FYI April 28, 2018

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On This Day

1869 – Chinese and Irish laborers for the Central Pacific Railroad working on the First Transcontinental Railroad lay ten miles of track in one day, a feat which has never been matched.

The Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) was a rail route between California and Utah built eastwards from the West Coast in the 1860s, to complete the western part of the “First Transcontinental Railroad” in North America. It later became part of the Union Pacific Railroad.

Many 19th century national proposals to build a transcontinental railroad failed because of the energy consumed by political disputes over slavery. With the secession of the South, the modernizers in the Republican Party controlled the US Congress. They passed legislation authorizing the railroad, with financing in the form of government railroad bonds. These were all eventually repaid with interest.[2] The government and the railroads both shared in the increased value of the land grants, which the railroads developed.[3] The construction of the railroad also secured for the government the economical “safe and speedy transportation of the mails, troops, munitions of war, and public stores.”[4]

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Born On This Day

1854 – Hertha Marks Ayrton, Polish-British engineer, mathematician, and physicist. (d. 1923)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 23 August 1923), was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.

Early life and education
Hertha Ayrton was born Phoebe Sarah Marks in Portsea, Hampshire, England, on 28 April 1854. She was the third child of a Polish Jewish watchmaker named Levi Marks, an immigrant from Tsarist Poland; and Alice Theresa Moss, a seamstress, the daughter of Joseph Moss, a glass merchant of Portsea.[1][2] Her father died in 1861, leaving Sarah’s mother with seven children and an eighth expected. Sarah then took up some of the responsibility for caring for the younger children.

At the age of nine, Sarah was invited by her aunts, who ran a school in northwest London, to live with her cousins and be educated with them.[3] She was known to her peers and teachers as a fiery, occasionally crude personality.[4] Her cousins introduced Ayrton to science and mathematics. By age 16, she was working as a governess.[5]

Hertha was awarded Bachelor of Science[6] in 1881, after sitting for external examinations at the University of London, as an external student.[6] Ayrton later attended Girton College, Cambridge, where she studied mathematics and was coached by physicist Richard Glazebrook. George Eliot supported Ayrton’s application to Girton College. During her time at Cambridge, Ayrton constructed a sphygmomanometer (blood pressure meter), led the choral society, founded the Girton fire brigade, and, together with Charlotte Scott, formed a mathematical club.[3] In 1880, Ayrton passed the Mathematical Tripos, but Cambridge did not grant her an academic degree because, at the time, Cambridge gave only certificates and not full degrees to women. Ayrton passed an external examination at the University of London, which awarded her a Bachelor of Science degree in 1881.[7]

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FYI

By Elizabeth Werth: This Olympic Athlete Removed Her Breasts To Drive Faster And Helped Invade Paris

Violette Morris (18 April 1893 – 26 April 1944) was a French athlete who won two gold and one silver medals at the Women’s World Games in 1921–1922. in 1936, she became a spy for Nazi Germany, which continued during World War II. She was killed in 1944 in a Resistance-led ambush as a traitor to France.
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The Old Motor: Gas Station Series
 
 
 
 

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