January 2 Science History

The Soviet Union launched the first of their Luna rockets to reach the Moon. An error in the rocket burn time launched the craft past the Moon and became the first man made object to achieve escape velocity and enter a heliocentric orbit. It is currently in orbit around the Sun between Earth and Mars and was renamed Mechta (Russian for Dream).

Teisserenc de Bort was a French meteorologist who discovered the stratosphere. He used unmanned instrument balloons to record temperature, pressure and wind speed at different altitudes and discovered a region approximately 7 miles up where the temperature stopped falling as altitude changed and even occasionally increased in temperature. He named this region the stratosphere because he believed the atmospheric gases would be stratified in layers with no wind to disturb them. He called the lower atmosphere the troposphere because there were many different temperatures and pressures.

Clausius was a German physicist and pioneer of thermodynamics. He introduced the concept of entropy and stated the second law of thermodynamics for the first time. He also introduced the concept of mean free path to gas kinetic theory to account for translational, rotational and vibrational movements of gas molecules. Together with Émile Clapeyron, he mathematically demonstrated the phase transition between two states of matter.

Hatchett was an English chemist who first discovered an element he named columbium. He was given a sample of the mineral columbite given to the British Museum from Connecticut. He announced his discovery at the Royal Society but never isolated it. Another English chemist, William Hyde Wollaston, wrongly concluded columbium was the same as the element tantalum. Columbium would be rediscovered later by German chemist Heinrich Rose and named niobium.