- 1. 1948- The famous "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow" paper appears in The Physical
Review.
- 2. 1879- Toll-line commercial telephone service is first instituted, between
Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts.
- 3. 1941- Astronomer Hermann Vogel is born the son of a high school principal
in Leipzig. He introduced the use of photography to this field in 1887.
- 4. 1597- Galileo, 33, writes to another famous astronomer, Johannes Kepler,
that he is reluctant to profess his belief that Earth and other planets move
around the sun because he fears public ridicule.
- 5. 1887- The blind and deaf Helen Keller, age 6, suddenly achieves her
dramatic insight into the meaning of language.
- 6. 1909- After several failed attempts, man finally reaches the North Pole.
First there are two Eskimos and one African-American, Matthew A. Henson.
The leader of the expedition, Robert E. Peary, arrives 45 minutes later.
- 7. 1795- The metric system is adopted by France, the country that created it.
1927- The first public demonstration of television transmitted over a long
distance is made. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in Washington D.C
treats an audience in New York to a speech.
- 8. 1947- The largest sunspot ever seen is discovered on the sun's Southern
Hemisphere. It is estimated to cover an area of 7 billion square miles.
- 9. 1865- Charles Proteus Steinmetz is born hunchback, in Breslau, Germany
(now Wroclaw, Poland). He established his work as the preferred form of
electrical energy throughout the world.
- 10. 1912- The Titanic departs Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage.
- 11. 1970- The ill-fated Apollo 13 mission begins.
- 12. 1961- Yury Gagarin becomes the first man to orbit Earth.
1981- The first reusable spacecraft, the shuttle Columbia, is given its
maiden flight in outer space.
- 13. 1892- Radar inventor Sir Robert Watson-Watt is born in Brechin, Scotland.
- 14. 1629- Physicist-astronomer Christiaan Huygens is born the son of an
important bureaucrat in The Hague, the Netherlands.
- 15. 1452- Leonardo Da Vinci is born illegitimately in Vinci, Italy.
1895- Swiss high school teacher Johann Balmer reports in Annalen der Physik
that light frequencies emitted by hydrogen are related to each other.
- 16. 1867- Aviation inventor Wilbur Wright is born near Millville, Indiana.
1972- Apollo 16 departs Florida for the moon.
- 17. 1598- Italian astronomer Giovanni Riccioli, the first to observe a double
star (two stars so close together that they appear as one), is born in
Ferrara. He made his discovery in 1650, looking at the middle star in the
handle of the Big Dipper.
1970- Apollo 13 splashes down safely in the Pacific, four days after an
explosion crippled the craft.
- 18. 1781- Joseph Priestley ignites a mixture of hydrogen and common air at
his lab in Birmingham, England. He is unimpressed with the explosive power.
- 19. 1912- Physicist/chemist Glenn Seaborg is born in Ishpeming, Michigan. He began
college as a literature major, but changed to science under the influence of
a great teacher. In 1951 he shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for
discovering a host of transuranium elements.
- 20. 1902- Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium in
their Paris laboratory. They processed eight tons of pitchblende rock to
extract just one gram of radium.
1928- Gerald Stanley Hawkins is born in Norfolk, England. His book "Stonehenge
Decoded" (1965) established Stonehenge as a prehistoric astronomy observatory.
- 21. 1972- Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke roam the surface
of the moon.
- 22. 1904- Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is born in New York City. He was
scientific head of the Manhatten project (which designed and constructed
history's first two atomic bombs, during World War II).
1970- Earth Day is first observed.
- 23. 1858- Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics (he even coined the term
"quantum" in physics), is born the son of a civil law professor in Kiel,
Germany. His Nobel Prize came in 1918.
- 24. 1990- Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral with the Hubble Space
Telescope.
- 25. 1974- Radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi is born in Bologna, Italy.
- 26. 1986- The Chernobyl nuclear disaster begins at 1:23 AM in Pripet, Russia.
- 27. 1791- Artist-telegraph inventor Samuel Morse is born the son of a
minister in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
- 28. 1900- Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort is born the son of a physician
in Franeker. In 1927 he convinced scientists that our galaxy rotates around its
center.
- 29. 1854- Jules-Henri Poincare, "the last of the universal mathematicians,"
is born in Nancy, France.
- 30. 1777- Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Mozart of mathematics, is born in
Brunswick, Germany.
1897- J.J. Thomson announces discovery of the electron. He calls it a
"corpuscle" at today's meeting of the Royal Society of London.
Selected from: The Illustrated Almanac of Science, Technology, and Invention:
Day by Day Facts, Figures, and the Fanciful. By Raymond L. Francis.
Published in 1997 by Plenum Publishing Corporation, New York, NY.
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~west/physicsTidbitsApr.html