Aikitu Tanakadate

Baron was a Japanese physicist with diverse interests and effect. His given name was also written as Aikitu.

Biography

Tanakadate was born in Fukuoka hamlet, in what is now part of the city of Ninohe in the northern Iwate Prefecture, Japan. He was the son of Tanakadate Inazo, a teacher of Jitsuyo, a martial art, and his wife, Kisei.

Tanakadate studied English at Keio-Gijuku University starting in 1884, and graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1882 with a degree in physics. He developed a way to write Japanese in the Latin alphabet called Nihon-shiki or Nippon-shiki in 1885, later becoming president of the Japanese Romanization Society. In the lead up to the World War II, he advocated directly for Nippon-shiki over Hepburn, eventually resulting in its adoption as the official Romanization standard by the wartime government. He visited Europe many times, and from 1888 to 1890 worked with Lord Kelvin at Glasgow University in Scotland, and with others in Berlin in Germany.

Tanakadate travelled widely in Japan from 1893 to 1896, making a survey of gravity and geomagnetism for geophysical research with Cargill Gilston Knott. He founded the Institute of Seismology at Tokyo Imperial University. The International Latitude Observatory (sometimes called the Astro-Geodynamics Observatory) at Mizusawa was founded in 1899 as he had proposed.

Tanakadate was also an early proponent of military aviation. In the Russo-Japanese War, he was an advisor to the Imperial Japanese army on the use of hot air balloons for military reconnaissance purposes. This led to the establishment of an aviation laboratory at Tokyo Imperial University. At a 1907 conference in Paris on the metric system, Tanakadate saw a model of early fixed-wing airplane, and extended his stay in Paris to study further. He founded a department on aviation at Tokyo University.

Recognition

An asteroid, 10300 Tanakadate, was named for him in 1989.

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