Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller ( July 12, 1895, Milton, MA, US – July 1, 1983, Los Angeles, CA, US) .

   In 1927, at age 32, Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade Building Systems, a business which aimed to provide affordable, efficient housing. The Fuller family had no savings, and during the autumn of 1927, Fuller contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment. Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:

"From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others." In 1927 Fuller resolved to think independently which included a commitment to "finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more"
   Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949.  At Black Mountain, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. 

 The Montreal Biosphère, formerly the American Pavilion of Expo 67, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Although the geodesic dome had been created, built and awarded a German patent on June 19, 1925 by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded United States patents. Fuller neglected to cite that the self supporting dome had already been built some 26 years prior in his patent applications. Although Fuller undoubtedly popularized this type of structure he is mistakenly given credit for its design.

Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity".

Yul Brynner

   

   Yuliy Borisovich Briner (July 11, 1920, Vladivostok, RU – October 10, 1985, New York, US), better known as Yul Brynner, was a Russian-American actor, singer, and director, considered one of the first Russian-American film stars. He became widely known for his portrayal of King Mongkut in musical The King and I, for which he won two Tony Awards (1952, 1985), and later won an Academy Award (Oscar) for the film adaptation (1956).
   He  had Swiss-German, Russian and Buryat (Mongol) ancestry, and was born at home in a four-story residence. After Yul's father, Boris Briner, a mining engineer and inventor abandoned the family in 1923,  his former spouse Marousia (née Blagovidova) took  Yuliy (3),  and Vera (7)  to Harbin (China). In 1932 the family moved to France, and in 1940, - to the United States.

   Famous quote by Yul Brynner:
Girls have an unfair advantage over men: if they can't get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb.


   

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856, Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia) – 7 January 1943, 

New York City, United States) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. 

In 1928, Tesla received U.S. Patent 1,655,114, for a biplane capable of taking off vertically (VTOL aircraft) and then of being "gradually tilted through manipulation of the elevator devices" in flight until it was flying like a conventional plane. Tesla thought the plane would sell for less than $1,000, although the aircraft has been described as impractical, although it has early resemblances to the V-22 Osprey used by the US military.

V-22 Osprey

This was his last patent. At the 1932 party, Tesla claimed he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays. In 1933 at age 77, Tesla told reporters at the event that, after 35 years of work, he was on the verge of producing proof of a new form of energy. He claimed it was a theory of energy that was "violently opposed" to Einsteinian physics, and could be tapped with an apparatus that would be cheap to run and last 500 years.

   He never married. He walked 8 to 10 miles per day and he squished his toes one hundred times for each foot every night.

Tesla walked to the park every day to feed the pigeons. He began feeding them at the window of his hotel room and nursed injured birds back to health. He said that he had been visited by a certain injured white pigeon daily. He spent over $2,000 to care for the bird, including a device he built to support her comfortably while her broken wing and leg healed.Tesla stated:

   "I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them for years. But there was one, a beautiful bird, pure white with light grey tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life. "

  In the fall of 1937 at the age of 81, after midnight one night, Tesla left the Hotel New Yorker to make his regular commute to the cathedral and library to feed the pigeons. While crossing a street a couple of blocks from the hotel, Tesla was unable to dodge a moving taxicab and was thrown to the ground. Tesla refused to consult a doctor, an almost lifelong custom, and never fully recovered. On 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel.

   On 9 January 1943 the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla's belongings. John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items, which were being held in custody. After a three-day investigation, Trump's report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating:

"Tesla's thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results."

Interesting facts:
John George Trump (August 21, 1907 – February 21, 1985) was an American electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist.  He was the youngest of three children of German Lutheran immigrants Frederick and Elizabeth Christ Trump.
 John had a sister, Elizabeth Trump Walters (1904–1961), and a brother, Frederick Christ  Trump (October 11, 1905 – June 25, 1999), an American businessman and philanthropist. Frederick was a prominent real-estate developer in New York City , and the father of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, Maryanne Trump Barry, a former United States Court of Appeals judge, and Frederick Jr, who died at age 42 from complications due to alcoholism.

Tom Hanks

Thomas Jeffrey Hanks (born July 9, 1956, Concord, CA, US) is an American actor and filmmaker.

Hanks was outspoken about his opposition to the 2008 Proposition 8, an amendment to the California constitution that defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman.
A proponent of environmentalism, Hanks is an investor in electric vehicles and owns a Toyota RAV4 EV.

John Davison Rockefeller Sr

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937)  was supporter of capitalism based on a perspective of social Darwinism : "The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest".

Plateau for start

Graph 1 Total number of cases, number of active cases, and rate of change in the United States, logarithmic scale.

   On May 30, there was maximum number of active cases (1 176 025),  on June 16, it was surpassed (1 186 227). The number of active cases on July 1, 2020 is 1 454 397.

Graph 2 Daily number of tests and percentage of detected cases in the United States

   On June 14 (111 day of the epidemic), the minimum percentage of detected cases (2.8%) was reached and the trend reversed.

Graph 3 Graph of the total number of infected  people and  number of active cases in Russia

   Although the infection in Russia started 19 days later than in the United States, the percentage of active  cases in Russia is significantly lower.

Graph 4 Daily number of tests and percentage of detected  cases in Russia

   "Saw" in number of tests characterizes the work of laboratories: war by war, and the lunch is by schedule. It is possible that many of them do not work on weekends. On June 30, the epidemic reached another minimum of 1.9 % on day 106 from the beginning of the epidemic.

Graph 5 Charts of normalized Rt reproduction number in the USA and Russia

   If Rt n is greater than 1, the infection widens, and if it less than 1, it fades. In the US, the plateau was not a maximum, but a respite before real growth. In this graph, the difference between the beginning of the epidemic in the United States and Russia is not 19 but 21 days, to  align weekly cycles. As you can see the risk to catch the desease in the US is, at least 30% higher on Saturdays, than on Tuesdays.
   Whether Russia will follow the well-trodden American path, or Russians mostly overcome the desease, will be revealed in a week.