1964- Murray Gell-Mann publishes an eight-paragraph note in Physics Letters that introduces the name "quark" to describe a class of subatomic particles. The future Nobel laureate stole the term from "Finnegan's Wake", a book by James Joyce.
1906- Astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, is born in Streator, Illinois. His first telescope was built of junked agriculture equipment.
1915- Physicist Robert Hofstadter, famous for dissecting the proton and neutron, is born in New York City. Using Stanford's linear accelerator, Hofstadter discovered that both of these nuclear particles have a positively charged core surrounded by two clouds of pi-mesons. He won the 1961 Nobel Prize.
1913- Mary Douglas Leakey, discoverer of critically important fossils and records of human ancestors, is born in London.
1933- The USS Ramapo, in the Pacific Ocean during a 68-knot hurricane, measures history's highest officially recorded sea wave (112 feet high).
1932- James Chanwick coins the term "neutron" and announces its discovery in Nature.
1969- A group of meteorites falls on Chihuahua, Mexico. They date back 4.61 billion years, to the dawn of the solar system.
1974- Skylab 4 splashes down, ending the longest manned U.S. space mission. (84 days 1 hour 15 minutes 30 seconds).
1971- Apollo 14 returns to Earth after mankind's third visit to the moon.
1847- Thomas Alva Edison is born in Milan, Ohio. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a sometimes-carpenter and a sometimes-lighthouse keeper. Edison had hearing problems all of his life and as a child had an unusual phrasing of questions. When one of his first teachers called him "addled," Mrs. Edison withdrew him from school. He eventually returned, but quit forever at age 12.
1898- Leo Szilard, a father of the Atomic Age, is born in Budapest, the son of an engineer. Szilard was a physicist in Germany until the Nazis took power, after which he went to Vienna, then England, and finally to the United States. At Columbia University he was part of the group that urged Franklin Roosevelt in a famous 1939 letter to build an atomic bomb. At the University of Chicago he collaborated with Enrico Fermi to build the first-ever nuclear reactor. He was also a key scientist in the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic weapons. After World War II Szilard devoted himself to curbing nuclear weapons and using nuclear power peacefully.
1910- William B. Shockley, Nobel laureate and a developer of the transistor, is born in London.
1923- Chuck Yeager, the first person to fly faster than sound (in 1947) is born in Myra, West Virginia.
1960- France explodes its first atomic bomb on one of the most ecologically delicate places on Earth, the Sahara Desert.
1876- Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray file separate documents with the patent office in New York City, with each man claiming priority as the inventor of the telephone. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Bell's favor. Bell filed his patent application just two hours ahead of Gray, and this slight time difference decided the case.
1826- Physicist George Stoney, the first to use the term "electron", is born in Oakley Park, Ireland.
1951- The first atomic reactor to be used in medical therapy - the Atomic Energy Commission's unit in the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York - is placed in operation.
1923- The burial chamber of King Tut's tomb is unsealed by Howard Carter in the Egyptian desert.
1888- Physicist Otto Stern is born the son of a grain merchant in Sohrau, Germany (now Poland). He won the 1843 Nobel Prize for developing the "electron beam" apparatus to study atomic properties.
1201- Nasir Ad-Din at-Tusi, Islamic philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and astronomer is born in Tus- Iran. After establishing himself as a court astrologer, he lives in the castle fortress of the terrorist Assassins, and then joined the invading Mongol army after giving them a description of the castle defenses. He wrote a number of books, and translated the works of many Greek scientists.
1564- Michelangelo dies in Rome at age 89. He is revered for his work as a painter, but he is also known for his extremely accurate anatomical drawings of the human body and for his works as an architect, which include several forts and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
1747- Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electric battery (history's first source of a continuous, reliable electric current), is born one of nine children in Como, Italy, in a noble family that had fallen on hard times. Volta did not talk until he was four, which mistakenly convinced his family that he was retarded.
1930- Pluto is discovered by astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh at Arizona's Lowell Observatory.
1764- Gottlieb Kirchhof is born the son of a pharmacist in Teterow, Germany. He was already a prosperous industrialist-chemist when he performed his epoch- making experiment: treating starch with sulfuric acid. This produced glucose (in essence this was the discovery of glucose) and was the first-ever controlled catalytic reaction.
1878- Thomas A. Edison patents the phonograph. The first recording was "Mary had a little lamb".
1962- John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth, in Friendship VII. A four-cent stamp is issued to mark the event, becoming the first U.S. stamp issued the day of the event it commemorates.
1965- Ranger VIII transmits thousands of spectacular pictures of the moon before crashing into it.
1947- At an optical society meeting in New York City, Edwin H. Land demonstrates the Polaroid camera, the first device to take, develop, and print pictures on a single sheet of paper, all in 60 seconds.
1902- Fritz Strassmann is born. In 1938 he helped, along with Otto Hahn in Hitler's Germany, to split the atom, paving the way for atomic weapons.
1987- SN1987A - The brightest supernova, the bright, violent death of a massive star, of the twentieth century is first seen on Earth; it was visible without a telescope until May.
1663- Thomas Newcomen, harbinger of the Industrial Revolution, is born in Dartmouth, England. He produced a steam engine that was the world's best for over a half-century. The engine designed by James Watt supplanted his.
1804- Heinrich Lenz is born in Dorpat, Estonia. Like Darwin, he studied theology and sailed on a multiyear scientific voyage before he "found himself." Lenz's calling was physics. Among his contributions is Lenz's law (describing the direction of the electric current).
1871- "The Descent of Man" by Charles Darwin is published in London by John Murray.
1968- The discovery of pulsars (extraterrestrial pulsating radio sources) is announced from where they were first detected, the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory at Cambridge University.
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/physicsTidbitsFeb.html