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: Robert Aitken
(Born December 31, 1864: Died October 29, 1951)
American astronomer who specialized in the study of double stars, of which he discovered more than 3,000. He worked at the Lick Observatory from 1895 to 1935, becoming director from 1930. Aitken made systematic surveys of binary stars, measuring their positions visually. His massive New General Catalogue of Double Stars within 120 degrees of the North Pole allowed orbit determinations which increased astronomers' knowledge of stellar masses. He also measured positions of comets and planetary satellites and computed orbits. He wrote an important book on binary stars, and he lectured and wrote widely for the public.

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 13 Nov 1946, although the official confirmation by the Senate occurred later, on 9 Apr 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: Belgium 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 in January of 1956 and it ceased operations on 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 March 25, 1865: Died 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: Charles Barkla
(Born June 7, 1877: Died October 23, 1944)
British physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1917 for his work on X-ray scattering, which occurs when X rays pass through a material and are deflected by the atomic electrons. This technique proved to be particularly useful in the study of atomic structures. In 1903, his measurements showed that the scattering of x-rays by gases depends on the molecular weight of the gas. Both by observing polarization of x-rays (1904) and by experiments (1907) on the direction of scattering of a beam of x-rays he showed x-rays to be electromagnetic radiation like light (whereas, at the time, William Henry Bragg who held that x-rays were particles.) Barkla also discovered that each element has its own characteristic x-ray spectrum.

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 Feburary 1984 flight of the shuttle Challenger, during which he orbited the earth 122 times. Sadly, on his second trip, on the morning of January 28, 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, born in Manchester, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics (1935) for the discovery of the neutron. He studied at Cambridge, and in Berlin under Geiger. He then worked at the Cavendish Laboratory with Rutherford, investigating the structure of the atom, and 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.

October 19: Sir Ernest Rutherford
(Born August 30, 1871: Died October 19, 1937)
(baron) New Zealand-born British physicist who laid the groundwork for the development of nuclear physics. He worked under Sir J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University (1895-98). Then he collaborated with Frederick Soddy in studying radioactivity. In 1899 he discovered alpha particles and beta particles, followed by the discovery of gamma radiation the following year. In 1905, with Soddy, he announced that radioactive decay involves a series of transformations. In 1907, with Hans Geiger and E. Marsden, he devised the alpha-particle scattering experiment that led in 1911 to the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In 1919 he achieved the artificial splitting of light atoms. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

October 18: Antiproton
In 1955, a new atomic subparticle called a negative proton (antiproton) is discovered at U.C. Berkeley.

October 17: First UK nuclear power
In 1956, the Queen 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 31 Mar 2003.

October 16: First Chinese Atomic Bomb Test
In 1964, China detonated the country's first atomic bomb, and became the fifth country with nuclear arms after the United States (1945), Great Britain (1953), the Soviet Union (1961), and France. It was determined by the U.S.Atomic Energy Commission to have been exploded in the vicinity of Lop Nor, a lake in a remote area of Central Asia. The AEC characterized it as a low-yield explosion "typical of an early nuclear test" of a fission device employing uranium-235 equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT or less. The Chinese Government stated "This is a major achievement of the Chinese people in their struggle to increase their national defence capability and oppose the U.S. imperialist policy of nuclear blackmail and nuclear threats."

October 15: Evangelista Torricelli
(Born October 15, 1608: Died October 25, 1647)
Born in Faenza, Italy, Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician who invented the barometer and whose work in geometry aided in the eventual development of integral calculus. Inspired by Galileo's writings, he wrote a treatise on mechanics, De Motu ("Concerning Movement"), which impressed Galileo. He also developed techniques for producing telescope lenses. The barometer experiment using "quicksilver" filling a tube then inverted into a dish of mercury, carried out in Spring 1644, made Torricelli's name famous. The Italian scientists merit was, above all, to admit that the effective cause of the resistance presented by nature to the creation of a vacuum (in the inverted tube above the mercury) was probably due to the weight of air.

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 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1994 (with American physicist Clifford G. Shull) for their separate but concurrent development of neutron-scattering techniques. This is a method of "seeing" the atomic structure of solid materials by bombarding them with neutrons. During WW II, he served as an on-shore electronic technician in the Royal Canadian Navy. After the war he earned his Ph.D. degree. From 1950 he joined the staff of the Atomic Energy Project of the National Research Council of Canada where he began his work on developing new neutron scattering techniques. His Triple-Axis Neutron Spectrometer is now widely used to investigate atomic structures, including even 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 volunteered to 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 15 July 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 4 August 1963 the LTBT was signed in Moscow by the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, and ratified by the US President 7 Oct 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: Infrared photographs
In 1931, the first U.S.short-exposure infrared photograph taken of a large group of people in apparently total darkness was taken in Rochester, NY at the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories. They were in a room that was flooded with invisible infrared light (waves 700 to 900 nanometers long, beyond the red end of the visible spectrum). A group of 50 people visiting the laboratory was photographed on a new photographic emulsion sensitive to infrared. Since then, scientists have made use of infrared photography in medical applications and aerial photography. Since plant chlorophyll reflects infrared rays more intensely than other green materials, infrared photos yield a precise indication of where vegetation is present on the ground.

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 April 14, 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: William Lassell
(Born June 18, 1799: Died October 5, 1880)
William Lassell was a wealthy amateur English astronomer. He set up an observatory at Starfield, near Liverpool. England, He built his own 24" diameter telescope, and devised steam-driven equipment for grinding an polishing the speculum metal mirror. This telescope was the first of its size to be mounted "equitorially" to allow easy tracking of the stars. He discovered Triton, a moon of Neptune, and Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus. Later, Lassell built a 48" diameter telescope with th same design and took it to Malta for observations with clearer skies.

October 4: Cyril Stanley Smith
(Born October 4, 1903: Died August 25, 1952)
British-American metallurgist who in 1943-44 determined the properties and technology of plutonium and uranium, the essential materials in the atomic bombs that were first exploded in 1945. Smith already then had 15 years of experience as a research metallurgist with the American Brass Co., during which time he studied properties of alloys and their microstructure. In WW II, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory at its inception (1943). The properties and technology of plutonium had to be conducted with extremely limited quantities of available material. Smith and his group found it was unique, with five different allotropic forms with huge density differences between them. Postwar, he organized the Institute for the Study of Metal at the Univ. of Chicago.

October 3: First UK atom bomb test
In 1952, "Hurricane", the first British atomic bomb was tested at the Monte Bello, Australia, becoming the third country in the world to test such a weapon. The bomb used an improved plutonium implosion bomb similar to the U.S. "Fat Man". The bomb used plutonium produced in Britain at Windscale (now Sellafield) with a low Pu-240 content since hurried production led to short irradiation times, plus some Canadian origin plutonium. To test the effects of a ship-smuggled bomb (a threat of great concern at the time), Hurricane was exploded inside the hull of the HMS Plym (1450 ton frigate) which was anchored in 40 feet of water 400 yards off shore. The explosion, 9-ft below the water line, left a saucer-shaped crater on the seabed 20-ft deep and 1,000-ft across.

October 2: Nuclear fission & Atomic clock
In 1942, the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated in Chicago.

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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Photos courtsey of Today in Science