Inquiring Minds
1767
Doing some calculations based on his translation of the biblical prophecies of Daniel, Eleazar Wheelock's protege Samson Occom concludes that the Second Coming will occur sometime between 1847 and 1849.
1778
Nine years after Benjamin Franklin published his research on electricity, Professor John Smith, class of 1773, observes that "the heat of lightning appears to be quite different from that of other fires." He speculates that lightning consists of fine particles that can pass through "soft bodies."
1874
Professor Charles "Twinkle" Young, perhaps the most noted astronomer of his era, travels to China with a group of colleagues to test his new method for determining the distance between the planets and the sun. While Young is conducting his experiment, the Chinese emperor contracts smallpox. An American envoy, fearing that the astronomer will be accused of moving Anthropologist Ken Korey findssimilarities between humans and. theirancestors. For more than two centuries,Dartmouth scholars have exploredeven stranger territory.
the spots on the sun's face to the emperor's countenance, secretly whisks the scientists out of the country.
1900
Edwin Brant Frost '86,the first medical director of Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, uses a congenital eye defect in his work as the world's leading discoverer of binary stars. His nearsightedness allows him to rapidly scan photographic plates from telescopes without the use of a microscope.
1924
Internationally known physicist and former Dartmouth President Ernest Fox Nichols delivers a paper on "Joining the Infrared and Electric Wave Spectra" before the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. During an uncharacteristically long pause in Nichols's delivery, according to a book by Leonard Rieser '44, the chairman discovers that he has died of a heart attack while remaining supported by the podium.
1929
Professor James MacKaye, an authority on mathematical philosophy, refutes Einstein's special theory of relativity and puts forth his own concept of a pulsating universe.
1932
On an expedition to Estonia, biology Professor William Patten discovers a new fish in the Ostracoderm family, which he names Dartmuthia Patten.
1957
Otis F. Jillson, instructor in dermatology and syphilology, studies the location of fungi in human fingernails.
1990
Adjunct Professor of Earth Sciences Robert Jastrow publishes a book entitled Journey to the Stars: Space Exploration Tomorrow and Beyond. Jastrow predicts that, in a few hundred years, men will build "giant space arks, the size of the Queen Mary."
