s participation. Prakasam was the first prominent leader from South India to offer individual satyagraha against the war effort in 1941.

Prakasam was arrested and jailed for more than three years for participating in the Quit India movement of 1942. After his release in 1945, he toured South India to get back in touch with the masses.

In 1946, after the Congress' victory in elections in Madras Presidency, Prakasam became the chief minister on 30 April 1946, as he and Kamaraj, a Tamil leader, were against Rajaji – the choice of leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru – becoming the chief minister. However, the government lasted for only 11 months, as it was felt that Prakasam was not accommodating enough to various interests and corruption charges. Mahatma Gandhi faulted Prakasam for accepting gifts and using party funds, ordered Prakasam to resign from congress party.

During his tenure as Premier, Prakasam publicly declared his intention to scrap all existing textile industries in the province and replace them with khadi manufacturing and weaving units. In February 1947, Communists broke into a full-scale revolt. On Vallabhbhai Patel's advice, Prakasam responded with widespread arrests and tough crackdown on arsonists.