Great Romanians

GEORGE ENESCU (1881-1955)

George Enescu was one of the most prodigiously gifted musicians of the twentieth century: a great violonist and composer, a distinguished conductor, an accomplished pianist, able cellist and a famous violin teacher who numbered Christian Ferras, Arthur Grumiaux and Yehudi Menuhin among his pupils. His musical memory was phenomenal, a fact that contributed to the loss of some of his own works which he composed but never wrote down.

1996 Paul Banks

VICTOR BABES (1854-1926)

Born in Vienna, in a family from Banat, Victor Babes studied medicine (at first, he wanted to become an actor.) Later he became an university assistant at the University of Vienna and Budapest. He co-authored the first Treaty of Bacteriology in the world, "Les bacteries" (by A.V. Cornil and Victor Babes), 1885, Paris. From 1888 he was a professor at the Bucharest faculty of medicine.

HENRY COANDA (1886-1972)

"In October 1910 Grand Palais on Champs-Elysees in Paris was hosting the second International Aeronautical Exhibition. The most recent products of aviation were exposed. Many people were visiting the exhibition, some because of pure curiosity, attracted by the mirage of flight, others because they were particurlarly interested in some specific machines.

The most interesting machine, which attracted lots of people, and caused the visitors to gather in a crowd around it, was a red airplane which was missing the propeller; beside it, on a metallic shell, was written: COANDA - 1910. This airplane caused the people to be so curious not only because it was missing the propeller, but also because of the fact that it was completely different from what people knew by that time an airplane looked like. It was a double-wing, one-seat plane equipped with a reactive engine. The "air-reactive engine", invented and built for the first time by Henry coanda, composed of a piston-engine with four cylindres, cooled with water; it developed 50 HP (Horse-Power) at 1000 rotations/minute. This piston-engine was connected to a rod which rotated the rotation multiplier; the movement was transmitted to the compressor which gained a rotation speed of 4000 rot./min. In front of the compressor was placed the obturator - a device very similar to that a photo-camera; this device could be controlled by the pilot such that the quantity of air that entered the compressor could be regulated. The air entered the burning rooms, (that had a ring-like section were placed on both sides of the fuselage), from which, through some tubes, burned gases of the engine were evacuated and the propulsion force was generated. The propulsion force at sea level obtained with this engine was 220 kgf, much larger than that obtained if the piston-engine would have been acted by a propeller. This attempt constitues the first flight of an airplane equiped with an air-reactive engine, the first reactive flight of an airplane in the world. But lacking the financial support Coanda could not improve his invention such that a second reactive airplane made by Coanda could not be seen flying again. So, 30 years before Heinkel, Campini and Whittle, COANDA built and flew the first reactive airplane.

MIRCEA ELIADE (1907-1986)

Born March 9, 1907 in Bucharest. He recived his M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest in 1928. He then studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy at the University of Calcutta and lived for six months in the ashram (hermitage) of Rishikesh, Himalaya. He invented the term "hierophanies" (I.e. manifestations of the sacred world) which applied to all religious experience in traditional and contemporary societies and signified them as credible phenomena. In 1931 returned to Romania, completing his Ph. D. in 1933 with the dissertation Yoga: Esai sur les origines de la mystique indienne ("Yoga: Essays of the origin of Indian Mysticism") and was named assistant professor at Bucharest, where taught the history of religions and Indian philosophy (1933-1939) After World War II, he went to Paris as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne. In 1956 he became professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, where he remained. He also wrote a three volume work entitled A History of Religious Ideas and was editor in chief of the 16 volume Encyclopedia of Religion. He is one of the most noted pioneers in the systematic study of the history of the world's religions.

More information on Mircea Eliade's work can be found at: http://www.enteract.com/~jwalz/Eliade

GEORGE EMIL PALADE (b. 1912)

1974 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell. He was born in Iasi, Romania and moved to the USA after WWII. Affiliation: Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven CT. George Palade, a pioneer of modern cell biology, helped lead the convergence of the electron microscopy, cell fractionation and, with Philip Siekevitz, biochemistry in the study of cell structure and function.