Important historic dates in science

May 31: James Rainwater
(Born December 9, 1917: Died May 31, 1986)
Leo James Rainwater was an American physicist who won a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei. During WW II, Rainwater worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In 1949 he began formulating a theory that not all atomic nuclei are spherical, as was then generally believed. The theory was tested experimentally and confirmed by Danish physicists Aage N. Bohr and Ben R. Mottelson. For their work the three scientists were awarded jointly the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics. He also conducted valuable research on X rays and took part in Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects.

May 30: Lewis Morris Rutherford
(November 25, 1816: Died May 30, 1892)
American spectroscopist, astrophysicist and photographer, born in Morrisania, NY, who made the first telescopes designed for celestial photography. He produced a classification scheme of stars based on their spectra as similarly developed by the Italian astronomer. Rutherfurd spent his life working in his own observatory, built in 1856, where he photographed (from 1858) the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and stars down to the fifth magnitude. While using photography to map star clusters, he devised a new micrometer to measure distances between stars with improved accuracy. When Rutherford began (1862) spectroscopic studies, he devised highly sophisticated diffraction gratings.

May 29: Peter Higgs
Born May 29, 1929
Peter Ware Higgs is an English theoretical physicist, the namesake of the Higgs boson. In the late 1960s, Higgs and others proposed a mechanism that would endow particles with mass, even though they appeared originally in a theory - and possibly in the Universe! - with no mass at all. The basic idea is that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field. which is carried by the Higgs bosons. This mechanism is an important part of the Standard Model of particles and forces, for it explains the masses of the carriers of the weak force, responsible for beta-decay and for nuclear reactions that fuel the Sun. No Higgs boson has yet been detected; its mass (over 1 TeV) exceeds the capacity of any current accelerator.

May 28: Mars landing
In 1971, the U.S.S.R. Mars 3 was launched. It arrived at Mars on December 2, 1971. The lander was released from the Mars 3 orbiter and became the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. It failed after relaying 20 seconds of video data to the orbiter. The Mars 3 orbiter returned data until Aug 1972, sending measurements of surface temperature and atmospheric composition. The first USSR Mars probe was launched October 10, 1960, but it failed to reach earth orbit. The next four USSR probes, including Mars 1, also failed. The USA Mariner 3 Mars Flyby attempt in 1964 failed when its solar panels did not open. USA's Mariners 4, 6, and 7 successfully returned Mars photos. Also in 1971, the USSR Mars 2 lander crashed.

May 27: Sir John Douglas Cockcroft
(Born May 27, 1897: Died September 18, 1967)
British physicist, joint winner (with Ernest T.S. Walton of Ireland) of the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering the use of particle accelerators in studying the atomic nucleus. Together, in 1929, they devised an accelerator that generated large numbers of particles at lower energies. The Cockcroft-Walton generator they built was the first atom-smasher. In 1932, they used it to disintegrate lithium atoms by bombarding them with protons - the first artificial nuclear reaction not utilizing radioactive substances. This type of accelerator proved to be one of the most useful in the world's laboratories. They conducted further research on the splitting of other atoms and established the importance of accelerators as a tool for nuclear research.

May 26: Richard Christopher Carrington
(Born May 26, 1826: Died November 27, 1875)
English astronomer who was the first to map the motions of sunspots and thus discover from them that the Sun rotates faster at the equator than near the poles (equatorial acceleration). He observed that the sunspots were not attached to any solid object, and also discovered the movement of sunspot zones toward the Sun's equator as the solar cycle progresses. On September 1, 1859, Carrington was the first to record the observation of a solar flare.

May 25: Jack Steinberger
(Born May 25, 1921)
German-born American physicist who, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their joint discoveries of the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino. In 1951, he met Lederman at Columbia University and, later, Schwarz who became his student. In 1958, they conducted a neutrino experiment at the new Brookhaven Alternating Gradient Synchrotron. The results emerged in a classic 1962 paper, and neutrino beams went on to become one of the standard tools of particle physics. When 26 years later, after receiving the Nobel, Steinberger said, "to get that prize, do your work early!"

May 24: Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
(Born May 24, 1686: Died September 16, 1736)
German physicist and maker of scientific instruments. He is best known for inventing the alcohol thermometer (1709) and mercury thermometer (1714) and for developing the Fahrenheit temperature scale. He devoted himself to the study of physics and the manufacture of precision meteorological instruments. He discovered, among other things, that water can remain liquid below its freezing point and that the boiling point of liquids varies with atmospheric pressure.

May 23: William Webster Hansen
(Born May 27, 1909: Died May 23, 1949)
American physicist who contributed to the development of radar and is regarded as the founder of microwave technology. He developed the klystron, a vacuum tube essential to radar technology (1937). Based on amplitude modulation of an electron beam, rather than on resonant circuits of coils and condensers, it permits the generation of powerful and stable high-frequency oscillations. It revolutionized high-energy physics and microwave research and led to airborne radar. The klystron also has been used in satellite communications, airplane and missile guidance systems, and telephone and television transmission. After WW II, working with three graduate students, Hansen demonstrated the first 4.5 MeV linear accelerator in 1947.

May 22: Julius Plücker
(Born June 16, 1801: Died May 22, 1868)
German mathematician and physicist whose work suggested the far-reaching principle of duality, which states the equivalence of certain related types of theorems. He also discovered that cathode rays (electron rays produced in a vacuum) are diverted from their path by a magnetic field, a principle vital to the development of modern electronic devices, such as television. At first alone and later with the German physicist Johann W. Hittorf, Plücker made many important discoveries in spectroscopy. Before Bunsen and Kirchhoff, he announced that spectral lines were characteristic for each chemical substance and this had value to chemical analysis. In 1862 he pointed out that the same element may exhibit different spectra at different temperatures.

May 21: Andrey Dmitriyevich Sakharov
(Born May 21, 1921: Died December 14, 1989)
Soviet nuclear physicist, an outspoken advocate of human rights in the Soviet Union. At the end of World War II, Sakharov returned to pure science and the study of cosmic rays. Two years later, he began work with a secret research group on the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he is believed to have been principally responsible for the Soviets' success in exploding their first thermonuclear bomb (1954). With I.E. Tamm, he proposed controlled thermonuclear fusion by confining an extremely hot ionized plasma in a torus-shaped magnetic bottle, known as a tokamak device. He became politically more active in the 1960s, campaigned against nuclear proliferation, and from 1980 to 1986, he was banished and kept under police surveillance.

May 20: Radium
In 1921, Marie Curie was presented with a gram of radium worth $100,000 at the White House, Washington, D.C.

May 19: Nuclear submarine
In 1959, the first submarine with two nuclear reactors was completed. The Triton was 447 feet long, 37 feet wide and was manned by 148 officers and crew. The General Electric Co. built the two water-cooled nuclear reactors. Each propeller was powered by electrical current provided by one of the reactors. The submarine had a cruising range of 110,000 miles. The first U.S. atomic powered submarine had been completed a few years before, on April 22, 1955.

May 18: First atomic pile patent issued
In 1955, the highly classified patent for the first atomic pile was finally issued - 13 years after it had been started and nearly 11 years after it had been filed (No. 2,708,656). Work on the initial patent application had begun six months before the reactor was completed. Fermi and his team of scientists at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory ushered in the nuclear age when they achieved the world's first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. Filed with the U.S. Patent Office in December 1944, the patent application listed Fermi and Szilard as co-inventors and described the method by which a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction had been achieved. By the time it was issued, Fermi had been dead for six months.

May 17: Atomic reactor
In 1955, an atomic reactor was patented by Fermi and Szilard (U.S. No. 2,708,656).

May 16: Alfred O.C. Nier
(Born May 28, 1911: Died May 16, 1994)
Physicist who helped develop the first atomic bomb.

May 15: Pierre Curie
(Born: May 15, 1859: Died April 19, 1906)
French physical chemist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. His studies of radioactive substances were made together with his wife, Marie Curie, whom he married in 1895. They were achieved under conditions of much hardship - barely adequate laboratory facilities and under the stress of having to do much teaching in order to earn their livelihood. Together, they discovered radium and polonium in their investigation of radioactivity by fractionation of pitchblende (announced in 1898). Later they did much to elucidate the properties of radium and its transformation products. Their work in this era formed the basis for much of the subsequent research in nuclear physics and chemistry.

May 14: Skylab
In 1973, the United States launched "Skylab One," its first manned space station. During the following nine months, three successive crews of astronauts manned the orbiting laboratory. This was the largest payload launched into space. It fell back into and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere in July, 1979. The official emblem (left) depicts the U.S. Skylab space station cluster in Earth orbit with the Sun in the background. The cluster is composed of the Apollo Command/Service Module, Orbital Workshop, Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM), Multiple Docking Adapter, and Airlock Module. The arrays of solar cell panels turn sunlight into electric power for the space station.

May 13: Stanislaw M. Ulam
(Born: April 13, 1909: May 13, 1984)
Polish-American mathematician who played a major role in the development of the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos. He solved the problem of how to initiate fusion in the hydrogen bomb by suggesting that compression was essential to explosion and that shock waves from a fission bomb could produce the compression needed. He further suggested that careful design could focus mechanical shock waves in such a way that they would promote rapid burning of the fusion fuel. Ulam, with J.C. Everett, also proposed the "Orion" plan for nuclear propulsion of space vehicles. While Ulam was at Los Alamos, he developed "Monte-Carlo method" which searched for solutions to mathematical problems using a statistical sampling method with random numbers.

May 12: Sir Christopher Hinton
(Born: May 12, 1901: Died June 22, 1983)
(Baron of Bankside) English engineer who was a leading figure in the development of the nuclear energy industry in Britain; he supervised the construction of Calder Hall, the world's first large-scale nuclear power station (opened in 1956). He first worked for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) where at age 29 he was appointed chief engineer of the Alkali Groups. While at ICI he was selected to start building nuclear power plants. Britain's first four such plants were completed in six years. He played a founding role in fast breeder technology. The decision to build the Dounreay Fast Reactor was made in 1954, which ran successfully for over two decades, until its planned shutdown in 1977, thus demonstrating the safe operation of the concept.

May 10: Richard P. Feynman
(Born May 11, 1918: Died February 15, 1988)
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. His lifelong interested was in subatomic physics. In 1942, he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. After the war, he developed Feynman Diagrams, a simple notation to describe the complex behavior of subatomic particles. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics.

May 9: Alfred Blalock
(Born May 10, 1901: Died September 15, 1971)
Irish physicist and X-ray crystallographer who studied the atomic structures of solid compounds. He also performed researched into molecular biology, the origin of life and the structure and composition of the Earth's crust.

May 9: AA Michelson
(Born December 9, 1852: Died May 9, 1931)
Albert Abraham Michelson was a German-born American physicist who accurately measured the speed of light and received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations" he carried out with them. He designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to establish the speed of light as a fundamental constant. With Edward Morley, he also used it in an attempt to measure the velocity of the earth through the ether (1887). The experiment yielded null results that eventually led Einstein to his theory of relativity. He measured the standard meter bar in Paris to be 1,553,163.5 wavelengths of the red cadmium line (1892-3).

May 8: Metric system
In 1790, following a motion by Charles Maurice Talleyrand (1754-1838), the French National Assembly decided on the creation of a decimal system of measurement units that would be stable and simple. The first unit chosen was based on a pendulum beating a second. On 30 Mar 1791, after a proposal by the Académie des sciences (Borda, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge and Condorcet), the Assembly chose that a metre would be a 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator. On April 7, 1795, the Convention decreed that the new "Republican Measures" were to be henceforth legal measures in France. The metric system was created, adopting greek prefixes for multiples and latin prefixes for decimal fractions.

May 7: Allan MacLeod Cormack
(Born February 23, 1924: Died May 7, 1998)
South African-born American physicist who formulated the mathematical algorithms that made possible the development of a powerful new diagnostic technique, the cross-sectional X-ray imaging process known as computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanning. He first described this in two papers in 1963 and 1964. X-ray tomography is a process by which a picture of an imaginary slice through an object (or the human body) is built up from information from detectors rotating around the body. For this work, he was awarded a share of the 1979 Nobel Prize. Cormack was unusual in the field of Nobel laureates because he never earned a doctorate degree in medicine or any other field of science.

May 6: Robert Henry Dicke
(Born May 6, 1916: Died March 4, 1997)
American physicist worked in such wide-ranging fields as microwave physics, cosmology, and relativity. As an inspired theorist and a successful experimentalist, his unifying theme was the application of powerful and scrupulously controlled experimental methods to issues that really matter. He also made a number of significant contributions to radar technology and to the field of atomic physics. His visualization of an oscillating universe stimulated the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the most direct evidence that our universe really did expand from a dense state. A key instrument in measurements of this fossil of the Big Bang is the microwave radiometer he invented. His patents ranged from clothes dryers to lasers.

May 5: Arthur L. Schawlow
(Born May 5, 1921: Died April 28, 1999)
American physicist and corecipient, with Nicolaas Bloembergen of the United States and Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn of Sweden, of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in developing the laser and in laser spectroscopy.

May 4: American Academy of Arts and Sciences
In 1780, the first U.S. national arts and science society was incorporated. It was chartered in Boston, Mass. "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, dignity, honor and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people." The first society president was James Bowdoin (1780-90). The original incorporators were later joined by Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Bulfinch, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and others.

May 3: Steven Weinberg
(Born May 3, 1933)
American nuclear physicist who in 1979 shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam for work in formulating the electroweak theory, which explains the unity of electromagnetism with the weak nuclear force.

May 2: Leonardo da Vini
(Born 1452: Died May 2, 1519)
Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time.

May 1: Van Allen radiation belts
In 1958, the discovery of the powerful Van Allen radiation belts that surround Earth was published in the Washington Evening Star. The article covered the report made by their discoverer James. A. Van Allen to the joint sysmposium of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society in Washington DC. He used data from the Explorer I and Pioneer III space probes of the earth's magnetosphere region to reveal the existence of the radiation belts - concentrations of electrically charged particles. Van Allen (born Sept. 7 1914) was also featured on the cover of the May 4, 1959 Time magazine for this discovery. He was the principal investigator on 23 other space probes.

Click here for previous months
April
March
February
January

Photos courtsey of Today in Science