Born on this day
Monday, September 20, 1880. : Australian pioneer in physical therapy for polio sufferers, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, is born.
Australian nurse Elizabeth Kenny was a pioneer in physical therapy. Born on 20 September 1880 at Kelly’s Gully, a township just west of the New South Wales town of Warialda, her family then moved to the small town of Nobby on the Darling Downs, near Toowoomba, Queensland.
An accident during her teenage years, in which she broke her wrist, sparked her interest in anatomy. Whilst recovering, Elizabeth keenly questioned her doctor and mentor, Dr. Aeneas McDonnell, about the workings of the human body. Though untrained, in 1911 she began working as a bush nurse in the area, even starting up a hospital in nearby Clifton. At the outbreak of World War I, she volunteered to serve as a nurse. Due to the dire need for nurses, the untrained Kenny was accepted to work on soldier transport ships, and the experience she gained in this venture earned her the official title of “Sister”.
Sister Kenny continued to work as a nurse after the war, and even improved the design of stretchers used in ambulances on the Darling Downs. Marketing the stretcher as the “Sylvie Stretcher”, Kenny gave the profits to the Australian Country Women’s Association who managed sales and manufacture of the invention. Her initiative gained the attention of a family on a cattle station near Townsville, who arranged for her to come and care for their daughter who had been disabled by polio. Her methods of care and treatment enabled the girl to completely recover. She gradually achieved acclaim for her methods by the many polio-stricken children she treated and cured, but criticism from the medical fraternity for her lack of training.
Unlike other methods of the time, Kenny’s treatment opposed immobilising affected limbs with casts or braces. She advocated treating children during the acute stage of polio and using hot compresses. However, doctors would not permit her to treat patients until after the first stage of the disease or until muscle spasms had ceased. Instead, she designed a programme of passive exercises to stimulate function.
Kenny’s pioneering methods were gradually adopted by more physicians as she travelled to the USA to promote them. During her 11-year stay in America, she opened numerous Kenny Treatment Centres. Although her processes were criticised by many doctors, her dramatic results in affected children spoke for themselves. Her lasting legacy is her methodology for rehabilitating muscles, which formed the foundation for physical therapy, or what is commonly known as physiotherapy.
Kenny returned to Australia in 1951, and died on 30 November 1952. Her grave lies in Nobby Cemetery.
Australian History
Friday, September 20, 1963. : Scrivener Dam is completed in order to make Lake Burley Griffin, a central feature of Canberra, Australia’s capital.
The competition to design Australia’s new capital city, Canberra, was won in 1911 by American architect Walter Burley Griffin. After winning the competition to design Australia’s national capital, he and his wife moved to Australia, where Griffin was appointed as the Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction.
As the Molonglo River flowed through the proposed site of Canberra, Burley Griffin’s design included an artificial lake in the city’s heart. The design allowed for a central circular basin, with irregularly shaped eastern and western lakes either side. Due to disputes with Australian authorities, Burley Griffin left Australia in 1920 with much of his vision for the city not yet realised. Thus, work on the lake only began in 1958 when engineers first began to investigate the hydrology and structural requirements needed to dam the Molonglo in order to construct the lake.
Excavation of the floodplain for the lake began in 1960. The dam to hold back the waters was named Scrivener Dam after Charles Scrivener, the man who surveyed several sites in New South Wales to select the site for the Australian Capital Territory and Canberra. The valves to complete Scrivener Dam were closed on 20 September 1963 by Interior Minister Gordon Freeth but, due to a drought, the lake only reached its planned level at the end of April the following year.
Australian History
Saturday, September 20, 1975. : 13 miners are killed in the first of several mining accidents at Moura, Queensland.
The town of Moura is located in central Queensland, about 676 km north-west of Brisbane. The Kianga-Moura coalfields were developed in the early 1960s, and by 1968 the coalfields were the largest in Queensland, with coal being railed out to Gladstone on the central Queensland coast.
Nicknamed ‘The Coal and Cattle Centre of the Dawson Valley’, Moura is a small town with a history of tragic accidents. The first of these occurred on 20 September 1975. 13 miners were killed in an explosion in a mineshaft near the town. An inquiry found that the explosion was caused by “a spontaneous combustion source which ignited inflammable gas and was propagated involving coal dust.”
The second major mining accident occurred in the Moura Underground No 4 mine, on 16 July 1986. 12 miners, the youngest of whom was just 18 years old, were killed in this accident. A brass statue of a miner at the southern end of the town commemorates this disaster. Yet another 11 miners were killed on 7 August 1994, when an explosion occurred at the main BHP mine.
World History
Saturday, September 20, 1519. : Ferdinand Magellan leaves Spain on his voyage around the world.
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese sea explorer. Born in 1480, at age 12 he became a page to King John II and Queen Eleonora at the royal court at Lisbon. Here he was able to pursue his academic interest in astronomy and geography. He first went to sea when he was 20, and gained much seafaring experience over the next 10 years. He was the first to sail from Europe westwards to Asia, and the first European to sail the Pacific Ocean.
On 20 September 1519 Magellan set sail to circumnavigate the world. His fleet reached the Philippines a year and a half later. Whilst Magellan was well received by many of the people, he died on 27 April 1521, during a battle with an indigenous group. 18 members of his crew and one ship of the fleet returned to Spain in 1522, having completed Magellan’s goal of circumnavigating the globe.
World History
Tuesday, September 20, 1853. : Inventor Elisha Otis sells his first safety elevator equipment.
Elisha Graves Otis was born in Halifax, Vermont, USA, in 1811. In 1852, Otis developed the first modern passenger elevator. It used his invention of a safety device which prevented the car from falling if the cables broke. On 20 September 1853 he sold his first safety elevator equipment to Benjamin Newhouse in New York City who used it for moving freight.
The safety equipment was not demonstrated in public until 1854, after Otis had begun his elevator business. At the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York, Otis ascended in the elevator, and called for the cable to be cut with an axe. The elevator platform did not fall, but held, secured by a brake using toothed guiderails in the elevator shaft and a spring-loaded bar that automatically caught in the toothed rail of the elevator car if the cable failed. Today, the Otis Elevator Company is the world’s largest company in the manufacture and service of elevators, escalators, moving walks and people-moving equipment.
World History
Monday, September 20, 1954. : The first Fortran computer program is run.
Fortran is a computer programming language. It was originally developed in the 1950s, primarily for technical and scientific applications. The name “Fortran” is short for “Formula Translation”. In its early form, it allowed users to express their problems in commonly understood mathematical formulae. Fortran was developed by an IBM team lead by John Backus, and the first Fortran programme was run on 20 September 1954. Continued modifications through the years have allowed the programme to develop with technology, and it is still a usable language today.
World History
Thursday, September 20, 1984. : A suicide bomber kills 20 people at the US Embassy in Beirut.
Long before the Twin Towers in New York were destroyed in a terrorist attack, the USA had been the target of terrorism. On 20 September 1984, a member of the Islamic Jihad group drove a truck containing 500kg of explosives towards the United States embassy in Beirut, capital of Lebanon. Despite attempts by guards to stop the vehicle, it reached its target and exploded directly in front of the building. Twenty people were killed in the blast, which ripped off the front of the five-storey building.
The previous embassy was blown up in April 1983, killing 61 people, and the current embassy had been open only 6 weeks at the time of the attack. The motivation for the attack was that The Islamic Jihad, who were allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, did not want any Americans to be on Lebanese soil. Many more attacks continued throughout the 1980s, with a total of nearly 270 US citizens killed in bombings, assassinations and kidnappings.