This March seems to be a month for important scientific birthdays, beginning with March 4, the 600th birthday of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal.
Prince Henry began sending out expeditions along the Atlantic coast of Africa in 1418, motivated as much by hatred of the Muslims and a lust for gold as by a thirst for knowledge.
In 1434, one of his explorers, Gil Eanes, rounded Cape Bojador on the coast of Morocco, Prince Henry’s first important success. Another explorer discovered the Azores, which were settled by the Portuguese in 1439. In 1443 Henry received a monopoly on trade and conquest beyond Bojador, and not long after that his expeditions reached the Senegal River and the Cape Verde Islands, and satisfied one of Henry’s desires by setting up a very profitable trade in gold and slaves. Not long before Henry died, in 1460, an expedition led by Pedro de Sintra reached Sierra Leone.
Prince Henry’s expeditions helped make Portugal a superpower and marked the beginning of the world-wide wave of European expansion and colonizing. Whether that was a good thing or not depended on whether you were European or a member of one of the native cultures about to be overwhelmed by that wave; but you can’t deny its significance.
The next birthday is also related to exploration: Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was born on March 9, 1934. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin made a single orbit aboard Vostok 1, reaching a maximum altitude of 327 kilometres.
After a triumphant world tour, Gagarin directed the brief woman-cosmonaut program from 1961 to 1963. He returned to flight status when the Soyuz program began, and may have been training to make his second spaceflight when he was killed in the crash of a MiG training jet in 1968.
Just a little less than 100 years before Gagarin was born, on March 17, 1834, a different kind of pioneer came into the world. Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler invented the first high-speed internal combustion engine in 1885, along with a carburetor that allowed the engine to run on liquid gasoline instead of natural gas.
His new engine was so much lighter and more efficient than existing engines that he was able to mount it onto a bicycle, thereby inventing the motorcycle. His 1886 powered carriage would have been the world’s first automobile if another German, Karl Benz, hadn’t built one a year earlier.
Daimler, who died on March 6, 1900, founded the Daimler Motor Company in 1890. It became Daimler-Benz in 1926–the antecedent of today’s Mercedes-Benz, still known for making pretty good automobiles.
The automobile changed the world, and in so doing, it changed people, because people are the product of their environment. That, at least, was the philosophy of Burrhus Frederic Skinner.
Born on March 20, 1904, in Susquehenna, Pennsylvania, Skinner received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard University in 1931, conducted research into learning there until 1936, and after teaching at other universities, returned to Harvard in 1948, remaining until his death in 1990.
Skinner invented the Skinner Box, in which a small animal, such as a pigeon, can receive food by pressing a lever. The animal can be observed to determine how quickly it learns to press the lever, and under what conditions it learns best.
Skinner saw the whole world as a Skinner Box, in which people’s behavior is determined entirely by their efforts to gain rewards or avoid punishment. Skinner rejected the idea of there being an unconscious mind that influences our actions apart from our environment. He thought human life could be improved if people would “radical behaviorism” to society and its problems.
Of course, as Skinner himself said, accepting radical behaviorism would mean the abandonment of certain outmoded concepts, like freedom and dignity. This did not make him popular either with other psychologists or with politicians, and also led to his theories being used to justify brutal totalitarianism and the modification of behavior through the use of pain–torture. This appalled Skinner, a very gentle man.
Despite the controversy, Skinner is the only person to ever receive the American Psychological Association’s citation for lifetime contribution to psychology. But that shouldn’t be surprising: the most influential science is always accomplished by pushing the boundaries.
Which, now that I think of it, is what all of this month’s birthdays have in common.
Prince Henry pushed the map’s boundaries. Yuri Gagarin pushed the Earth’s boundaries. Gottlieb Daimler pushed the boundaries of technology. And B. F. Skinner pushed the boundaries of our understanding of ourselves.
Happy birthday, boundary bashers!
