50 Years Ago

'Orbit of the artificial Earth satellite' — By a considerable feat of improvization, Mr. Martin Ryle and his team at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory near Cambridge have been able to record the radio signals transmitted by the artificial satellite from October 5… A report from the United States gives the maximum height of the orbit above the Earth as 583 miles and the minimum as 143 miles, and states that the carrier rocket was travelling three minutes ahead of the satellite on October 12… Mr. D. H. Sadler reports…that the carrier rocket is now visible in the British Isles in the morning twilight… On October 13 it was approximately over Bournemouth at 5h. 26m. U.T., the track moving south-west, parallel to itself, about 200 km. a day.

From Nature 19 October 1957.

100 Years Ago

'Classification of portraits' — Experiments of various kinds that I have made to define the facial peculiarities of persons, families, and races by means of measurement led to the following results… The individuality of a portrait lies more in the relative positions of six cardinal features than in the shapes of the lines that connect them… The features are these:— c, the tip of the chin; l, the lower, and u, the upper lip; m, the hollow between the upper lip and the nose; n, the tip of the nose; f, the hollow between the nose and the brow… In my experiments I have chiefly used the side-view portraits by George Vance, R. A., of his distinguished contemporaries, published in 1809… I lexiconised these in respect to the measures…and found, first, that no two of the numerical formulae were the same… I have applied the above method to portraits of very different races, and have thus far found it efficient in all of them.

Francis Galton

From Nature 17 October 1907.