10 March 1876 - The first telephone call.

Made by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson between two rooms above the Palace Theatre, Boston with the words "Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you". 

Within months he improved his apparatus and was able to make calls over several miles distance. 

March is Women's History Month here in the Colonies.  Mary Anning is a wonderful contribution.

The person who created fossil hunting and the quest for the true history of the world

There's a fossil shop in Hay-on-Wye, I'll be there two weeks today, so I'll buy something in her honour. 

11 March 1955 - Sir Alexander Fleming died.

Scottish microbiologist and discoverer of penicillin.

Whilst working on research at St Mary's Hospital, London in 1928 Fleming noticed that after leaving a culture of staphyloccus unattended for several days a fungus had grown and had attacked and destroyed the surrounding bacteria. He identified the mould and named it penicillin thus revolutionizing the fight against infection.

He was knighted in 1944. 

12 March 1864 - William Rivers born.

English neurologist and psychiatrist, another all but forgotten figure who deserves far better recognition. His early work on the nervous system gained him a position at the Maghull Military Hospital, Liverpool in 1915 treating shell shock victims. A year later he became a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh where he greatly advanced the treatment and understanding of shell shock. 

One of his patients was the war poet Siegfried Sassoon who wrote the the poem Revisitation including the lines -

Deep in my morning time he made his mark

And still he comes uncalled to be my guide

In devastated regions

When the brain has lost its bearings in the dark.

I can't begin to imagine the horror war puts on a man in combat.  WWI was truly hell on earth.

What Rivers' treatments could achieve.

13 March 1781 - The discovery of the planet Uranus.

Not an actual "discovery" as it had always been visible, but due to it being apparently static it was thought to be a star and catalogued as such. However in March 1781 the English astronomer William Herschel observed it with his telescope in the garden of his house in Bath, Somerset at first labelling it as a comet as it appeared to move. Several months later other astronomers alerted by Herschel's discovery announced it to be a planet and initially named Herschel in his honour. Herschel himself was in favour of naming it Georgium Sidus (George's Star) after King George III who had granted him an annual stipend of £200 and a house near Windsor so the Royal Family could use his telescopes. It was not formally named Uranus until the 1850s.

14 March 1879 - Albert Einstein born.

Probably the world's most famous scientist. Born in Ulm, Germany moving to Switzerland aged 17, back to Germany in 1914 before fleeing to the USA on the rise of Hitler in 1933. By then he had become a famous name for his work on physics in 1905 when he made a number of discoveries and breakthroughs which earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics years later in 1921.

15 March 1898 - Sir Henry Bessemer died.

English industrialist whose steel-making process revolutionized the industry and made Sheffield the country's main centre for steel production. He patented many other inventions, and built a ship the SS Bessemer which was designed to eliminate seasickness on the cross-Channel service. However during sea trials in 1875 it crashed into Calais pier and never entered commercial service before being scrapped. Bessemer was in 1879.

16 March 1787 - Georg Ohm born.

German physicist in the field of electricity whose publication The Galvanic circuit investigated mathematically in 1827 greatly influenced the advance of the understanding of electricity and gave rise to the theory named after him - Ohm's Law. 

Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Ohm are riding in a car and get pulled over.  The cop asked Heisenberg, "do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replies, "no, but I know where I am."  The cop, confused, orders him to open the trunk, then says "do you know you have a dead cat back here?"  Schrodinger shouts "we do now, you jerk!"  The cop moves to arrest them and Ohm resists.

Sorry if you've heard this joke before.  I couldn't resist.

Perhaps the most highbrow joke ever written.

17 March 1899 - The first radio distress signal at sea.

Transmitted by the East Goodwin Lightship off the coast of Kent, England to summon assistance for the German merchant vessel SS Elbe which had run aground on the Goodwin Sands. The message was received by the South Foreland Lighthouse which alerted the Ramsgate lifeboat. Interestingly the East Goodwin Lightship became the first vessel to send a distress call of her own seven weeks later when she was rammed by the cargo ship SS R F Matthews.

In 1904 CQD was adopted as the recognized Morse distress signal, replaced by SOS in 1908. 

Recently my son and I were discussing the USS Indianapolis scene from Jaws and the conversation morphed into the naval catastrophe involving the Sullivan Brothers.  I read in one of my history books that that incident sparked the creation of better rescue at sea efforts, that we really didn't have one firmly in place during most of WWII.  When did England perfect its rescue at sea efforts?  If that distress signal went out in 1899, you probably already had policies.

Being a maritime nation we thought a lot about rescue at sea, perhaps not so much though about making sure ships were seaworthy in the first place.