50 YEARS AGO

A joint meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada was held on January 24, during which the lecture theatres of these three bodies in London, New York and Montreal were connected together by the trans-Atlantic telephone cable, which was opened for public service last September... At the end of the symposium the clarity of transmission over the cable was demonstrated when identical recordings of music were played in London and New York...Without the indicator provided in the lecture theatre in London, it would have required a very sensitive musical ear to determine the source of the music.

From Nature 16 February 1957.

100 YEARS AGO

Death has been very busy of late among the army of men of science, and nowhere has he been more active than in Russia, where within the space of a few weeks three of that country's foremost chemical philosophers—Beilstein, Mendeléeff, and Menschutkin—all men of front rank and of a worldwide reputation, have submitted themselves to the strict arrest of the fell sergeant... Our immediate concern is with the most distinguished of the eminent triumvirate—Dmitri Ivanovitsch Mendeléeff...he was a Siberian, born at Tobolsk on February 7th (N.S.), 1834. He died, therefore, within a week of his seventy-third birthday. He was the seventeenth and youngest child of Ivan Paolowitch Mendeléeff... The story of the rise and development of the Periodic Law is so well known that it is unnecessary now to dwell upon it. By a good fortune, which some may regard as evidence of predestination, Mendeléeff lived to see the verification of his predictions in the discovery, in rapid succession, of gallium, scandium and germanium; and no seer ever prophesied more truthfully.

From Nature 14 February 1907.