Important historic dates in science

October 31: Vatican admits Galileo correct
In 1992, the Vatican admitted erring for over 359 years in formally condemning Galileo Galilei for entertaining scientific truths such as the Earth revolves around the sun it, 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.

October 30: Largest nuclear device
In 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a 58 megaton yield hydrogen bomb over Novaya Zemlya, which is still the largest nuclear device to ever be detonated.

October 29: Glenn returns to space
In 1998, U.S. astronaut John Glenn was launched into space aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. In 1962, Glenn first made history as the first American to orbit the Earth, strapped into a nine-by-seven-foot capsule. Now at age 77, and a U.S. Senator from Ohio, Glenn was a member of the STS-95 crew, serving as a Payload Specialist, aboard the Discovery. He carried out studies on the commonalities between the effects of space flight and aging. His microgravity research results relate to product-oriented commercial applications in such diverse fields as medical, agriculture and manufacturing. The 9-day mission returned on November 7, 1998, after 134 Earth orbits, traveling 3.6 million miles in 213-hr 44-min. His original flight had lasted about 5 hours.

October 28: Atomic Energy Commission
In 1946, a five-man commission of civilians was appointed by President Harry S. Truman. The Atomic Energy Commission was established by the U.S. Atomic Energy Act approved 1 Aug 1946 to develop and utilize atomic energy toward improving the public welfare, increasing the standard of living, strengthening free competition in private enterprise, and promoting world peace. The first meeting took place on November 13, 1946, although the official confirmation by the Senate occurred later, on April 7, 1947. The chairman was David Eli Lilienthal.

October 27: Lisa Meitner
(Born October 27, 1968: Died November 7, 1878)
Physicist, born in Vienna, Austria, who shared the Enrico Fermi Award (1966) with the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research beginning in 1934 that led to the discovery of uranium fission. She refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1917, she discovered with Hahn the new radioactive element protactinium. She was the first to describe the emission of Auger electrons. In 1935, she found evidence of four other radioactive elements corresponding to atomic numbers 93-96. In 1938, she was forced to leave Nazi Germany, and went to a post in Sweden. She has done much work on nuclear physics in general, including work on the three main disintegration series and on beta rays. In later work, she used the cyclotron as a tool.

October 26: Max Mason
(Born October 26, 1877: Died March 23, 1961)
American mathematical physicist, educator, and science administrator. During World War I he invented several devices for submarine detection - several generations of the Navy's "M," or multiple-tube, passive submarine sensors. This apparatus focused sound to ascertain its source. To determine the direction from which the sound came, the operator needed only to seek the maximum output on his earphones by turning a dial. The final device had a range of 3 miles. Mason's special interest and contributions lay in mathematics (differential equations, calculus of variations), physics (electromagnetic theory), invention (acoustical compensators, submarine-detection devices), and the administration of universities and foundations.

October 25: Belgian nuclear reactor
In 1962, Belgium's first nuclear powered generation of electricity began with the inauguration of the BR-3 power plant at Mol by Minister Spinoy. The BR-3 Pressurized Water Reactor was the firstPWR-type in Europe. Construction began January 1956 and it ceased operation June 30, 1987 at the end of its Westinghouse license. The BR-1 was a research reactor put into operation at Mol in 1956 with thermal power of 4 MW. The BR-2 was a materials testing reactor at Mol in 1963 with thermal power 80 MW. Presently, Belgium produces 55% of their electricity from seven newer nuclear units, at Doel and Tihange, which generated almost 44 TWh in 1998.

October 24: Pierre-Ernest Weiss
(Born October 24, 1940)
French physicist who investigated magnetism and determined the Weiss magneton unit of magnetic moment. Weiss's chief work was on ferromagnetism. Hypothesizing a molecular magnetic field acting on individual atomic magnetic moments, he was able to construct mathematical descriptions of ferromagnetic behaviour, including an explanation of such magnetocaloric phenomena as the Curie point. His theory succeeded also in predicting a discontinuity in the specific heat of a ferromagnetic substance at the Curie point and suggested that spontaneous magnetization could occur in such materials; the latter phenomenon was later found to occur in very small regions known as Weiss domains. His major published work was Le magnetisme ( 1926).

October 23: William David Coolidge
(Born October 23, 1873: Died February 3, 1975)
William D(avid) Coolidge was an American engineer and physical chemist whose improvement of tungsten filaments (1913, patent No.1,082,933) was essential in the development of the modern incandescent lamp bulb and the X-ray tube. Coolidge's X-ray tube (1916, U.S. patent No. 1,203,495) completely revolutionized the generation of X-rays and remains to this day the model upon which all X-ray tubes for medical applications are patterned [above R]. He worked on many other devices such as high-quality magnetic steel, improved ventilating fans, and the electric blanket. During World War II he contributed research to projects involving radar and radar countermeasures. He was awarded 83 patents during his lifetime.

October 22: Karl Jansky
(Born October 22, 1905: Died February 14, 1950)
Karl Guthe Jansky was an American electrical engineer who discovered cosmic radio emissions in 1932. At Bell Laboratories in NJ, Jansky was tracking down the crackling static noises that plagued overseas telephone reception. He found certain radio waves came from a specific region on the sky every 23 hours and 56 minutes, from the direction of Sagittarius toward the center of the Milky Way. In the publication of his results, he suggested that the radio emission was somehow connected to the Milky Way and that it originated not from stars but from ionized interstellar gas. At the age of 26, Jansky had made a historic discovery - that celestial bodies could emit radio waves as well as light waves.

October 21: Ronald E. McNair
(Born October 21, 1950: Died January 28, 1986)
Ronald E(rwin) McNair was an American physicist and astronaut who was the second African American to fly in space.He had been fascinated by space since childhood, when as early as in elementary school he talked about the Sputnik satellite. McNair was nationally recognized for his work in the field of laser physics, including chemical and high-pressure lasers. In 1978, he was one of 35 applicants selected from a pool of 10,000 for NASA's space shuttle program. He was assigned as a mission specialist on the Feb 1984 flight of the shuttle Challenger, during which he orbited the earth 122 times. Sadly, on his second trip, on the morning of 28 Jan 1986, McNair with six other crew members died in an explosion shortly after launching aboard the Challenger.

October 20: Sir James Chadwick
(Born October 20, 1891: Died July 24, 1974)
English physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics (1935) for his discovery of the neutron. He studied at Cambridge, and in Berlin under Geiger, then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory with Rutherford, where he investigated the structure of the atom. He worked on the scattering of alpha particles and on nuclear disintegration. By bombarding beryllium with alpha particles, Chadwick discovered the neutron - a neutral particle in the atom's nucleus - for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1935. In 1932, Chadwick coined the name "neutron," which he described in an article in the journal Nature. He led the UK's work on the atomic bomb in WW II, and was knighted in 1945.

October 19: Walter Bradford Cannon
(Born October 19, 1871: Died October 1, 1945)
American neurologist and physiologist who was the first to use X-rays in physiological studies. These led to his publication of The Mechanical Factors of Digestion (1911). He investigated hemorrhagic and traumatic shock during WW I. He devised the term homeostasis (1930) for how the body maintains its temperature. He worked on methods of blood storage and discovered sympathin (1931), an adrenaline-like substance that is liberated at the tips of certain nerve cells. He died from leukemia - probably a legacy from his early work with X rays He was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1920 for his work on digestion, but his claim was ruled out as "too old." In 1934, 1935, and 1936 he was adjudged "prizeworthy" by the appropriate Nobel jurors but was not given a prize.

October 18: Antiproton
In 1955, a new atomic subparticle called a negative proton (antiproton) was discovered at U.C. Berkeley. The hunt for antimatter began in earnest in 1932, with the discovery of the positron, a particle with the mass of an electron and a positive charge. However, creating an antiproton would be far more difficult since it needs nearly 2,000 times the energy. In 1955, the most powerful "atom smasher" in the world, the Bevatron built at Berkeley could provide the required energy. Detection was accomplished with a maze of magnets and electronic counters through which only antiprotons could pass. After several hours of bombarding copper with protons accelerated to 6.2 billion electron volts of energy, the scientists counted a total of 60 antiprotons.

October 17: First UK nuclear power
In 1956, Queen Elizabeth II opened Calder Hall, Britain's first nuclear power station. Her speech was given in the shadow of the massive chimneys of the Windscale plant, where explosives were made for Britain's first atomic bomb. "This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction," she said, "is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community." At 1216 GMT, she pulled the lever which would direct electricity from the power station into the National Grid for the first time. A crowd of several thousand people gathered to watch the opening ceremony, which was also attended by scientists and statesmen from almost 40 different countries. The plant closed on March 31, 2003.

October 16: Halley's Comet
In 1982, Halley's Comet was observed on its 30th recorded visit to Earth, first detected using the 5-m (200-in) Hale Telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory by a team of astronomers led by David Jewett and G. Edward Danielson. They found the comet, beyond the orbit of Saturn, about 11 AU (1.6 billion km) from the Sun. While 50 million times fainter than the faintest objects our eyes can see, they needed to use not only the largest American telescope but also special electronic equipment developed for the Space Telescope. In 1705, Halley used Newton's theories to compute the orbit and correctly predicted the return of this comet about every 76 years. After his death, for correctly predicting its reappearance, it was named after Halley.

October 15: First Chinese astronaut
In 2003, China became the third nation to send a man into space. Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei, 38, was launched on a Long March CZ-2F rocket in the Shenzhou-5 spacecraft at 9 am local time (1 am GMT). He completed 14 Earth orbits during a 21-hour flight which ended with a parachute-assisted landing in the on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in northern China. The Shenzhou spacecraft was based on the three-seat Russian Soyuz capsule, but with extensive modifications. The country began planning manned spaceflight in 1992. Russia began providing advice on technology and astronaut training in 1995. The first of four unmanned test flights of a Shenzhou craft (took place in Nov 1999. The name Shenzhou translates as "divine vessel."

October 14: Walter M. Elsasser
(Born March 20, 1904: Died October 14, 1991)
German-born American physicist notable for a variety of contributions to science. He is known for his explanation of the origin and properties of the Earth's magnetic field using a "dynamo model." Trained as a theoretical physicist, he made several important contributions to fundamental problems of atomic physics, including interpretation of the experiments on electron scattering by Davisson and Germer as an effect of de Broglie's electron waves and recognition of the shell structure of atomic nuclei. Circumstances later turned his interests to geophysics, where he had important insights about the radiative transfer of heat in the atmosphere and fathered the generally accepted dynamo theory of the earth's magnetism.

October 13: Bertram H. Brockhouse
(Born July 15, 1918: Died October 13, 2003)
Canadian physicist who developed neutron diffraction techniques used for studying the structure and properties of matter for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1994 (with American physicist Clifford G. Shull). By devising instrumentation to measure the energy of neutrons scattered from a solid material, Brockhouse provided insight to its atomic structure. It made possible advances in semiconductor technology. His Triple-Axis Neutron Spectrometer is now widely used not only to investigate atomic structures, but also virus and DNA molecules.

October 12: Nobel Prize
In 1985, International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War receives Nobel Prize

October 11: Robert Gale
(Born October 11, 1945)
Physician, co-founder of International Bone Marrow Registry, and a pioneer in bone marrow transplantation. Gale has received much attention for the assistance he has given foreign governments in treating radiation victims - to the Soviet Union (1986) after the Chernobyl disaster and to Brazil (1987) following an accident in Goiania. As a specialist in bone marrow transplants, he volunteeredto treat Chernobyl victims and was invited by Mikhail Gorbachev to travel with a group to Moscow immediately after the April 1986 accident. He operated with bone marrow transplants on 13 Chernobyl victims. However, many of the highly exposed Chernobyl survivors have since died from latent radiation effects.

October 10: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
In 1963, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), signed by Britain, America and the Soviet Union, comes into operation. Its official title was the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water. On July 15, 1963, U.S., British, and Soviet negotiators had met in Moscow. Due to disagreements concerning on-site inspections, agreement on a comprehensive ban was not reached. So negotiators turned their attention to the limited ban, prohibiting tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and beneath the surface of the seas (but not yet those underground). On August 4, 1963 the LTBT was signed in Moscow by the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, and ratified by the US President October 7, 1963.

October 9: Max Von Laue
(Born October 9, 1879: Died April 23, 1960)
German physicist who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays in crystals. This enabled scientists to study the structure of crystals and hence marked the origin of solid-state physics, an important field in the development of modern electronics.

October 8: Robert Rowe Gilruth
(Born October 8, 1913: Died August 17, 2000)
American aerospace scientist, engineer, and a pioneer of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. He developed the X-1, first plane to break the sound barrier. Gilruth directed Project Mercury, the initial program for achieving manned space flight. Under his leadership, the first American astronaut orbited the Earth only a little over 3 years after NASA was created. In 1961, President Kennedy and the Congress committed the nation to a manned lunar landing within the decade. Gilruth was named the Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center and assigned the responsibility of designing and developing the spacecraft and associated equipment, planning and controlling missions, and training flight crews. He retired from NASA in 1973.

October 7: Niels Bohr
(Born October 7, 1885: Died November 18: 1962)
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist, born in Copenhagen, who was the first to apply the quantum theory, which restricts the energy of a system to certain discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For this work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. He developed the so-called Bohr theory of the atom and liquid model of the nucleus. Bohr was of Jewish origin and when the Nazis occupied Denmark he escaped in 1943 to Sweden on a fishing boat. From there he was flown to England where he began to work on the project to make a nuclear fission bomb. After a few months he went with the British research team to Los Alamos in the USA where they continued work on the project.

October 6: Ernest Walton
(Born October 6, 1903: Died June 25, 1995)
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was an Irish physicist, who was corecipient, with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft of England, of the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for the development of the first nuclear particle accelerator, known as the Cockcroft-Walton generator. The accelerator was built in a disused room in the Cavendish Laboratory, and supplied with several hundred kilovolts from a voltage multiplier circuit designed and built by Cockroft and Walton. On 14 Apr 1932 Walton turned the proton beam on to a lithium target. Despite all the odds against them, they succeeded in being the first to split the atom, and Walton was the first to see the reaction taking place. They identified the disintegration products as alpha particles (helium nuclei).

October 5: Robert Hutchings Goddard
(Born October 5, 1882: Died August 10, 1945)
American professor, physicist and inventor, "father of modern rocketry". From age 17 Goddard was interested in rockets (1899) and by 1908 he conducted static tests with small solid-fuel rockets. He developed mathematical theory of rocket propulsion (1912) and proved that rockets would functioned in a vacuum for space flight (1915). During WW I, Goddard developed rocket weapons. He wrote A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919. Over the following two decades he produced a number of large liquid-fuel rockets at his shop and rocket range at Roswell, N.M. During WW II he developed rocket-assisted takeoff of Navy carrier planes and variable-thrust liquid-fuel rocket motors. At the time of his death Goddard held 214 patents in rocketry.

October 4: Michael Idvorsky Pupin
(Born October 4, 1858: Died March 12, 1935)
Serbian-American physicist who devised a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire. His parents were illiterate, but they encouraged his education. Pupin became an instructor in mathematical physics (1890) at Columbia University, New York City. In 1986, he discovered that atoms struck by X rays emit secondary X-ray radiation. He also invented a means for taking short-exposure X-ray photographs. The Bell Telephone Company, in 1901, acquired the patent for his invention for long-distance telephony. Pupin won a Pulitzer Prize (1924) for his autobiographical work, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923).

October 3: Atomic bomb security
In 1945, following a message from President Truman, a bill sponsored by the war department and known as the May-Johnson bill was introduced into the U.S. Congress. The purpose of this bill was to keep the atomic bomb a secret under stringent security restrictions. Because it failed to provide for the sharing of information with foreign countries, and granted a dominant role to the military, scientists throughout the country were galvanized in opposition. Due in part to lobbying by scientists such as Leo Szilard and other groups, the May-Johnson Bill was tabled in December. The McMahon Act, signed on 1 Aug 1946, mandated civilian control of atomic energy under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

October 2: Atomic clock
In 1956, the Atomicron, the first atomic clock, was unveiled at the Overseas Press Club in New York City.

October 1: Walter Bradford Cannon
(Born October 19, 1871: Died October 1, 1945)
American neurologist and physiologist who was the first to use X-rays in physiological studies. These led to his publication of The Mechanical Factors of Digestion (1911). He investigated hemorrhagic and traumatic shock during WW I. He devised the term homeostasis (1930) for how the body maintains its temperature. He worked on methods of blood storage and discovered sympathin (1931), an adrenaline-like substance that is liberated at the tips of certain nerve cells. He died from leukemia - probably a legacy from his early work with X rays. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1920 for his work on digestion, but his claim was ruled out as "too old." In 1934, 1935, and 1936 he was adjudged "prizeworthy" by the appropriate Nobel jurors but was not given a prize.

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