Learn about the history of science by reading about the significant scientific events that took place on this day in history.
2004 - Herbert Charles Brown died.
Brown was an Anglo-American chemist who was awarded half the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of organoborane chemistry. Organoboranes are organic compounds which have boron and hydrogen together and are used in many transformation reactions.1996 - Yuly Borisovich Khariton died.
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Khariton was a Russian nuclear physicist who headed the team that constructed the first Soviet atomic bomb. The Soviet bomb was designed and built using the stolen US plutonium bomb plans. He also was part of the team that developed the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon.
1961 - Eric Allin Cornell was born.
Cornell is an American physicist who shares the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterie for synthesizing the first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter where a dilute gas near absolute zero where all particles occupy the lowest quantum state and the quantum effects appear on a macroscopic level. This achievement verified the existence of BEC predicted by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924.1953 - Robert Andrews Millikan died.
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Millikan was an American physicist who is best known for his oil drop experiment to determine the charge of an electron. A charged drop of oil would be suspended between two electric plates where the force of gravity and electrostatic force would be balanced. His experimental value for the charge of the electron was 1.5924(17) x 10−19 C where today's accepted value is 1.602176487(40) x 10−19 C. This experiment would earn him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics.
1936 - Juan de la Cierva died.
Cierva was a Spanish civil engineer who invented the autogyro. An autogyro is an aircraft that uses a rotary wing system to provide lift. The autogyro uses a conventional propeller to pull the aircraft forward which starts the gyro rotating and the aircraft begins to fly. This invention led directly to the invention of the helicopter.
1903 - George Davis Snell was born.
Snell was an American geneticist who discovered the genetic factors involved to determine whether or not a transplant of tissue from one organism to another is possible. This would earn him one third of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Medicine.1852 - Albert Abraham Michelson was born.
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Michelson was an American physicist best known for his quest to accurately measure the speed of light. He was also the Michelson from the Michelson/Morley experiment to disprove the existence of the aether, the medium of space. He developed many new precision optical devices to refine his measurement of the speed of light and was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his efforts.
