Born on this day
Saturday, November 21, 1936. : Victor Chang, Australian heart surgeon and a pioneer of modern heart transplantation, is born.
Victor Peter Chang Yam Him was born in Shanghai, China, on 21 November 1936. Chang’s mother died of cancer when he was just twelve years old, and this was a deciding factor in his choice to become a doctor. He came to Australia to complete his secondary schooling in 1953, then studied medicine at the University of Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Medical Science with first class honours in 1960, and a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1962. After further study in England, and becoming a Fellow of both the Royal College of Surgeons and American College of Surgeons, he joined the cardiothoracic team at St Vincent’s Hospital in 1972.
Chang was instrumental in raising funds to establish a heart transplant programme at St Vincent’s. The first successful transplant under the programme was performed on a 39-year-old shearer from Armidale in February 1984, who survived several months longer than he would have otherwise. Arguably, Chang’s best-known success was when he operated on Fiona Coote, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, on 7-8 April 1984. Over the next six years, the unit at St Vincent’s performed over 197 heart transplants and 14 heart-lung transplants, achieving a 90% success rate for recipients in the first year. To compensate for the lack of heart donors, Chang developed an artificial heart valve and also worked on designing an artificial heart.
Victor Chang was murdered on 4 July 1991, after an extortion attempt on his family. The murder was related to transplant waiting lists. Within less than two weeks, Chiew Seng Liew was charged with the murder, and Jimmy Tan was charged as an accessory. The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, to enable research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of heart muscle diseases, was launched in honour of Victor Chang on 15 February 1994.
Australian History
Saturday, November 21, 1789. : Convict James Ruse is provisionally granted land at Parramatta to establish a working farm.
James Ruse was born on a farm in Cornwall around 1759. At age 22, he was convicted of burglary and, due to severe over-crowding in British gaols, spent over four years on the prison hulks in Plymouth Harbour. He was one of the convicts who was transported in the First Fleet to New South Wales, sailing on the ‘Scarborough’.
Governor Phillip was aware of the need to build a working, farming colony as soon as possible. Thus, on 21 November 1789, Phillip selected Ruse to go to Rose Hill (now Parramatta), west of Sydney Town, and establish “Experiment Farm”, the colony’s first working farm. Ruse was allocated one and a half acres of already cleared ground and assisted in clearing a further five acres. He was given two sows and six hens and a deal was made for him to be fed and clothed from the public store for 15 months. Within a year, Ruse had successfully farmed the site and produced corn crops, proving that it was possible for new settlers to become self-sufficient, and to feed a family with relatively little assistance to begin with.
As a result of the success of Ruse’s venture, he was granted another 30 acres in March 1791, in the colony’s first official, permanent land grant. This was in addition to the area he was already occupying.
World History
Wednesday, November 21, 1877. : Thomas Edison announces his invention of a ‘talking machine’, which preceded the phonograph.
Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847, in Milan, Ohio, USA. Although probably best known for developing the light bulb and the phonograph, Edison was a prolific inventor, registering 1093 patents by the time he died in 1931. On 21 November 1877, Edison announced his invention of a “talking machine”, the precursor to the phonograph, which provided a way to record and play back sound.
Edison came upon the invention by accident, whilst trying to find a way to improve the efficiency of a telegraph transmitter. He noticed that the needle could prick paper tape to record a message but the paper did not last for many recordings. This led him to experiment with trying a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder. He then moved on to experimenting with silverfoil which, while more expensive, was smoother and recorded better. Edison experimented with cylinder as well as disc tinfoil phonographs, and in 1878 developed a clockwork motor disc phonograph.
World History
Monday, November 21, 1927. : The Columbine Mine massacre occurs in Colorado, USA.
Throughout history, coal mining towns have suffered the worst of conditions while coal mines themselves have seen some of the lowest safety standards. The situation was no different in North America.
For five decades, tensions on the Colorado coal fields had been high. The mines were marked by frequent strikes and confrontations between miners and mine owners, and the state police. Thirteen years prior to the Columbine Mine massacre, Colorado had been shocked when seventeen workers and family members had been killed by state militia during the Ludlow strike. However, the awareness this raised and the improvement in conditions, were not enough to combat the unrest and subsequent violence that occurred at the Columbine Mine in 1927.
Since the Ludlow incident, the neglect of basic safety measures had resulted in the deaths of over 170 more workers in mines scattered throughout northern Colorado. Action by around 8,700 striking miners had shut down all the coal mines in the region except for the Columbine mine, which was located in a small town called Serene, just north of Denver. The mine had been kept running by ‘scab’ labour, while militant members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Union who had been arrested were constantly moved from jail to jail to prevent IWW lawyers from accessing them. This did not stop the leaders from organising protests and rallies.
On the morning of 21 November 1927, some 500 miners and their families marched to the north gate of Serene, where they were met by plainclothed but heavily armed state militia who blocked the entrance to the gate, backed up by mine guards inside the town who were also armed. When one of the strike leaders, Adam Bell, approached the gate, he was struck on the head. Supporters rushed to his aid, and chaos broke out. Police attempts to use tear gas were to no avail, and the workers and family members scaled the gate, where they were met with clubs, rifle fire and even machine guns. In all, six strikers were killed, and dozens were injured.
This was not the end of the tensions. Further confrontations occurred for many years afterwards, as the work of the IWW was severely compromised, and no militia or policemen were ever held accountable for the massacre.
World History
Saturday, November 21, 1953. : Piltdown Man, the so-called missing link between ape and man, is declared to be a fraud.
On 18 December 1912, fragments of a fossil skull and jawbone were unveiled at a meeting of the Geological Society in London. These bone fragments, estimated to be almost a million years old, were considered to be evidence of early man. The skull became known as Piltdown Man, and was recognised as the “missing link” between ape and man. The remains, officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni, were supposedly discovered in Piltdown Quarry near Uckfield in Sussex, England, by Charles Dawson, a solicitor and an amateur palaeontologist.
Forty years later, on 21 November 1953, a team of English scientists exposed Piltdown Man as a deliberate fraud. The skull fragments were a mixture of bone parts: the skull belonged to a medieval human, the jaw was determined to be that of an orang-utan, from approximately 500 years ago, and the teeth came from a chimpanzee. It has never been determined whether Dawson himself was the perpetrator of the fraud, as he died in 1916. However, further research on his “discoveries” has determined several dozen of them to be frauds.