October 6th Birthdays

Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton
Ernest Walton was an Irish physicist, who was co-recipient, with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft of England, of the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of the first nuclear particle accelerator, known as the Cockcroft-Walton generator. On 14 Apr 1932 Walton turned the proton beam on to a lithium target. They identified the disintegration products as alpha particles (helium nuclei). This was experimental verification of theories about atomic structure that had been proposed earlier by Rutherford, George Gamow, and others.

He was born 1903 in Abbeyside, Co. Waterford, Ireland. Walton married Freda Wilson in 1934. They had five children. He died on June 25th, 1995.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Walton

Joseph Echols Lowery
Lowery is a minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the American civil rights movement. He was born in 1921. He married Evelyn Gibson in 1950, a civil rights activist and leader in her own right.

His career in the civil rights movement began in the early 1950s. After Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955, Lowery helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organisation devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. Lowery is a co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of black advocacy groups. The Forum protested Apartheid in South Africa in the mid 1970s until the election of Nelson Mandela.

In 2004 Rev. Lowery was honored at the "International Civil Rights Walk of Fame". Lowery was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lowery