1892 – Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he lost the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
Homer Adolph Plessy was the American Louisiana Creole of Color plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Arrested, tried and convicted in New Orleans of a violation of one of Louisiana’s racial segregation laws, he appealed through Louisiana state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The resulting “separate but equal” decision against him had wide consequences for civil rights in the United States. The decision legalized state-mandated segregation anywhere in the United States so long as the facilities provided for both blacks and whites were putatively “equal”.
1909 – Virginia Apgar, American anesthesiologist and pediatrician, developed the Apgar test, is born.
Virginia Apgar was an American-Armenian obstetrical anesthesiologist. She was a leader in the fields of anesthesiology and teratology, and introduced obstetrical considerations to the established field of neonatology. To the public, however, she is best known as the inventor of the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of newborn children immediately after birth.
1940 – Evi Nemeth, American author and engineer is born.
Evi Nemeth was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the “bibles” of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010). Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration.
Nemeth was best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie–Hellman problem”, the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.
2011 – Creativty 50 2011: Limor Fried – Creativity 50 – Creativity Online
Move over, Martha. When it comes to DIY, Limor Fried is the queen. Alternately — and often simultaneously — described as an engineer, artist and hacker, Ms. Fried was pursuing a master’s degree at MIT when she started publishing designs for her homemade consumer-electronics products (think an MP3 player encased in a mint tin) and amassing a following of folks who wanted to know: How can I do that?
Enter Adafruit, the DIY business that sells kits to create everything from a small battery-powered USB charger to the EggBot, an “open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping-pong ball to that of a small grapefruit.” While most traditional hardware makers go to great pains to protect their proprietary IP, Ms. Fried gives hers away and accompanies them with online tutorials. “The more it’s shared, the better it gets,” she said.
