FYI May 06, 2018

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On This Day

1935 – New Deal: Executive Order 7034 creates the Works Progress Administration.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was the largest and most ambitious American New Deal agency, employing millions of people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. In a much smaller project, Federal Project Number One, the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.[1]

Almost every community in the United States had a new park, bridge or school constructed by the agency. The WPA’s initial appropriation in 1935 was for $4.9 billion (about 6.7 percent of the 1935 GDP).[2]

Headed by Harry Hopkins, the WPA provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression in the United States. At its peak in 1938, it provided paid jobs for three million unemployed men and women, as well as youth in a separate division, the National Youth Administration. Between 1935 and 1943, when the agency was disbanded, the WPA employed 8.5 million people.[3] Most people who needed a job were eligible for employment in some capacity.[4] Hourly wages were typically set to the prevailing wages in each area.[5]:70 Full employment, which was reached in 1942 and emerged as a long-term national goal around 1944, was not the goal of the WPA; rather, it tried to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment.[6]:64, 184

“The stated goal of public building programs was to end the depression or, at least, alleviate its worst effects,” sociologist Robert D. Leighninger asserted. “Millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was preferred over public assistance (the dole) because it maintained self-respect, reinforced the work ethic, and kept skills sharp.”[7]:228

The WPA was a national program that operated its own projects in cooperation with state and local governments, which provided 10–30% of the costs. Usually the local sponsor provided land and often trucks and supplies, with the WPA responsible for wages (and for the salaries of supervisors, who were not on relief). WPA sometimes took over state and local relief programs that had originated in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) or Federal Emergency Relief Administration programs.[6]:63

It was liquidated on June 30, 1943, as a result of low unemployment due to the worker shortage of World War II. The WPA had provided millions of Americans with jobs for eight years.[6]:71

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Born On This Day

1769 – Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette, French mathematician and academic (d. 1834)
Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette (6 May 1769 – 16 January 1834), French mathematician, was born at Mézières, where his father was a bookseller.

For his early education he proceeded first to the college of Charleville, and afterwards to that of Reims. In 1788 he returned to Mézières, where he was attached to the school of engineering as draughtsman to the professors of physics and chemistry. In 1793 he became professor of hydrography at Collioure and Port-Vendre. While there he sent several papers, in which some questions of navigation were treated geometrically, to Gaspard Monge, at that time minister of marine, through whose influence he obtained an appointment in Paris.

Towards the close of 1794, when the Ecole Polytechnique was established, he was appointed along with Monge over the department of descriptive geometry. There he instructed some of the ablest Frenchmen of the day, among them SD Poisson, François Arago and A Fresnel. Accompanying Guyton de Morveau in his expedition, earlier in the year, he was present at the battle of Fleurus, and entered Brussels with the French army.

In 1816, on the accession of Louis XVIII, he was expelled from his chair by government. He retained, however, till his death the office of professor in the faculty of sciences in the Ecole Normale, to which he had been appointed in 1810. The necessary royal assent was in 1823 refused to the election of Hachette to the Académie des Sciences, and it was not till 1831, after the Revolution, that he obtained that honour. He died at Paris on 16 January 1834.

Hachette was held in high esteem for his private worth, as well as for his scientific attainments and great public services. His labours were chiefly in the field of descriptive geometry, with its application to the arts and mechanical engineering. It was left to him to develop the geometry of Monge, and to him also is due in great measure the rapid advancement which France made soon after the establishment of the École Polytechnique in the construction of machinery.

Hachette’s principal works are:
Deux Suppléments à la Géométrie descriptive de Monge (1811 and 1818)
Éléments de géométrie à trois dimensions (1817)
Collection des épures de géométrie, etc. (1795 and 1817)
Applications de géométrie descriptive (1817)
Traité de géométrie descriptive, etc. (1822)
Traité élémentaire des machines (1811)
Correspondance sur l’École Polytechnique (1804–1815)

He also contributed many valuable papers to the leading scientific journals of his time. For a list of Hachette’s writings see the Catalogue of Scientific Papers of the Royal Society of London; also F Arago, Œuvres (1855); and Silvestre, Notice sur J. N. P. Hachette (Brussels, 1836).

Further reading
Taton, Rene (1970–80). “Hachette, Jean Nicolas Pierre”. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 6. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 1–3. ISBN 978-0-684-10114-9.

External links
O’Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., “Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette”, MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.

 
 
 
 

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