This Week in Science

This Week in Science Archive: June-December 2007   January-December 2008   January-December 2009   January-December 2010   April 2011-present   

January

• January 3, 1919: Professor Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom. By bombarding nitrogen atoms with alpha particles emitted by radioactive materials he transmuted the nitrogen atoms into oxygen.
• January 10, 1863: London's Metropolitan, the world's first underground passenger railway, opened to fare-paying passengers. The four mile, 33-min route had seven stations between Farringdon St. and Paddington. At 6 am, six steam locomotives each with four carriages, left 15-min apart, and made a total of 120 journeys in both directions, carrying over 30,000 passengers.
• January 18, 1994: the U.S. Department of Energy announced production of solar panels with twice the efficiency of existing panels. Made by United Solar Systems of Troy, Mich., these amorphous silicon submodule (1 ft2) panels converted 10.2% of solar energy into electricity, as compared to 6% previously possible. This was possible by using new thin-film photovoltaic technology.
• January 24, 1948: IBM dedicated its "SSEC" in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. It occupied three sides of a 30-ft x 60-ft room. Banks of vacuum tube circuits for card reading and sequence control and 36 paper tape readers comprising the table-lookup section occupied one wall. In the center of the room were card readers, card punches, printers, and the operator's console. It was visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk outside.
• January 31, 1958: the United States launched its first successful orbiting satellite, Explorer-I, four months after the Soviet launch of Sputnik on 4 Oct 1957. Explorer-I measured cosmic radiation, and led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belt. Its instrumentation included temperature sensors, a micrometeorite impact microphone, and a ring of micrometeorite erosion gauges. Explorer-I was 80-inch long, 6-in diam, weighed 31-lb with 18-lb of payload and was delivered into orbit using a Jupiter-C rocket.

February

• February 7, 1932: the "neutron" was described in an article in the journal Nature by its discoverer, James Chadwick, who coined the name for this neutral particle he discovered present in the nucleus of atoms. He was an English physicist who studied at Cambridge then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory where he investigated the structure of the atom. By bombarding beryllium with alpha particles, Chadwick discovered the neutron for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. He led the UK's work on the atomic bomb in WW II, and was knighted in 1945.
• February 14, 1990: radio signals were received from the U.S. space probe Voyager I that it successfully completed a four-hour series of about 60 images looking back into the Solar System, of the sun and six planets. The signals took 5-hr 26-min to travel 3,700 million miles back to Earth. The images were then assembled into a large mosaic, the “Family Portrait of the Planets.” Voyager I was launched on 5 Sept. 1977, traveled to the outer reaches of the solar system and climbed high above the plane of the orbits of the planets, enabling it to look down on the Solar System — the only spacecraft ever to do so.
• February 21, 1953: Francis Crick and James Watson reached their conclusion about the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. They made their first announcement on Feb 28, and their paper, A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, was published in the April 25th 1953 issue of the journal Nature.
• February 28, 1935: Nylon was discovered by Dr. Wallace H. Carothers of DuPont. It took seven years for the chemist to accomplish success on this project. Nylon won immediate acceptance in the commercial world in part because of the unmatched properties it offered.

March

• March 7, 1876: Alexander Graham Bell patented an "Improvement in Telegraphy" (No.174,465) which established the principle of the telephone. In this patent, he described a device to produce an undulatory current (similar to a sinusoidal wave form rather than the square wave of a pulsatory current) on the line wire. On March 10, 1876 Bell had his first successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell uttered these famous words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."
• March 14, 1879: Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. Einstein is regarded as the father of modern physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. His theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field.

  March 14 (3/14)is Pi Day(π). The symbol for pi was first used in 1706 by William Jones, but was popularized after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.

• March 28, 1979: a nuclear accident occurred at Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Caused by human and mechanical errors, a cooling system malfunctioned and permitted a partial meltdown of the reactor's core. Efforts to re-establish cooling of the reactor took several days. It was the worst U.S. nuclear accident to date, but no radiation injuries were identified.

April

• April 4, 1983: the space shuttle Challenger roared into orbit on its maiden voyage. It was named after the British Naval research vessel HMS Challenger that sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during the 1870's. Challenger joined the NASA fleet of reusable winged spaceships and flew nine successful Space Shuttle missions. But on 28 Jan 1986, its tenth launch, the Challenger and its crew of seven were lost 73 seconds after launch when a booster failure resulted in the breakup of the vehicle.
• April 11, 1943: Frank Piasecki, a Philadelphia engineer flew his first (single-rotor) helicopter, his PV-2 model, the second successful American helicopter to fly. It weighed just under 500kg and was powered by a 90hp Franklin flat-four engine. It had a three-blade articulated rotor with folding blades. Frank Piasecki was the holder of the first Helicopter Pilot's License. He formed the PV Engineering Forum in 1943 to develop practical rotorcraft. With the PV-3, Piasecki turned his attention to the more ambitious field of large military helicopters of a tandem-rotor design. (Igor Sikorsky, a Russian-born engineer in Bridgeport, Conn., piloted the first successful flight in 1939).
• April 18, 1885: In Japan, a Patent Monopoly Act was proclaimed, which effectively established the Japanese Patent Office at that time. The need for a patent system had become clearly apparent in order to speed up modernization efforts. The first patent issued by the new office, on 14 Aug 1885, was to Zuisho Hotta for his formulation of an antifouling paint for ship hulls made of lacquer, powdered iron, red lead, persimmon tannin, and other ingredients. A New Utility Model Law was enacted in 1905 to complement the patent system.
• April 25, 1990: the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in space from the Space Shuttle Discovery into an orbit 381 miles above Earth. It was the first major orbiting observatory, named in honor of American astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble. In orbit, the 94.5-in primary mirror was found to be flawed, giving blurred images and reduced ability to see distant stars. However, correcting optics were successfully installed in 25 Dec 1993. The 43-ft x 14-ft telescope now provides images with a clarity otherwise impossible due to the effect of the earth's atmosphere.

May

• May 2, 1519: Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer Leonardo Da Vinci dies on this date. Da Vinci was a great engineer and inventor who designed buildings, bridges, canals, forts and war machines. He kept huge notebooks sketching his ideas. Among these, he was fascinated by birds and flying and his sketches include such fantastic designs as flying machines. These drawings demonstrate a genius for mechanical invention and insight into scientific inquiry, truly centuries ahead of their time. His greater fame lies in being one of the greatest painters of all times.
• May 9, 1893: the first motion picture exhibition was given by Thomas Alva Edison in Brooklyn, New York to an audience of 400 people at the Dept of Physics, Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y. using Edison's Kinetograph. An optical lantern projector showed moving images of a blacksmith and his two helpers passing a bottle and forging a piece of iron. Each filmstrip had 700 images, each image being shown for 1/92 sec. The event was reported in the Scientific American of 20 May 1893.
• May 16, 1960: a synthetic ruby crystal laser was first operated at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. The laser is a device that produces monochromatic coherent light (light in which the rays are all of the same wavelength and phase). This first operable laser device was invented by American physicist Theodore Maiman, for which he was issued U.S. Patent 3,353,115 on 14 Nov 1967.
• May 23, 1930: a new U.S. Plant Patent Act provided, for the first time, patent protection for new and distinct varieties of asexually reproduced plants. This legislation resulted from the growing awareness that plant breeders had no financial incentive to enter plant breeding because they could not exercise control over their discoveries.
• May 30, 1971: the U.S. Mars space probe Mariner 9 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Florida. It carried cameras, infrared spectrometer and radiometer, ultraviolet spectrometer, radio occultation and celestial mechanics instruments. On 13 Nov 1971, it entered orbit as the first artificial satellite of Mars. After waiting for a month-long planet-wide dust storm to clear, it began compiling a global mosaic of high-quality images for 100% of the Martian surface. The photos showed gigantic volcanoes, a grand canyon stretching 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles) and relics of ancient riverbeds that were carved in the landscape of this seemingly dry and dusty planet. It also sent the first closeup pictures of the two Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos.

June

• June 6, 1899: Thomas A. Edison was issued a patent for his "Filament for And Process of Incandescent Lamps" (U.S. No. 626,460). "I form a filament of highly-refractory non-conducting material which is preferably porous, and incorporate therein isolated particles of carbon, so as to produce spark gaps between the particles, whereby high-tension currents, either alternating, continuous, or intermittent, will be conducted from particle to particle of the carbon to raise the filament to incandescence."
• June 13, 1983: the space probe vehicle Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune and became the first man-made object to leave our Solar System. It was launched 2 Mar 1972. It is moving in a straight line away from the Sun at a constant velocity of about 12 km/sec. Some 30 years after its launch, on 27 Apr 2002, NASA made successful contact with telemetry received from Pioneer 10 when it was at a distance from Earth of 7.57 billion miles, and the round-trip time for the signal (at the speed of light) was 22-hr 35-min. The probe sent information from the one scientific instrument that was still working, the Geiger Tube Telescope.
• June 20, 2002: an agreement was signed to establish a seawater desalination and heating plant - using atomic reactors - at the coastal city of Yingkou, China. The deep-water reactor designed by Chinese scientists is to burn used fuel from nuclear power stations under normal pressure giving 200 megawatts. The initial phase, costing 35 million yuan ($4 million) would provide heating for a building area of 5 million sq. meters during winter. It can also desalinate 3,000 tons of sea water daily when no heating is required. The daily capacity is expected to amount to 80,000 tons. The reactor in theory is able to replace about 130,000 tons of coal burned every year, reducing immensely waste gases.
• June 27, 1978: Seasat, an experimental U.S. ocean surveillance satellite was launched. Each day, Seasat made 14 orbits of the Earth, and in a period of 36 hours was able to monitor nearly 96% of the oceanic surface. The measurement equipment on board was able to penetrate cloud cover and report measurements such as wave height, water temperature, currents, winds, icebergs, and coastal characteristics. Although it operated for only 99 days before a power failure, it had already shown the viability of the use of a satellite for collecting oceanic data. The information collected was shared with scientists and was used to aid transoceanic travel by ships and aircraft.

July

• July 11, 1979: the U.S. space station, Skylab, re-entered the Earth's atmosphere after staying in orbit for six years. It disintegrated, spreading fragments across the southeastern Indian Ocean and over a sparsely populated section of western Australia.
• July 18, 1986: Videotapes taken by the deep-sea Alvin submersible, showing Titanic's remains were released. Looking like huge stalagmites rusticles ("rust icicles"), are a byproduct of the bacteria slowly converting the iron in the hull. The colony of iron-eating bacteria flourish in the anaerobic environment inside the hollow multi-layered rusticles while on the outside, porous layers support oxygen-dependent bacteria. In this eerie way, there is still life on the Titanic as the ship lies deep on the ocean floor.
• July 25, 1946: the U.S. detonated the "Baker" atomic bomb during "Operation Crossroads" at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. This, the first underwater nuclear explosion, was to test results on a naval fleet of war-surplus and captured enemy vessels. The bomb, encased in a watertight steel caisson, was suspended 90 feet below the landing ship LSM-60 and detonated by radio signals from a command ship at 8:45 am. The explosion created a massive column of steam and water, and a series of huge waves. After a second, the first wave struck target ship Carrier Saratoga and swept it 800 yards away. It sank eight hours later. The 90-foot wave also sank Battleship Arkansas, three submarines (Pilotfish, Apogon, Shipjack) and the fuel barge YO-160.

August

• August 1, 1946: the Atomic Energy Commission was established as President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, which transfered the control of atomic energy from military to civilian hands. Almost a year after World War II ended, Congress established the United States Atomic Energy Commission to foster and control the peace time development of atomic science and technology. The National Laboratory system was established from the facilities created under the Manhattan Project.
• August 8, 1829: the first steam locomotive for railroad use in the U.S., the Stourbridge Lion, made its first run in America. It travelled at 10 m.p.h. on the wooden tracks faced with wrought iron that already existed as a gravity railway, used to carry coal from mines at Carbondale to the canal terminus at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The 7-ton engine was built by Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge, England for the Hudson Railroad Company. However, after the trials, it was deemed to be too heavy for continued use hauling loads of coal on those tracks.
• August 15, 1914: the Panama Canal was officially opened with the passage of the SS Ancon, an American ship, through the canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The United States assisted the Panamanian rebellion in order to get the land for this canal from Colombia. Before the Panama Canal was built, sea trade had to go around South America's stormy Cape Horn. The Panama Canal crosses a small mountain range with a series of huge locks. Over 27,000 men died from disease and accidents during both the French and American construction periods.
• August 22, 1834: Samuel Pierpont Langley was born on this date. Langley was an American astronomer, physicist, and aeronautics pioneer who built the first heavier-than-air flying machine to achieve sustained flight. He launched his Aerodrome No.5 on 6 May 1896 using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. He also researched the relationship of solar phenomena to meteorology.
• August 29, 1842: the design patent, a new form of patent was authorized by Act of Congress. The first U.S. design patent was issued for typefaces and borders to George Bruce of New York City on 9 Nov 1842.

September

• September 6, 1954: ground breaking took place at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, for the first U.S. full-scale atomic electricity generating station devoted exclusively to peaceful uses. President Eisenhower remotely signaled a radio-controlled bulldozer. On 2 Dec 1957, the reactor reached critical power. It produced its full rated net capacity of 60 megawatts about 3 weeks later on 23 Dec. This would be sufficient to supply a city of 250,000 homes. The plant consisted of a single pressurized water-type reactor which heated steam to drive an electrical turbine-generator. The plant was formally dedicated by the same president on 25 May 1958, by remote control from Washington, D.C. It operated until 1982.
• September 12, 1958: Jack Kilby demonstrated his invention of a miniaturized electronic circuit to his supervisor at Texas Instruments, now recognised as the first integrated circuit to be built and operated. On 6 Feb 1959, he applied for a patent, which was eventually issued on 23 Jun 1964. Kilby was an American physicist and won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.
• September 19, 1848: Hyperion, one of the moons of Saturn, was independently co-discovered by William Bond (US) and William Lassell (England). Hyperion is one of the largest non-ellipsoidal bodies in the solar system and is composed primarily of water ice.
• September 26, 1877: Hermann Grassman died on this day. Grassmann was a German linguist and mathematician chiefly remembered for his development of a general calculus of vectors in Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre, ein neuer Zweig der Mathematik (1844; "The Theory of Linear Extension, a New Branch of Mathematics"). Grassmann's work was not fully recognized in his lifetime. Only after his death was the importance of his theory understood.

October

• October 3, 1947: after 11 years of grinding and polishing, a 200-inch diameter telescope lens for the Mount Palomar Observatory was completed at the California Institute of Technology. This lens, the first of its size made in the U.S., began when 20 tons of molten glass at 2,700 deg. Fahrenheit were poured into a ceramic mold at Corning Glass Works, N.Y. on 2 Dec 1934. The glass lens was allowed to cool only one or two degrees per day over the next eleven months, and then brought to room temperature. The telescope in which the lens was mounted was named the Hale Telescope in recognition of the late Dr. George E. Hale who had initiated the project. The completed telescope was first used on 1 Feb 1949 by taking pictures of a Milky Way constellation.
• October 10, 1933: a U.S. patent was issued to Waldo L. Semon for a method of making plasticized PVC, now known simply as vinyl. The patent was titled "Synthetic Rubber-like Composition and Method of Making Same" (U.S. No. 1,929,453). As originally known, PVC - polyvinyl chloride - was a polymer that was hard and difficult to form into useful articles. Semon had invented a way to make it in a rubber-like form. In brief, it consisted of dissolving a polymerized vinyl halide, at an elevated temperature, in a substantially non-volatile organic solvent, and allowing the solution to cool, whereupon it sets to a stiff rubbery gel. The patent listed uses such as water-proof boots or shoes, insulating coatings and resilient flooring material.
• October 17, 1963: French mathematician Jacques-Salomon Hadamard who proved the prime-number theorem died on this date. Conjectured in the 18th century, this theorem was not proved until 1896. Hadamard's work includes the theory of integral functions and singularities of functions represented by Taylor series. His work on the partial differential equations of mathematical physics is important. He introduced the concept of a well-posed initial value and boundary value problem.
• October 24, 1601: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe died on this date. Brahe's work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries. He studied the nova of 1572 ("Tycho's star") and showed that it was a fixed star. His report, De nova...stella (1573), was taken by many as proof of the inadequacy of the traditional Aristotelian cosmology. Before the invention of the telescope, using his nine-foot armillary sphere and his fourteen-foot mural quadrant, he charted the positions of 777 stars with unparallelled accuracy. In 1599 he moved to Prague, with Johannes Kepler as his assistant.
• October 31, 1992: the Vatican admitted erring for over 359 years in formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining scientific truths such as the Earth revolving around the sun, which the Roman Catholic Church long denounced as anti-scriptural heresy. After 13 years of inquiry, the Pope's commission of historic, scientific and theological scholars brought the pope a "not guilty" finding for Galileo. Pope John Paul II himself met with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to help set the record straight. In 1633, at age 69, Galileo was forced by the Roman Inquisition to repent and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Galileo was a 17th century Italian mathematician, astronomer and physicist remembered as one of history's greatest scientists.

November

• November 14, 1930: Edward H. White, II was born on November 14, 1930. He was the first U.S. astronaut to walk in space. With James A. McDivitt he manned the four-day orbital flight of Gemini 4, launched on 3 Jun 1965. During the third orbit White emerged from the spacecraft, floated in space for about 20 minutes, and became the first person to propel himself in space with a maneuvering unit. Two years later, White was one of the three-man crew of Apollo 1 who in 1967 were the first casualties of the U.S. space program, killed during a flight simulation (the others were Virgil I. Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee).
• November 21, 1783:Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier, a professor of physics and chemistry, and the Marquis Francois Laurant d'Arlandes became the first men to fly. Their hot-air balloon lifted off from La Muettte, a royal palace in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. They flew nearly 6 miles in 25 mins, reaching an altitude of around 300-ft. Spectators included Ben Franklin and King Louis XVI. The Montgolfier brothers, Étienne and Joseph, had publicly demonstrated the first unmanned hot-air balloon a few months earlier, on June 5th 1783, and a second with animals on September 19th 1783 to verify that air travel was safe for living beings.
• November 28, 1660: A group of twelve scientists met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found 'a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning'. This group included Wren himself, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, and William, Viscount Brouncker. The Society subsequently petitioned King Charles II to recognise it and to make a royal grant of incorporation. The Royal Charter, which was passed by the Great Seal on 15 Jul 1662, created the Royal Society of London.

December

• December 5, 1879: the first U.S. patent was issued for an automatic telephone switching system to Daniel Connolly of Philadelphia, Thomas A. Connolly of Washington, D.C. and Thomas J. McTighe of Pittsburgh (No. 222,458). The system consisted of a single-line wire, a battery of cells located at each telephone. and a dial switching mechanism for each line. Although this first system was crude in design and limited to a small number of subscribers, it introduced the general principle of later dial systems. The system, with eight stations connected, was exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1881. The system served a limited number of lines and was not introduced commercially.
• December 12, 1896: Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of his radio equipment at Toynbee Hall, East London. He was introduced by William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office. Preece saw the value of wireless telegraphy to replace the existing post office wire service. The use of the hall had been arranged by Preece, who advertised the event, drawing a considerable audience, and the press. While Marconi tapped the key on the transmitter, Preece carried the receiver box around the room showing that there were no wires yet a bell in the receiver rang each time Marconi closed the key.
• December 19, 1974: the pioneering Altair 8800 microcomputer was first put on sale in the U.S. as a do-it-yourself computer kit, for $397. It used switches for input and flashing lights as a display. Ed Roberts founded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to market his product that used the 8800 microprocessor. The demand for the $395.00 machine exceeded the manufacturer's wildest expectations. The Altair 8800 was featured on the cover of the Jan 1975 issue of Popular Electronics.

The content on this page is from multiple sources including Infoplease This Day in History.

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