Today in history @ 11 Feb.

Famous birthdays

a. American inventor and businessman Thomas Alva Edison (b. 1847), who has been described as America's greatest inventor. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

He amassed a record 1,093 patents (a total still untouched by any other inventor) covering key innovations and minor improvements in wide range of fields, including telecommunications, electric power, sound recording, motion pictures, primary and storage batteries, and mining and cement technology.

b. Hungarian-born German and American physicist and inventor Leo Szilard (b. 1898). He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.

c. German philosopher of the continental tradition Hans-Georg Gadamer (b. 1900). His importance lies in his development of hermeneutic philosophy.

d. British scientist, inventor and photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot (b. 1800). He invented the salted paper and calotype processes, precursors to photographic processes of the later 19th and 20th centuries. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1831 for his work on the integral calculus, and researched in optics, electricity and other subjects such as etymology and ancient history.

e. American mathematical physicist J. Willard Gibbs (b. 1839). His work in statistical mechanics laid the basis for the development of physical chemistry as a science. Albert Einstein called him "the greatest mind in American history." Gibbs’s studies of thermodynamics and discoveries in statistical mechanics paved the way for many of Einstein’s later discoveries. Gibbs is also known as the "father of vector analysis", or the formal study of vectors in math, and is largely responsible for the widespread use of vectors in physics, replacing the quaternions that William Rowan Hamilton had earlier discovered.

f. American inventor Almon Brown Strowger (b. 1839). He gave his name to the Strowger switch, an electromechanical telephone exchange technology that his invention and patent inspired.

Anecdotally, Strowger's undertaking business was losing clients to a competitor whose telephone-operator wife was redirecting everyone who called for Strowger. Motivated to remove the intermediary operator, he invented the first automatic telephone exchange in 1889 and received its patent in 1891. It is reported that he initially constructed a model of his invention from a round collar box and some straight pins.

g. American politician John Fitzerland (b. 1863). He went on to win two terms as mayor of Boston. He was the maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy. In old age, Fitzgerald helped his grandson John F. Kennedy to win his first seat in congress.

h. English Grand Prix motorcycle road racer and Formula One driver John Surtees (b. 1934). He remains the only person to have won World Championships on both two and four wheels.

Famous death anniversaries

a. Fifth President of India Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (d. 1977). He was the second President to die in office.

b. Industrialist, philanthropist, and freedom fighter Jamnalal Bajaj (d. 1942). He founded the Bajaj Group of companies in 1926 and was a close aide of Mahatma Gandhi.

c. Eminent thinker, social worker and politician Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay (d. 1968). He was one of the leaders of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the forerunner of the present day Bharatiya Janata Party.

d. Film director and screenwriter Syed Amir Haider Kamal Naqvi popularly known as Kamal Amrohi (d. 1993). He is famous for his Hindi films such as Mahal (1949), Pakeezah (1972) and Razia Sultan (1983). He established Kamal Pictures (Mahal Films) in 1953 and Kamalistan Studio in Bombay in 1958.

e. First Pakistani cardinal Joseph Cordeiro (d. 1994).

f. French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Rene Descrates (d. 1650). He is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”

g. Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (d. 1958). A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world.

h. French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (d. 1868). He is best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope.

i. American biochemist Robert Holley (d. 1993). He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 (with Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Warren Nirenberg) for describing the structure of alanine transfer RNA, linking DNA and protein synthesis.

Other notable events

a. 1942 "Archie" comic book debuts (started as “Archie Comics”)

b. 1945 Yalta agreement signed by FDR, Churchill & Stalin.

c. 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini seizes power in Iran

d. 1990 Nelson Mandela released after 27 years imprisonment in South Africa