- 1- 1904- Nuclear physicist Otto Robert Frisch is born in Vienna. His fame is
linked to Otto Hahn's; Hahn and his partner Fritz Strassmann split the atom
in 1938, but did not realize completely what they had done. They
communicated their results to Frisch and his aunt Lise Meitner, who were the
first to understand that fission had been produced and that enormous amounts
of energy were released.
1908- Henry Ford introduces the Model T automobile. Each car costs $825.
- 2- 1608- The first known refracting telescope is offered by lens
grinder-glass maker Hans Lippershey to the Dutch government for use on the
battlefield. The principle of aligning two lenses to produce great
magnification was apparently a chance discovery by a Lippershey apprentice.
1948- Mark Leakey discovers a shattered skull of Proconsul africanus outside
Rusinga, Kenya; it is the first skull of a fossilized ape ever found.
- 3- 1803- John Gorrie, inventor of the refrigerator, is born in Charleston,
South Carolina.
- 4- 1582- The day is declared to be October 15 by Pope Gregory XIII, under
advisement of an astronomical conference in Rome. The event marks the advent
of the Gregorian calendar, used universally today.
1955- The first solar-powered telephone conversation (commercial) takes place
in Americus, Georgia, over a distance of about 14 miles.
1957- The Space Age begins. Russia launches the first man-made object (Sputnik
I) into orbit.
- 5- 1882- Robert Hutchings Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, is born the
only child of a bookkeeper-salesman-machine-shop owner in Worcester,
Massachusetts.
- 6- 1807- The wild experimenter Sir Humphry Davy first produces and discovers
potassium.
1903- E.T.S. Walton, co-developer of the first nuclear particle accelerator,
known as the Cockcroft-Walton generator, is born the son of a priest in
Dungarvan, Ireland.
- 7- 1885- Nuclear physicist Niels Bohr is born the son of a physiology
professor in Copenhagen. Both Bohr and his son, Aage Bohr, were to receive
Nobel Prizes (in 1922 and 1975).
1957- The first large nuclear accident occurs, in England's Windscale
plutonium reactor near Liverpool. A fire scatters radioactive material over
the countryside. Authorities seize all milk and growing foodstuffs within
400 miles of the plant. In 1983 the British government estimated that 39
people died of cancer as a result of the mishap.
- 8- 1850- Henri-Louis Le Chatelier is born in Paris, the son of France's
inspector general of mines. Among his achievements was the invention of the
thermoelectric couple for measuring high temperature.
- 9- 1000- Norwegian explorer Leif Erickson enters the Western Hemisphere,
landing at present-day Nova Scotia.
1855- Issac M. Singer patents the sewing machine motor.
1879- Physicist Max von Laue, the first to diffract X-rays with crystals, is
born.
- 10- Physicist-chemist Henry Cavendish is born into an aristocratic English
family in Nice, France. He made many fundamental discoveries, including the
composition of air, the nature and properties of hydrogen, the specific heat
of several substances, and the structure of water.
- 11- 1802- The first parachute patent is issued to Frenchman Jacques Garnerin.
1958- The second U.S. moon-shot, Pioneer 1, is launched.
1968- Apollo 7 is launched. It is the first three-man U.S. spaceflight-
carrying astronauts Schirra, Eislele, and Cunningham- and the first manned
flight in the Apollo series of launches that later successfully lands a man on the
moon.
- 12- 1492- At 2 AM a member of Columbus's crew spots land for the first time
in the New World.
1881- Physicist Albert A. Michelson, 30, begins the first of a series of 23
measurements of the speed of light.
- 13- 1993- Clones of human embryos have been created in a laboratory, report
George Washington University biologists at a joint meeting of the American
Fertility Society and the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society.
- 14- 1863- Alfred Nobel is granted his first patent; it is a Swedish patent
for preparing nitroglycerine. During his lifetime he obtained 355 patents.
1947- Chuck Yeager becomes the first human to fly faster than sound, breaking
the sound barrier in the rocket-powered plane XS-1 over Murac, California.
- 15- 1608- Evangelista Torricelli is born in Faenza, Italy. He invented the
barameter, and was the first to create a sustained vacuum.
1878- The first electric company in U.S. history incorporates. It is the
Edison Electric Light Company in New York City.
- 16- 1964- China becomes the fifth nation to explode the atomic bomb.
- 17- 1933- Albert Einstein arrives in the United States, a refugee from the
Nazis.
1949- A long-distance telephone number is dialed for the first time in New
York City.
1986- Pioneer 10 crosses the orbit of Pluto and becomes the first man-made
object in history to travel so far from Earth; it is 3.67 billion miles away
at that point,
- 18- 1931- Thomas Edison dies at 84 in West Orange, New Jersey.
1962- The international team of James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice
Wilkins are named winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for
determining the structure of DNA
1967- The first telescope-carrying space observatory is launched. It is
NASA's orbiting Solar Observatory.
- 19- 1910- Astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who determined the
origin of black holes, is born in Lahore, Pakistan. He was a 1983 Nobel
laureate for calculating what happens when stars exhaust their energy and
collapse.
1977- The French-English supersonic jet Concorde flies into New York City for
the first time.
- 20- 1891- Sir James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron is born in
Manchester, England.
- 21- 1520- The Strait of Magellan is first navigated. Ferdinand Magellan, 40,
leads the expedition around the southern tip of South America. One of the
original five ships had already abandoned the expedition, the other ships
were nearly out of water, and the crews were eating rat-fouled food and
leather.
1879- Thomas Edison invents the first successful incandescent light bulb, at
Menlo Park, New Jersey. In 1931 the anniversary of this event was celebrated
with Edison's funeral and burial, on a hillside overlooking West Orange, New
Jersey (where Edison moved his "invention factory" in 1877), now aglow with
electric light.
- 22- 1881- Physicist Clinton Joseph Davisson is born the son of a paperhanger
in Bloomington, Illinois. He shared the 1937 Nobel Prize for Physics for
discovering that electrons can be diffracted (just like light), thereby
confirming de Broglie's theory that electrons behave like waves as well as like
particles.
- 23- 1905- Physicist Felix Bloch, developer of NMR (nuclear magnetic
resonance) technology/theory, is born in Zurich, Switzerland. Bloch shared
the 1952 Nobel Prize for his work.
- 24- 1601- Tycho Brahe, the last and probably the greatest naked-eye
astronomer, dies at 54 in Prague.
1804- Physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber is born in Wittenberg, Germany. He is
best known for studies of magnetism (in partnership with friend Carl
Friedrich Gauss).
1939- The age of synthetics dawns. Nylon stockings are first sold to the
public in Wilmington, Delaware.
- 25- 1789- Amateur astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, the first to sketch
Jupiter's Great Red Spot in detail, and the first to see that the number of
sunspots cycles regularly, is born in Dessau, Germany.
1935- Astronaut Russell L. Schweickart is born in Bailey's Corner, New
Jersey. During the March 1969 flight of Apollo 9, Schweickart and James
McDivitt gave the Lunar Landing Module its first test in outer space; the pair
flew the module for six hours, and Schweickart took a 40-minute spacewalk
from it.
- 26- 1977- The experimental space shuttle Enterprise makes a safe but bumpy
landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California after its maiden test flight.
England's Prince Charles witnesses the adventure.
- 27- 1728- Explorer-oceanographer James Cook is born in Marton-in-Cleveland,
England.
1859- German physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff announces invention of the
spectroscope, a device that reveals the chemical composition of substances by
their emission and absorption of light. Spectroscopy greatly advanced
chemical analysis.
1904- The first rapid-transit subway opens in New York City. It is the IRT
(Interborough Rapid Transit) running from the Brooklyn Bridge to Grand
Central Station to Times Square to 145th Street. It is also the first time
aluminum has been used in subway cars.
1938- The du Pont company announces the name "nylon" for its new synthetic
yarn.
- 28- 1799- The first aeronautical patent in U.S. history is awarded to Moses
McFarland of Massachusetts for a "federal balloon".
- 29- 1928- German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a nonstop flight of 3967.1
miles, still the record distance for a dirigible.
- 30- 1938- Earth is attacked by Martians! Thousands of radio listeners hear
and believe "The War of the Worlds" staring Orson Welles on CBS.
1961- The most powerful man-made explosion in history occurs. A 57-megaton
thermonuclear device is detonated in the Novaya Zemlya region of
Russia. The resulting shock wave circles Earth three times, the first lap
taking 36 hours 27 minutes.
- 31- 1930- Astronaut Michael Collins, a member of the first manned mission to
the moon, is born in Rome, Italy.
1952- An atomic fusion bomb is first detonated. Nicknamed "Mike" (but known
as a thermonuclear bomb, hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb), the device explodes at
19:14:59.4 G.C.T. from a tower in the Elugelab Atoll in the Marshall Islands
in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. Its immense energy comes from the fusing
together of hydrogen atoms- the same process used by the sun.
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/physicsTidbitsOct.html