This Week in Science
This Week in Science Archive: June-December 2007 January-December 2008
January
- January 6, 1838: Samuel Morse, with his partner, Alfred Vail, gave the first public demonstration of their new invention electric telegraphic system at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, NJ. For more information about the telegraph, visit The History of the Telegraph.
- January 12, 1896: H. L. Smith took the first X-ray photograph. It was a hand with a bullet in it. For more information on the development of the x-ray, visit The History of the X-Ray.
- January 24, 1986: The Voyager Two space probe passes within 51,000 miles of Uranus. For more information about this flight, visit NASA's Voyager: The Interstellar Mission.
- January 29, 1886: Karl Benz received a patent for the first successful gasoline-driven car. For more information about Benz and his invention, visit the European Patent Office's page on Modern Gas Engine for Automobiles.
February
- February 3, 1966: Three days after its takeoff, the unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first ever soft landing on another celestial body, and opened the way for manned trips to the moon. For more information about this mission, visit NASA's Luna 9.
- February 11, 1809: Robert Fulton patented the steamboat. For more information about Fulton and his invention, visit The History of Steamboats.
- February 20, 1962: John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. For more information about this mission, visit NASA's Friendship 7-Mercury 6.
- February 24, 1968: The discovery of a pulsar was announced. For more information about pulsars, visit AIP's A Pulsar Discovery.
March
- March 3, 1863: The National Academy of Sciences was chartered in the U.S. as President Abraham Lincoln approved the Act of Congress which established it. For more information about the history of the Academy, visit The History of the National Academies.
- March 10, 1876: The first telephone call was made by Alexander Graham Bell. For more about Bell and his first success, visit the Library of Congress's page showing Bell's Experimental Notebook.
- March 23, 1840: J.W. Draper took the first successful photo of the Moon. He made a daguerreotype, a precursor of the modern photograph. For more information about astro-photography, visit AIP's Spectroscopy and the Birth of Astrophysics.
April
- April 10, 1849: The safety pin was patented (#6,281) by Walter Hunt, in New York. For more information about Hunt and his other inventions, visit Walter Hunt, Safety Pin, Sewing Machine
- April 18, 1906: The Great San Francisco Earthquake destroyed over 4 square miles and killed over 500 people. For more information on the earthquake, including photographs and maps, visit the USGS's 1906 Earthquake.
- April 26, 1986: The worst nuclear power plant accident in history occurred at Chernobyl, near Kiev, U.S.S.R. For more information about the long-term effects of the Chernobyl disaster, visit Chernobyl.info.
May
- May 1, 1964: The first BASIC program was run on a computer at about 4:00 a.m. Invented at Dartmouth University by professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, the first implementation was a BASIC compiler. For more information about the development of computer languages, visit Computer Languages History.
- May 5, 1933: The New York Times carried a front-page article reporting the discovery of radio waves from the center of the Milky Way galaxy by Karl Jansky, researcher at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. Jansky delivered a paper on his discovery to the International Radio Union in April 1933. To learn more about Jansky, visit Karl Jansky and the Discovery of Cosmic Radio Waves.
- May 14, 1973: Skylab, the United States� first space station, was launched into orbit. For more information about the station's mission and history, visit NASA's The Skylab Space Station.
- May 18, 1980: Following a weeklong series of earthquakes and smaller explosions of ash and smoke, the long-dormant Mount St. Helens volcano erupted in Washington state, U.S., hurling ash 15,000 feet into the air and setting off mudslides and avalanches. The explosion was characterized as the equivalent of 27,000 atomic bombs. The cloud of ash eventually circled the globe. For more information, visit USGS's Mount St. Helen's Volcano.
- May 27, 1994: The highest temperature produced in a lab was a plasma temperature of 510 million degrees Celsius (918,000,000 deg F) in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) operated at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory of Princeton University. The TFTR (Dec 1982-Apr 1997) was the largest magnetic fusion experiment in the U.S. To learn more about the reactor, visit Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor .
June
- June 7, 1980: The first U.S. solar power plant was dedicated. It was sited at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah, and at the time the world's largest. For more information, visit Natural Bridge's page on its solar power system.
- June 16, 1977: German-born American engineer Wernher von Braun died. von Braun became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle used to put men on the moon. His contributions include the Explorer satellites; Jupiter, Pershing, Redstone and Saturn rockets; and Skylab. For more about von Braun, take a look at the Marshall Space Flight Center's Biography of Wernher von Braun.
- June 27, 1954: The world's first atomic power station began producing electricity in Obninsk, U.S.S.R., a small town 60 miles south of Moscow. The plant used a small, graphite moderated, water-cooled reactor, and could produce 5 megawatts. The reactor was used for both civilan power needs and also military purposes, such as research into the possibility of propelling submarines with nuclear power. The plant closed in 2002. For more information about nuclear power in Russia, visit the World Nuclear Association.
July
- July 1, 1901: The U.S. National Bureau of Standards became effective. Its duties included the custody of the standards; comparison of standards; construction of standards; testing and calibration of standard measuring apparatus; and determination of physical constants and the properties of materials. The Bureau became the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T) in 1988. Visit the NIST website for more information.
- July 7, 1981: The first solar-powered aircraft, Solar Challenger, crossed the English Channel. For more information about NASA's research into solar-powered crafts, visit the Dryden Flight Research Center.
- July 16, 1945: The first atomic bomb was tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For more information about the Trinity test, visit the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
- July 23, 1995: The Hale-Bopp comet was discovered by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp. For more information and over 5,000 images of the comet, visit NASA's Comet Hale-Bopp: The Great Comet of 1997.
- July 31, 1790: The first U.S. patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a process of making fertilizer. For more information about the re-discovery of the first patent, take a look at Henry Paynter's 1990 [revised 1998] article "The First Patent".
August
- August 7, 1959: The United States launched Explorer 6, which sent back a picture of Earth. For more information about the satellite, visit NASA's page on Explorer 6 website for more information.
September
- September 10, 1846: Elias Howe patented a hand-cranked sewing machine. Isaac Singer patented one five years later. Howe sued Singer and won, but by that time Singer was already well-established.
- September 21, 2003: The Galileo space probe ended its eight year mission to Jupiter with a scheduled entry burn in Jupiter's atmosphere. It was launched by the space shuttle Atlantis on October 18, 1989 and arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995. The probe sent back critical information on Jupiter and its moons.
- September 28, 1959: The Explorer VI satellite took the first remote television images of Earth and its meteorological conditions and also revealed an intense radiological belt around the planet.
October
- October 6, 1903: Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was born. Along with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft he won the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of the first nuclear particle accelerator, known as the Cockcroft-Walton generator. On April 14, 1932 Walton and Cockcroft succeeded in being the first to split the atom.
- October 12, 1928:The iron lung is first used on a child with respiratory failure. During the height of the polio epidemic thousands of lives were saved using this device which used negative pressure to mimic breathing.
- October 19, 1862: Auguste Lumiere was born on this date. With his brother Louis, Lumiere devised one of the first motion picture cameras. Their 1895 film, "La Sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière," is the first known motion picture.
- October 26, 1984: Baby Fae became the first new born cross-species heart transplant recipient when she was given the heart of a baboon. She survived for 20 days before she died from complications.
November
- November 2, 1947: The "Spruce Goose" made its only flight on this date. Piloted by Howard Hughes, the 400,000 pound, 8 engine, laminated wood plane flew for roughly a minute over Long Beach Harbor in California.
- November 9, 1991: An international team of scientists in Culham, England produced a significant amount of power using nuclear fusion. Though lasting for only two seconds, about 1.7 megawatts of electric power was produced.
The content on this page is from multiple sources including Infoplease This Day in History.
