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This Day in History

Historical events in Physics and Astronomy for each day of the year.

Historical Physics Events of January 1:

• 1939: Neils Bohr was informed of Otto Frisch's and Lise Meitner's theory of nuclear fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Wilhelm Roentgen's first paper on his discovery of x-rays was distributed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: Heinrich Hertz died in Bonn, Germany. He discovered radio waves in 1888.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: Satyendranath N. Bose was born in Calcutta, India. He developed statistics that Einstein later used to conclude that particles exhibit wave-like properties.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Robert Hutchings Goddard was born in Worchester, Massachusetts.
  
• 1801: Giuseppe Piazzi was the first to discover an asteroid (Ceres).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1600: Kepler left Gratz to meet Tycho de Brahe.
  

Historical Physics Events of January 2:

• 1959: The first USSR deep space probe, Luna 1, was launched.
  
• 1939: One year after Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize for Physics, Enrico Fermi and his family arrived in New York to become residents of the United States.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1841: Emile Hilaire Amagat was born in Saint-Satur, France. He experimented with gases under high pressures.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1822: Rudolf J.E. Clausius was born in Koslin, Pomerania (Koszalin, Poland). He was the first to state the Second Law of Thermodynamics (1850).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 3:

• 1840: Sir James Ross successfully made the first deep-sea sounding in the South Atlantic.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 4:

• 1961: Erwin Schrödinger died in Vienna. His Nobel lecture 'The fundamental idea of wave mechanics' was delivered 12 Dec. 1933.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: Sputnik I reentered the earth's atmosphere and burned.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Brian D. Josephson was born in Cardiff, Glamorgan, Wales. He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics, with L. Esaki and I. Glaever, "for his theoretical prediction of the properties of a super-current through a tunnel barrier."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1642: British physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was born. (Newton's Birthday is listed for another date as well, can you explain why?)
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Matthew Skellett.

Historical Physics Events of January 5:

• 1993: Hans A. Bethe received the 1992 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1981: Harold Clayton Urey died in La Jolla, California. He received the 1934 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of heavy hydrogen.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1970: Max Born died in Goettingen, Germany. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics, with Walther Bothe, for his work in quantum mechanics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: George Washington Carver was born in Diamond- Missouri.
  
• 1943: George Washington Carver died in Tuskegee, Alabama. Most of his discoveries were made while he was the head of the Department of Agricultural Research at Tuskegee Institute.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1917: Robert Hutchings Goddard received a grant from the Smithsonian Institution to build rockets and collect scientific measurements at high altitudes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: Louis-Paul Cailletet died in Paris, France. He and Paul Pictet successfully liquified oxygen in 1877.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 6:

• 1994: E. Leonard Jossem received the 1993 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The World Around Us."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman published a paper in Die Naturwissanschafter which announced the discovery of fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 7:

• 1992: Eugen Merzbacher received the 1991 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Frills or Fundamentals, Fervor and Phobia."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1953: President Truman announces the H-Bomb.
  
• 1939: Neils Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld left Copenhagen for New York where they would spread news about the discovery of fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1897: Emil Wiechert first predicted the existence of particles 2000 to 4000 times lighter than the hydrogen atom.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1893: Josef Stefan died in Vienna, Austria. In 1879, he discovered the relationship between the absolute temperature of a body to the total radiation it produces. (Stefan-Boltzmann Law)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1610: Galileo observed Jupiter's moons. He first noticed only 3, and did not realize what they were until later observations showed them in different positions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 8:

• 1985: Japan became the third country to send an object into solar orbit.
  
• 1942: Astrophysicist Stephen W. Hawking was born in Oxford, England. He made significant contributions to cosmology, particularly to the theory of black holes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1891: Walther Bothe was born in Oranienburg, Germany. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics, with Max Born, "for his coincidence method and his discoveries made therewith."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1642: Galileo Galilei died in Florence, Italy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 9:

• 1839: Thomas Henderson measured the distance to Alpha Centauri (the closest star to Earth, excluding the Sun).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 10:

• 1949: RCA announces the 45 RPM record.
  
• 1946: The U.S. Signal Corps first received a reflected radar signal from the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1936: Robert W. Wilson was born in Houston, Texas. He and A. A. Penzias were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics, with P. L. Kapitsa, "for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Wallace Sabine died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the first acoustical engineer and he designed Boston Symphony Hall in 1868.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 11:

• 1959: First Flight of Boeing 707-320 ("Intercontinental")
  
• 1787: William Herschel discovered moons around Uranus (Oberon and Titania).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1757: Louis Castel died in Paris, France. He published a paper in 1735 in which he related colors to musical notes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 12:

• 1986: George Nelson became the first Congressional space traveler.
  
• 1909: Russo-German mathematician Hermann Minkowski died. He provided the four-dimensional geometric framework for the special theory of relativity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: H.L. Smith took the first x-ray photograph of a hand with a bullet in it.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.

Historical Physics Events of January 13:

• 1982: Boeing 757, first roll-out.
  
• 1978: NASA selected the first group of female astronauts.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1934: Paul Ulrich Villard died in Bayonne, Basses-Pyrenees. He was the first to observe gamma rays (1900).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1906: Alexander Popov died in St. Petersburg, USSR. In 1897, he first used an antenna to transmit radio waves over a sizeable distance (5 km).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1864: Wilhelm Wien was born in Fischhausen, East Prussia. He was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discoveries regarding the laws governing the radiation of heat."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 14:

• 1990: "The Simpsons" first goes on the air.
  
• 1969: Two manned spacecraft (USSR) docked while in orbit.
  
• 1742: English Astronomer Edmond Halley died in Greenwich, England. In 1684 he encouraged Newton to write a paper describing his (Newton's) calculations of planetary motion. Halley then made sure it was published.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 15:

• 1955: The first solar heated, radiation-cooled house was built in Tuscon, Arizona by Raymond Bliss.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1944: Roland Roy Tileston received the 1943 AAPT Oersted Medal for Notable Contributions to the Teaching of Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: Edward Teller, physicist, was born on this day in Budapest, Hungary. He led the group that developed the H bomb.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1836: Michael Faraday demonstrated the Faraday Cage at the British Royal Institution by sitting inside a 12 foot metal cube that was subjected to an electric current. He detected nothing inside the cage.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1803: Heinrich Daniel Ruehmkorff was born in Hanover, Germany. He invented a type of induction coil in 1855.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1785: William Prout was born in Gloucestershire, England. In 1815, he suggested that the chemical elements were formed from hydrogen atoms.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 16:

• 1967: Robert Van de Graaff died in Boston, Massachusetts. He developed a static electricity generator in 1933 that could produce 7 million volts. This generator is still functional and can be seen at the Boston Museum of Science.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch sent an article describing nuclear fission to Nature.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Neils Bohr and Leon Rosenfeld arrived in New York where they informed John Wheeler about the discovery of fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 17:

• 1989: Anthony P. French received the 1988 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Learning from the Past; Looking to the Future."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1706: American inventor and diplomat Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 18:

• 1955: Albert Sabin begins oral polio vaccine tests.
  
• 1932: Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie observed neutron behavior, one month after those particles were discovered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 19:

• 1896: An X-Ray machine was first demonstrated in the U.S.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1736: James Watt was born in Scotland. He designed the most efficient steam engines of his time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 20:

• 1945: Homer Levi Dodge received the 1944 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1878: Henri Victor Regnault died. He calculated absolute zero to be -273 degrees Celsius.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 21:

• 1991: Carl Anderson died in San Marino, California. He received the 1936 Nobel Prize for Physics with V. F. Hess, for his discovery of the positron, a positively charged electron.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1979: Pluto crossed the orbit of Neptune, making Neptune temporarily the farthest planet from the Sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1974: Mariner 10 executed its second mid-course maneuver in order to intercept Venus.
  
• 1970: First Boeing 747 revenue flight, by Pan Am.
  
• 1954: The first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Connecticut.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 22:

• 1991: Freeman Dyson received the 1990 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "To Teach or Not To Teach."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1985: Sam Treiman received the 1984 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "On Physics Graduate Students."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1980: Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Laureate and Soviet physicist, was forced to live in the city of Gorky where he could have no contact with foreigners.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1980: Gerald Holton received the 1979 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The Two Maps."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: George Walter Stewart received the 1942 Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Teaching of Tomorrow."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: Lev Davidovic Landau was born in Baku, USSR. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his pioneering theories of condensed matter, especially liquid helium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1863: Louis Carl Heinrich Paschen was born in Schwerin, Germany. He confirmed that helium on Earth is the same element found in the Sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1799: Horace-Benedict de Saussure died in Geneva, Switzerland. He invented devices that could measure electric potential and relative humidity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 23:

• 1990: Carl Sagan received the 1989 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Croesus and Cassandra: Policy Response to Global Warming."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: Walter Christian Michels received the 1963 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Freedom, Responsibility, and Barriers."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1953: Richard M. Sutton received the 1952 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The Heritage of a Physics Teacher."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1907: Hideki Yukawa was born in Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: In a session of the Physics-Medicine Society (Physikalisch Medizinische Geselschaft), Roentgen made an X-ray photograph of Professor von Koelliker's hand. Professor von Koell immediately suggested the name Roentgen's Rays for this form of energy. (This na
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Roentgen's first paper, "On a New Kind of Ray" appears in English translation in Nature.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1862: Birthday of David Hilbert.
  
• 1849: Elizabeth Blackwell becomes 1st US woman MD.
  
• 1810: Johann Ritter died in Munich, Germany. He discovered ultraviolet radiation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 24:

• 1986: Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1963: Francis Lee Friedman was awarded the 1962 AAPT Oersted Medal posthumously. Philip Morrison gave the acceptance speech "Insight and Taste."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1879: Heinrich Geissler died in Bonn, Rhenish, Prussia. He was the first to produce good vacuum tubes (1855).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1877: Johann Christian Poggendorf died. He founded and edited the "Annals of Physics and Chemistry."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 25:

• 1983: IRAS (Infrared Astronomy Satellite) was launched. This satellite looks for IR sources in the universe. Among other discoveries, it detected a dust cloud around Vega that might indicate the formation of a planetary system.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1983: John A. Wheeler received the 1982 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "On Recognizing `Law without Law.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1962: Francis Weston Sears received the 1961 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The Most Important Thing."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: Ray Lee Edwards received the 1945 Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The New Challenge to the Physics Teacher."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Neils Bohr arrived in Washington D.C. where he told George Gamow about the discovery of fission. Gamow informed Edward Teller.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1742: Edmund Halley died in Greenwich- England.
  

Historical Physics Events of January 26:

• 1982: I.I. Rabi received the 1981 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Nature Revealed: the Joys and Dangers of Experimental Physics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1978: International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE)- the only astronomical satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit.
  Source: Handbook of Current Science & Technology, Henry Holt, 1992; submitted by Veronica Griggs.
• 1959: First New York to Los Angeles commercial jet flight.
  
• 1911: Polykarp Kusch was born in Blankenburg, Germany. He received the 1955 Nobel Prize for Physics, with W. E. Lamb, "for his precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 27:

• 1997: Physicists have created a new laser in which beam of atoms march in lockstop, like the photons of a light laser.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1970: Edwin C. Kemble received the 1969 AAPT Oersted Medal for Notable Contributions to the Teaching of Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1967: Fire broke out in the cabin of the first manned Apollo (Apollo I ) mission during a launch rehearsal- killing all three crew members.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1951: An Air Force plane dropped a 1-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats in the Nevada desert as an era of atomic testing began.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1948: Wire Recording Corporation of America announced the first magnetic tape recorded. The Wireway machine with a built-in oscillatior sold for $149.50.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1936: Samuel C. C. Ting was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics with B. Richter for their (independent) discovery of a heavy elemental particle.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: In a letter to Max Born, Albert Einstein wrote concerning quantum mechanics, "The question of causality concerns me a lot."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1880: Thomas Edison patented his electric incandescent lamp.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1701: Charles-Marie de la Condamine was born in Paris, France. He measured the curvature of the Earth at the equator in 1735.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 28:

• 1988: Norman F. Ramsey received the 1987 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "New Teaching Technologies and Research with Molecular Beams."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1986: NASA Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing all 7 crew members.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1949: Arnold Sommerfeld received the 1948 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Some Reminiscences of My Teaching Career."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: Members of the Federation of Atomic Scientists appeared before a congressional committee to oppose Army control over "fundamental science under the pretext of guarding secrets vital for national security".
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: In Washington D.C. a group including Neils Bohr and Edward Teller conducted the first fission demonstration in the United States.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: The government of Wurttemberg acknowledged an application by Albert Einstein to renounce his German citizenship.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1864: Benoit-Pierre Clapeyron died in Paris, France. He developed a specialized version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in 1834.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 29:

• 1979: Between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. the tide rose 16 meters at the Hantsport Pier of the Miras Basin Pulp and Power Company in Nova Scotia at the head of the Bay of Fundy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1959: Paul Kirkpatrick received the 1958 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "On Colleagues and Clients."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1926: Abdus Salam was born in Jhang, India. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979 with S. L. Glashow and S. Weinberg "for their unified model of the action of the weak and electromagn forces and for their prediction of the existence of neutral cu
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1838: Edward Morley was born in Newark, New Jersey. He and Albert Michelson were unable to detect the proper motion of the Earth through ether.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1613: Galileo sighted Neptune but did not recognize it as a planet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of January 30:

• 1987: Clifford E. Swartz received the 1986 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Weak and Strong Interactions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1975: Robert Resnick received the 1974 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1973: Arnold Arons received the 1972 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Toward Wider Public Understanding of Science."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: Harvey E. White received the 1967 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "My Reflections on the Teaching of Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: First 2 way, moving sidewalk was put into service at Love Field Field in Dallas, TX. The sidewalk ran the length of the airport 1435 feet.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Jeff Stephenson.
• 1958: J.W. Buchta received the 1957 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "New Era in Science.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1951: Fifty millionth electric customer in the US.
  
• 1948: Orville Wright died in Dayton, Ohio. He and his brother Wilbur launched the first airplane in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: C.B. King received the patent for the pneumatic hammer-heavy jackhammer that runs on air.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Shelly Bowman.

Historical Physics Events of January 31:

• 1984: Frank Oppenheimer received the 1983 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The Sentimental Fruits of Science."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1971: Apollo 14 was launched. This mission involved the third successful lunar landing.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: U.S. entered the Space Age with the launch of Explorer I.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: Mark W. Zemansky received the 1956 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Fashions in Thermodynamics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: Duane Roller received the 1946 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "An Approach to the Study of Physical Terminology."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1929: Rudolf Ludwig Moessbauer was born in Munich, Germany. He was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physics with R. Hofstadter "for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma- and his discovery in this connection of the effect which bears
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1862: Alvan G. Clark, Jr. discovered the white dwarf companion of the star Sirius.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 1:

• 1976: Werner Heisenberg died in Munich, Germany. He postulated his uncertainty principle in 1927.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: Clinton Joseph Davisson died in Charlottesville, Virginia. He demonstrated that electrons acted both as particles and waves.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Clinton Joseph Davisson died in Charlottesville- Virginia. (1937 Nobel Prize winner) His Nobel lecture was titled The discovery of electron waves."
  
• 1905: Emilio Gino Segre was born in Rome, Italy. He was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physics with O. Chamberlain "for their discovery of the antiproton."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1903: George Gabriel Stokes died. He defined how a small body would fall through a fluid in 1851.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 2:

• 1971: Uri Haber-Schaim received the 1970 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Preservice Education of Physics-Chemistry Teachers."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1961: Jerrold R. Zacharias received the 1960 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Team Approach to Education."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: George E. Uhlenbeck received the 1955 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Reminiscences of Professor Paul Ehrenfest."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1951: John W. Hornbeck received the 1950 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Some Reflections on the Teaching of Physics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Max Planck first viewed electron microscopy in the laboratory of Manfred von Ardenne.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: While speaking of nuclear energy, Max Planck said, "it must be used to benefit mankind, but it will happen differently."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1935: The Italian government granted a patent to Enrico Fermi and his collaborators for the process of inducing radioactivity in materials.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 3:

• 1975: William Coolidge died in Schenectady, New York. He invented the hot-cathode x-ray tube in 1913.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: USSR spacecraft Luna 9 made the first soft landing on the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1950: Orrin H. Smith received the 1949 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Experience Plus Realization."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Kettering demonstrates first car starter.
  
• 1862: Jean-Baptiste Biot died in Paris, France. He discovered the circular polarization of light in 1815.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1826: Michael Faraday founded a series of lectures to improve the public understanding of science. He presented the first lecture on "caoutchouc" (later called rubber).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 4:

• 1974: Satyendranath Bose died in Calcutta, India. He developed statistics for photons that were later used by Albert Einstein to conclude the wave-like properties of matter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Eric M. Rogers received the 1968 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Examinations: Powerful Agents for Good or Ill in Teaching."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1928: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz died in Haarlem, Holland. He and Pieter Zeeman received the 1902 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on how magnetism affects electromagnetic radiation. Lorentz delivered the first Nobel Lecture for Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Charles Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan. His famous solo flight across the Atlantic lasted 33.5 hours and took place in 1927.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 5:

• 1974: Melba Phillips received the 1973 AAPT Oersted Medal. Her acceptance speech was titled "Science and Progress."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1974: US spacecraft Mariner 10 passed within 3600 miles of Venus, and took the first close-range photograph of that planet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1971: Apollo 14, 3rd US manned Moon expedition, lands near Fra Mauro. Alan Shepard & Edward Mitchell walk on Moon for 4 hrs
  Source: Josh Spier, PH2213SP98, http://www.scopesys.com/anyday/
• 1957: Last Boeing B-47 delivered (by Lockheed).
  
• 1915: Robert Hofstadter was born in New York, New York. He received the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physics, with R. L. Moessbauer, "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in at nuclei and for his thereby achieved discoveries concerning the structure o
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Loop-the-loop centrifugal RR (roller coaster) patented by Ed Prescot
  Source: Josh Spier, PH2213SP98, http://www.scopesys.com/anyday/

Historical Physics Events of February 6:

• 1971: A golf ball was hit on the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Peter Debye stated to Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation that research on a nuclear weapon was "a good joke on the German Army".
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 7:

• 1991: Record High Matter Density was achieved by S. Nahai of Osaka University in Japan. He used 8-10 kilojoule laser pulses to compress a carbon-deuterium-tritium target to a density of 600 tons per cubic meter.
  Source: American Institute of Physics; submitted by Bodie Cooper.
• 1984: Bruce McCandless took the first spacewalk without a tether.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Neils Bohr submitted to Physical Review a paper in which he stated that only uranium-235 underwent fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 8:

• 1957: Walther Bothe died in Heidelberg, W. Germany. He was among the first to isolate neutrons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1828: Author Jules Verne was born.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 9:

• 1979: Dennis Gabor died in London, England. He conceptualized holography in 1947, and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1971: The third successful lunar landing ended with the Apollo 14 splashdown.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 10:

• 1986: Comet Halley was closest to the Sun, during its most recent orbit.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1977: H. Richard Crane received the 1976 AAPT Oersted Medal for Notable Contributions to the Teaching of Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen died in Munich, Germany. He received the first Nobel Prize for Physics (1901) for his disovery of x-rays.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Walter Houser Brattain was born in Amoy, China. He was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics with W. Shockley and J. Bardeen "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1868: Sir David Brewster died in Allerly, Scotland. He discovered the law of optics that is named after him in 1812 and he invented the kaleidoscope in 1816.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1865: Heinrich Lenz died in Rome, Italy. He formulated the law describing the effect that opposes a current produced by electromagnetic forces in 1834.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 11:

• 1970: Japan launched its first satellite- Ohsumi becoming the fourth nation to enter the Space Age.
  
• 1897: Leo Szilard was born in Budapest, Hungary. He persuaded Einstein in 1939 to write a letter to the president suggesting the feasibility of an atomic bomb.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1868: Jean-Bernard Leon Foucault died in Paris, France. He used a pendulum to show the Earth's rotation in 1851.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1847: American inventor Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 12:

• 1991: Comet Halley erupted between Saturn and Uranis(2 billion miles from the sun) giving of 300 times its usual amount of light at this distance from Earth.
  Source: American Institute of Physics; submitted by Bodie Cooper.
• 1918: Julian Schwinger was born in New York, New York. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics with S. Tomonaga and R. P. Feynman "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary part
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 13:

• 1960: France explodes its first A-Bomb.
  
• 1910: William Shockley was born in London, England. He received the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. Bardeen and W. H. Brattain "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1633: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 14:

• 1980: Solar Maximum Mission was launched. It aided the study of solar flares- sunspots- and other solar phenomena.
  
• 1963: Syncom 1 (USA), the first geosynchronous satellite, was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Edward Arthur Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. In 1921, he predicted the temperatures within various layers of the solar atmosphere, and the existence of solar wind.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1876: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell applied separately for patents related to the telephone. Bell was declared the rightful inventor by the Supreme Court.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1869: Charles Thomson Rees Wilson was born in Glencorse, Scotland. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics with A. H. Compton "for his method of making the paths of electrically cha particles visible by condensation of vapor."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 15:

• 1988: Richard Feynman died in Los Angeles, California. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics with S. Tomonaga and J. Schwinger.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1959: Sir Owen Richardson died in Alton, England. He received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the effect of heat on electron emission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1915: Emile Hilaire Amagat died in Saint-Satur, France. His research involved high pressure gases.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1861: Charles Edouard Guillaume was born in Fleurier in the Swiss-Jura. He was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the service he rendered to precision measurements for Physics by his discovery of anomalies in nickel steel alloys."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1842: First self-adhesive postage stamp sold.
  
• 1826: George Johnstone Stoney was born in Oakley Park, Ireland. He estimated the charge of the electron in 1874. The electron was discovered 23 years later.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1564: Astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy. He was the first to turn a telescope toward the sky.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 16:

• 1957: Sir John Townsend died. He helped determine the charge of the electron in 1897.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1937: DuPont patents nylon.
  
• 1822: James Thompson was born. He used Carnot's theory of heat to predict a lower freezing point for water under pressure in 1849.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1698: Pierre Bouger was born in Le Croisic, France. He was one of the first to make photometric measurements (1729).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 17:

• 1965: US spacecraft Ranger 8 was launched. It sent back 7137 pictures of the lunar surface before impact.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1929: Universal Air Lines has first in-flight movie.
  
• 1888: Otto Stern was born in Sorau, Upper Silesia, Germany. He received the 1943 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his contribution to the development of the molecular ray method and his discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1740: Horace-Benedict de Saussure was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He invented the electrometer in 1766.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 18:

• 1967: J. Robert Oppenheimer died in Princeton, New Jersey. He predicted the existence of neutron stars and black holes during the late 1930's.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. (Lowell Observatory)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: Frederick Soddy first used the word "isotope" to describe atoms of an element which have different masses.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1838: Ernst Mach was born in Chirlitz-Turas, Moravia (Czechoslovakia). His writings about space and time greatly influenced Einstein.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1745: Alessandro Volta was born in Como Italy. He invented the electric battery in 1799.
  Source: Science Now; Physics Infomall; submitted by Carrie Duncan.

Historical Physics Events of February 19:

• 1916: Ernst Mach died in Vaterstetten, Germany. He was influential in Einstein's formulation of his theory of relativity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1473: Nicholas Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland. He revolutionized astronomy by suggesting that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 20:

• 1972: Marie Goeppert-Mayer died in San Diego, California. She received the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics with E. P. Wigner and J. H. D. Jensen for her theory of nuclear structure.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1962: Marine Colonel John Glenn orbited the Earth three times, becoming the first American in space.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: Heinrich Barkhausen died in Dresden, Germany. He explained why iron emits sounds when in the presence of an increasing magnetic field.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1844: Ludwig Edward Boltzmann was born in Vienna, Austria. He founded statistical mechanics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 21:

• 1926: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes died in Leiden, Netherlands. His Nobel lecture was titled "Investigations into the properties of substances at low temperatures, which have led, amongst other things, to the preparation of liquid helium".
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Einstein was granted Swiss citizenship.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: George Francis Fitzgerald died in Dublin, Ireland. He theorized in 1892 that objects moving at near-light speeds would contract, independently of H. Lorentz.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1878: First phone book issued, at New Haven, CT.
  
• 1833: Michael Faraday discovers the principle of the thermistor -- in some salts electric resistance decreases as temperature increases.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 22:

• 1902: Fritz Strassman was born in Boppard, Germany. He replaced Lise Meitner as Otto Hahn's assistant, just after they discovered fission of uranium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1890: University of Pennsylvania physicist, Goodspeed, demonstrated Crooke's Tube near an unexposed photographic plate and some scattered coins. The film was developed the following day.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1857: Heinrich Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. He was the first to produce and detect radio waves (1888).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 23:

• 1987: Supernova 1987a was detected in the large Magellanic cloud.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: Max Planck's son, Erwin, was executed in Germany for his alleged role in an assassination attempt on Adolph Hitler.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1890: University of Pennsylvania physicist, Goodspeed, develops the film described on 22 Feb. He notes that the film is dark with two white spots, but fails to see any significance. Thus misses the chance to announce the discovery of x-rays.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1855: Karl Friedrich Gauss died in Goettingen, Germany. He made enormous contributions to the field of electromagnetism and various fields of mathematics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 24:

• 1969: Mariner 6 was launched for a Mars fly-by.
  
• 1968: Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Edward W. Morely died in West Hartford, Connecticut. The famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which demonstrated that the speed of light is constant in different reference frames, was conducted in 1887.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Antonie Becquerel announced the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1841: Carl Graebe, a German organic chemist, was born on this day. He helped to create the synthetic dye industry. He also introduced the chemical terms "ortho", "meta", and "para".
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Carrie Duncan.
• 1812: Etienne-Louis Malus died. He coined the term "polarization."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1804: Heinrich Lenz was born in Dorpat, Estonia (Tartu, USSR). He discovered the law named after him in 1834. It describes the behavior of electromagnetic forces produced by a current.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 25:

• 1947: Louis Paschen died in Potsdam, E. Germany. He discovered in 1908 the series of lines in the hydrogen spectrum that is now named after him.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Oregon starts the 1st gasoline tax.
  
• 1909: Lev Andreevich Artsimovich was born in Moscow. He helped design the Tokamak device for nuclear fusion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1736: Stephen Gray died in London, England. He discovered that the surface of an object carries static electricity, not the interior, and that any object can be electrostatically charge it is surrounded by nonconducting materials.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 26:

• 1979: The last total solar eclipse of the century was seen in the continental U.S.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1799: Benoit-Pierre Clapeyron was born in Paris, France. He developed the initial version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1786: Dominique-Francois Arago was born in Estagel, France. He worked with the polarization of light.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1728: Antoine Baume was born in Senlis, France. He made the first graduated hydrometer in 1768. The specific gravities of liquids are still measured by this scale.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 27:

• 1951: John W. Hornbeck died. He was awarded the AAPT Oersted Medal for 1950.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: Radiowaves were discovered emanating from the sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 28:

• 1959: Air Force satellite Discover 1 was launched.
  
• 1943: A bright comet was first observed. It was eventually bright enough to be seen in daylight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Leon Cooper was born in New York, New York. He formulated the BCS theory, with J. Bardeen and J. Schrieffer, in 1957 that explained superconductivity. They received the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of February 29:

• 1908: Dutch Scientists produce solid helium.
  Source: BrainyHistory.
• 1968: U.S. end regular flights with nuclear bombs
  Source: BrainyHistory.

Historical Physics Events of March 1:

• 1973: Lev Andreevich Artsimovich died in the USSR. He was closely involved with the Tokamak design for nuclear fusion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: USSR spacecraft Venera 3 reached Venus, making it the first man-made object to touch another planet. However, contact was lost before impact.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1847: American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1813: Michael Faraday began working as an assistant to Humphrey Davy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 2:

• 1972: US spacecraft Pioneer 10 was launched for a rendevous with Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: Georgii Nikolaevich Flerov was born. He discovered spontaneous fission of uranium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 3:

• 1959: Pioneer 4 was launched. This mission became the first successful Lunar fly-by for the US.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1751: Pierre Prevost was born in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1791, he demonstrated that cold is the absence of heat, and that an object in equilibrium with its environment will not appear to radiate heat.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1703: Robert Hooke died in London, England. He identified the relationship between the tension of a spring and its stretch in 1676.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 4:

• 1979: Voyager 1 photographed rings around Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1907: Vladimir Veksler was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine. He improved the design of the particle accelerator in 1945.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1904: George Gamow was born in Odessa, Russia. He used quantum tunnelling to explain alpha decay.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1835: Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, was born. He believed he had observed canals on Mars in 1877, which inspired the popular belief that intelligent life existed on that pla We now know Schiaparelli's observations were erroneous.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1774: William Herschel made the first recorded observation of the Orion Nebula.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 5:

• 1979: Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1978: US satellite Landsat 3 was launched. This was one of the Earth-observing satellites that monitored agricultural crops and assisted the search for oil- water- and other minerals.
  
• 1853: Steinway starts making pianos.
  
• 1827: Alessandro Volta died in Como, Italy. He invented the electric battery in 1799.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 6:

• 1937: Valentina Tereshkova was born. She was the first woman in space (1963).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Clarence Birdseye markets "frosted foods."
  

Historical Physics Events of March 7:

• 1973: Comet Kohoutek was discovered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1876: Bell gets the patent for the telephone.
  
• 1837: Henry Draper was born in Prince Edward County, Virginia. He was the first to photograph the spectrum of a star. (Vega, in 1872).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 8:

• 1983: NASA lost contact with the Viking 1 lander on Mars due to an erroneous message that caused the craft to aim its radio antenna at the ground.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1979: Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes on Io.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1952: First use of a heart bypass machine.
  
• 1923: Johannes Diderik van der Waals died in Amsterdam. His Nobel lecture The equation of state for gases and liquids was delivered on 12 Dec. 1910.
  
• 1879: Otto Hahn was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He and Lise Meitner started their research of energy released during radioactive decay in 1906. This eventually led to nuclear fission in 1938.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1866: Pyotr Nicolaievich Lebedev was born in Moscow. He measured the radiation pressure of light, thus confirming Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 9:

• 1934: Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was born.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Johannes Diderik Van der Waals died in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His Nobel lecture "The equation of state for gases and liquids" was delivered on December 12, 1910.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1851: Hans Christian Oersted died in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1819, he observed the deflection of a compass needle in the proximity of a current carrying wire. The following year he announced the discovery of electromagnetism.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 10:

• 1977: The rings around Uranus were first observed when the planet passed in front of a star.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: Frits Zernike died in Naarden. He invented the phase contrast microscope in 1938, and received the 1953 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: William Henry Bragg died (1915 Nobel laureate).
  
• 1923: Val Fitch was born in Merriman, Nebraska. He shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Physics with James W. Cronin for their proof that time symmetry and charge parity could be violated.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1744: John Desaguliers died in London, England. He worked extensively with electricity, and coined the terms "conductor" and "insulator."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 11:

• 1960: US deep space probe Pioneer 5 was launched toward Venus' orbit and tracked for 22.5 million miles.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: Nicolaas Bloembergen was born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. He determined in 1956 how to make a solid-state maser produce microwaves continuously.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 12:

• 1942: Sir William Henry Bragg died in London, England. He received the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his son William Lawrence Bragg for their studies of x-ray diffraction in crystals.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1935: Michael Pupin died in New York, New York. He was the first to use x-rays for diagnosis in the United States (1896).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1934: Leo Szilard applied for a patent covering the basic concepts of nuclear chain reactions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1925: Leo Esaki was born in Osaka, Japan. He discovered electron tunneling in 1957, and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics with B. Josephson and I. Glaever for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1918: David Frisch, co-creator of the PSSC film "Relativistic Time Dilation", was born.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Johann Jakob Balmer died in Basel, Switzerland. He developed a formula to describe the spectral lines of hydrogen in 1885.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Wilhelm Roentgen created an x-ray photo of the hand of Dr. W. Koening by using a five minute exposure.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1824: Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was born in Koenigsberg (Kalingrad, USSR). He developed the black-body radiation law in 1859.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1683: John Desaguliers was born in La Rochelle, France. He expanded upon Stephen Gray's experiments with electricity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 13:

• 1939: Leo Szilard and Walter Zinse experimentally determined that neutrons are emitted when uranium undergoes fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: It was announced on this day that the planet Pluto had been discovered by astronomers who were searching for another planet in our solar system.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1899: John Van Vleck was born in Middletown, Connecticut. He received the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics "for work on the magnetic properties of atoms."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Eadweard Muybridge presented his lecture "The Attitudes of Animal in Motion, Illustrated with the Zooapraxiscope" to the British Royal Institution. This work pioneered the use of film to analyze motion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1781: William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 14:

• 1931: An 11 pound, methane-oxygen rocket in Dessau, Germany reached an altitude of approximately 1000 ft. This was the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in Europe.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1879: Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1864: Birth Casey Jones, railroad worker.
  

Historical Physics Events of March 15:

• 1972: NASA announced the Space Shuttle program.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1971: Boeing delivers first Lunar Rover.
  
• 1962: Arthur Holly Compton died in Berkeley, California. His Nobel lecture "X-rays as a branch of optics" was delivered on December 12, 1927.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: The first issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists appeared. The lead article was "Military or Civilian Control of Atomic Energy."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 16:

• 1926: Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. It reached an altitude of 41 ft, and an average velocity of 60 mph.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1918: Frederick Reines was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He and C. Cowan, Jr. were the first to observe neutrinos.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1859: Alexander Popov was born in Bogoslavsky. He used an antenna to transmit radio waves a distance of 3 miles in 1897.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1789: Georg Simon Ohm was born in Erlangen, Germany. He discovered the relationship between electrical current, voltage, and resistance in 1827.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 17:

• 1958: The second US satellite, Vanguard 1, was launched. It still orbits the Earth today.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: Irene Joliot-Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, died in Paris, France. Her death was probably caused by her working with radioactive materials.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1950: Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announced that they created a new radioactive element which they called "californium".
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Albert Einstein postulates the light-quantum in a paper published on this day explaining the photoelectric effect, or particle-like qualities, of light. (The light-quantum was later termed the "photon.")
  Source: The Timetables of Science (Hellemans & Bunch); submitted by Emily Vigour.
• 1853: Christian Doppler, Austrian physicist, died in Venice, Italy. He explained in 1842 why moving sources of sound appear to change pitch.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 18:

• 1965: LTC Aleksei A. Leonov performed the first spacewalk. He spent 10 minutes outside the Voskhod 2 spacecraft.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 19:

• 1915: Pluto was first photographed, but it wasn't recognized until 1930.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Frederic Joliot-Curie was born in Paris. He developed the first artificial radioactive element (a radioactive form of phosphorus) along with Irene Juliot-Curie.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 20:

• 1993: Polykarp Kusch died. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1955 with Willis Lamb, Jr. for his work with the magnetic momentum of the electron.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1916: Albert Einstein submitted the final form of his general theory of relativity to Annalen der Physik.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1878: Julius Robert Mayer died in Heilbronn, Germany. He was the first to state the law of conservation of energy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1726: Sir Isaac Newton died in Kensington, London. His complete Principia was published in 1687. It established his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 21:

• 1965: US spacecraft Ranger 9 was launched. It took 6007 pictures of the moon before impact, some of which were televised.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1768: Physicist/French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born. He developed the Fourier analysis.
  Source: America On Line-Grolier Encylopedia; submitted by Shelly Bowman.

Historical Physics Events of March 22:

• 1931: Burton Richter was born in New York, New York. He discovered a new subatomic particle which he called the y particle.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1903: Niagara Falls runs out of water.
  
• 1868: Robert Andrew Millikan was born in Morrison, Illinois. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1772: John Canton died in London, England. He was the first to observe magnetic storms in the Earth's magnetic field.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 23:

• 1912: Birth of Werner von Braun, rocketeer.
  
• 1840: The first photograph of the Moon was taken (daguerrotype).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1786: Giovanni Battista Amici was born in Modena. He made several improvements on microscope designs, resulting in 1840 with the oil-immersion microscope, an instrument that had a magnification power of 6000.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 24:

• 1962: August Piccard died in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was a balloonist, who in 1932, became the first person to reach the stratosphere (16,201 m).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: William Keesom died in Oegstgeest. He produced solid helium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1884: Peter Debye was born in Maastricht, The Netherlands. He used x-ray diffraction of powdered crystals to study their structure in 1916. He won the 1936 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his study of dipolar moments.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1835: Josef Stefan was born in Peter, Carinthia, Austria. He discovered the relationship between total radiation of a body and its temperature in 1879. (Stefan-Boltzmann Law)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1820: Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel was born in Paris, France. He demonstrated in 1840 that chemical reactions caused by light can produce electric currents.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 25:

• 1865: Pierre Weiss was born in Mulhouse, France. He developed the domain theory of ferromagnetism.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1656: Saturn's largest satellite Titan was discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 26:

• 1753: Benjamin Thompson (Lord Rumford), was born in Woburn, Massachusetts. He greatly influenced the scientific understanding of the nature of heat. In 1798, he proposed that heat was a form of motion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 27:

• 1969: US spacecraft Mariner 7 was launched toward Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1845: Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen was born in Lennep, Germany. He received the 1901 Nobel Prize for Physics "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1824: Johann Wilhelm Hittorf was born in Bonn, Rhenish, Prussia. He noticed that when subjected to an electric current, different ions in solution will travel at different rates (1853).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 28:

• 1979: The Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident occurred.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1807: Asteroid Vesta was discovered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1747: Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Peter Collinson, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London. Franklin thanked Collinson for his "kind present of an electric tube" and stated that he would communicate new findings soon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 29:

• 1974: US spacecraft Mariner 10 passed by Mercury on its first of three fly-bys.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 30:

• 1954: Fritz Wolfgang London died in Durham, North Carolina. He and Walter Heitler used quantum mechanics to derive the binding energy within a hydrogen molecule in 1927.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of March 31:

• 1970: Explorer 1, the first US satellite, reentered the Earth's atmosphere after 12 years of orbit.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1906: Sin-itiro Tomonaga was born in Tokyo, Japan. He received the 1965 Nobel prize for Physics with J. Schwinger and R. P. Feynman "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploug consequences for physics of elementary particles.&qu
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1890: William Lawrence Bragg was born in Adelaide, South Australia. He received the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his father W. H. Bragg for "their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of Roentgen ra He was the youngest Nobel laureate
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 1:

• 1968: Andrei Sakharov gave a copy of his reflections on war and peace to historian Roy Medvedev who distributed it through an underground communications network in the USSR.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: Lev Landau died in Moscow in spite of an incredible international effort to save his life after an auto accident on 7 January 1962. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the superfluidity in liquid helium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1960: The first U.S. meteorological satellite- Tiros 1- was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1912: Pyotr Lebedev died in Moscow. He confirmed Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism in 1901 by measuring the radiation pressure of light.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 2:

• 1994: A super nova was observed in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: President Eisenhower endorsed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to Congress.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1845: The first photograph of the Sun was taken.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 3:

• 1966: USSR spacecraft Luna 10 was placed in orbit around Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1926: Goddard achieved his second successful flight of a liquid fueled rocket.
  
• 1846: During a public lecture, Michael Faraday first suggested that light could be a disturbance in the electromagnetic lines of force. A few days later he stated that these thoughts were "speculations" and "vague impressions of my mind".
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 4:

• 1983: The Space Shuttle Challenger was launched for the first time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Sir William Crookes died in London, England. He determined that the cathode rays produced in his vacuum tubes were streams of charged particles. J.J. Thomson identified these particles as electrons in 1897.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1846: Raoul Pictet was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He and Louis-Paul Cailletet liquified oxygen in 1877.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 5:

• 1979: Pioneer 11 was launched for a rendezvous with Jupiter.
  
• 1929: Ivar Glaever was born in Bergen, Norway. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973 with L. Esaki and B. Josephson "for their theories on superconductors and semiconductors important to microelectronics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 6:

• 1920: Johann Elster died in Bad Harzburg, Saxony. He devised the first practical photoelectric cell in 1904.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1914: Albert Einstein moved from Zurich, Switzerland to Berlin, Germany.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 7:

• 1978: A large fireball was visible throughout eastern Australia.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 8:

• 1984: Pyotr Kapitsa died. He explained the behavior of helium cooled to temperatures below 2.2 K in 1937. He later names this phenomena "superfluidity."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: NASA executed an unmanned Gemini test launch.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Baron Roland von Eoetvoes died in Budapest, Hungary. His 1890 experiments related the gravitational mass to the inertial mass.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1839: Pierre Prevost died in Geneva, Switzerland. He developed a theory describing the exchange of heat radiation in 1791.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1796: Johan Carl Wilcke died in Stockholm, Sweden. He introduced the concept of specific heat in 1782.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1779: Johann Schweigger was born in Erlangen, Germany. He built the first galvanometer in 1820.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 9:

• 1959: NASA selected the first 7 astronauts.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1869: Birthday of Elie Cartan.
  
• 1770: Thomas Johann Seebeck was born in Revel, USSR. He discovered in 1821 that electricity could be created when a junction of certain metals was heated.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 10:

• 1868: Giovanni Battista Amici died in Florence, Italy. He invented the oil-immersion microscope in 1840, an instrument with an enlarging power of 6000 times.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 11:

• 1986: Comet Halley's closest approach to Earth since 1910.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1970: Apollo 13 was launched for the third lunar landing mission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 12:

• 1981: Space Shuttle Columbia was launched for the first space shuttle mission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1971: Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm died in Moscow. He received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with P. A. Cherenkov and I. M. Frank for the explanation of the radiation produced by accelerating electrons. (Cherenkov radiation)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1961: Major Yuri A. Gagarin became the first person in outer space. He orbited the Earth once in the Vostok 1 spacecraft.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1770: Abbe Jean Antoine Nollet died in Paris, France. He discovered and explained osmotic pressure in 1748.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 13:

• 1941: Annie Jump Cannon died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She classified stellar spectra for the Henry Draper Catalogue of 225,300 stars, and she introduced spectral subclasses of stars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 14:

• 1970: An explosion in Apollo 13's oxygen system caused the mission to be aborted.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: Ampex demonstrates first videotape recorder.
  
• 1953: Ronald W. Gurney died in New York City. He applied quantum tunneling to alpha decay in 1928, and first suggested nuclear resonances in 1929.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1948: A flash of light was observed in the crater Plato on the moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1629: Christiaan Huygens was born in The Hague, Holland. He worked with pendulums and clocks, and explained the wave theory of light. He was also the first to identify rings around Saturn and to see surface features on Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 15:

• 1874: Johannes Stark was born in Schickenhof, Bavaria. He was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 16:

• 1972: Apollo 16 was launched for the fifth lunar landing.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: Werner Heisenberg and 17 other German scientists sign a statement in which they refused to work on nuclear weapons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Henry Augustus Rowland died in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied the solar spectrum, and developed diffraction gratings for use in spectroscopy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1867: Wilbur Wright was born in Millville, Indiana. He and his brother Orville built the first airplane in 1903.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 17:

• 1967: Surveyor 3 was launched. This was the first spacecraft to sample the lunar surface.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: Jean Baptiste Perrin died in New York, New York. His Nobel lecture, "Discontinuous structure of matter," was delivered on December 11, 1926.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1790: Benjamin Franklin died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 18:

• 1955: Albert Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Maurice Goldhaber was born in Lemberg, Austria. With James Chadwick, he measured the mass of the neutron, in 1934. He also worked extensively with fission reactions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 19:

• 1982: Sally Ride was named the first woman astronaut.
  
• 1906: Pierre Curie was killed in a street accident in Paris, France. His Nobel lecture was titled "Radioactive substances, especially radium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Zygmunt Florenty von Wroblewski died in Krakow, Poland. He was the first to produce liquid hydrogen.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 20:

• 1972: Apollo 16 landed on the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: RCA demonstrated its electron microscope in public.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1918: Karl Ferdinand Braun, died in New York, New York. His Nobel lecture "Electrical oscillations and wireless telegraphy" was presented December 11, 1909.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 21:

• 1965: Sir Edward Appleton died in Edinburgh, Scotland. He received the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the ionic layer in the atmosphere.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1918: The "Red Baron" is shot down.
  
• 1882: Percy Williams Bridgman was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received the 1946 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the invention of an apparatus to produce extremely high pressures, and the discoveries he made therewith in the field of high-pressure phy
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1774: Jean-Baptiste Biot was born in Paris, France. In 1804, he and Joseph Gay-Lussac studied the Earth's atmosphere and magnetism in rocks from a balloon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 22:

• 1904: J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York, New York. He directed the construction of nuclear bombs at Los Alamos during the 1940's.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 23:

• 1992: Astrophysicist George Smoot announced that large-scale temperature variations in the 3-degree background radiation were detected with the COBE satellite (Cosmic Background Explor This discovery supports the Big Bang theory and confirms the theory of the e
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1962: Ranger 4 became the first spacecraft to touch the Moon but no information was obtained due to a malfunction.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1858: Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany. He received the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discovery of energy quanta."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 24:

• 1992: China launched its first satellite.
  
• 1967: Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed when his capsule's parachute recovery system failed to deploy. This was the first death related to manned-space flight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1960: Max von Laue died in Berlin as a result of injuries sustained from a motor accident. He received the 1914 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with crystal diffraction of x-rays.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: Werner Heisenberg was appointed director at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin where nuclear weapons research was being conducted.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1934: Lauren Hammonds developed the pipeless organ.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.

Historical Physics Events of April 25:

• 1961: An unmanned Mercury test exploded on the launch pad.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna, Austria. He was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the discovery of the Exclusion Principle."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1874: Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna, Italy. He was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics with C. F. Braun "for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 26:

• 1986: The Chernobyl nuclear reactor near Kiev, USSR exploded and released large amounts of radioactivity into the environment, causing dozens of fatalities.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1951: Arnold Sommerfeld died in Munich, West Germany. He modified the Bohr atom in 1916 to have elliptical orbits, and created the second quantum number in the process.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Arno Allan Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. He received the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics with R. Wilson for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: The Shapley-Curtis debate on the nature and location of spiral nebulae took place in Washington D.C.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1879: Owen Williams Richardson was born in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England. He received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1514: Nicolas Copernicus made his first observations of Saturn.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 27:

• 1986: Captain Midnight interrupts HBO.
  
• 1919: Philip Abelson was born in Tacoma, Washington. He identified the products of uranium fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1880: Francis Clark and M.G. Foster pattened the electrical hearing aid.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.

Historical Physics Events of April 28:

• 1940: Peter Debye arrived in the U.S. after being forced to leave Germany.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1903: Josiah Willard Gibbs died in New Haven, Connecticut. He worked with statistical mechanics and he developed a system of vector analysis for three dimensions in 1881.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1686: Newton published his Principia.
  

Historical Physics Events of April 29:

• 1960: An engine test of the Saturn rocket produced a record 1.3 million pounds of thrust.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: A group of German scientists met in Berlin to discuss the use of fission in weapons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: Gideon Sundback patents the zipper.
  
• 1893: Harold Clayton Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana. He discovered deuterium in 1932, and received the 1934 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for this discovery.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of April 30:

• 1939: RCA makes 1st public demonstration of TV.
  
• 1897: J.J. Thomson announced his discovery of the electron at a lecture to the Royal Institute.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1777: Karl Friedrich Gauss was born in Brunswick, Germany. He made enormous contributions to the field of electromagnetism and various fields of mathematics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 1:

• 1959: Goddard Space Flight Center was named.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1825: Johann Jakob Balmer was born in Lausen, Switzerland. He developed a formula to describe the hydrogen spectrum in 1885. Niels Bohr uses this formula to develop his model of the atom.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 2:

• 1903: Pieter Zeeman presented his Nobel lecture "Light radiation in a magnetic field."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1847: Prescott Joule announces his discovery of the general law of energy conservation.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Matthew Skellett.

Historical Physics Events of May 3:

• 1933: Steven Weinberg was born in New York, New York. He received the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics with A. Salam and S. L. Glashow "for their unified model of the action of the weak electromagnetic forces and for their prediction of the existence of neutra
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Alfred Kastler was born in Guebwiller in Alsace. He was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonance in atoms."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1892: George Paget Thomson was born in Cambridge, England. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize for Physics with C. J. Davisson "for the experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 5:

• 1961: Alan Shepard became the first American in space. His flight lasted 15 min.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: The New York Times carried a front page story stating that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1921: Arthur Leonard Schawlow was born in Mount Vernon, New York. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physics with N. Bloembergen "for their contribution of high resolution electron spectroscopy."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 6:

• 1966: Sin-itiro Tomonaga delivered his Nobel lecture "Development of quantum electrodynamics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 7:

• 1963: Theodore von Karman died in Aachen, W. Germany. He pioneered the science of aerodynamics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Ernest Rutherford presented his theory of the atom to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1909: Edwin Herbert Land was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He designed a polarizing filter in 1928 and in 1948, a camera that would develop its own film.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 8:

• 1794: Antoine Lavoisier was executed during the French Revolution. He is considered to be "the father of modern chemistry."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 9:

• 1965: USSR spacecraft Luna 5 was launched. This was an unsuccessful first attempt to soft land on the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1931: Albert Michelson died in Pasadena, California. He and E. Morley attempted to detect the proper motion of the Earth through ether in 1887. Their results suggested that ether did not exist.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1834: John Dalton presented to the British Royal Society a lecture "On The Atomic Theory of Vapours."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 10:

• 1910: Halley's comet made its closest pass by the Earth during that orbit.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1869: Golden Spike brings rails across the US.
  
• 1829: Thomas Young died in London, England. He rediscovered the interference phenomena of light passing through a double slit in 1801. (Francesco Grimaldi discovered it in the 17th century, but his ideas were not accepted at the time.)
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 11:

• 1924: Anthony Hewish was born in Fowey, Cornwall, England. He was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics, with Sir Martin Ryle, "for his discovery of pulsars."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1918: Richard P. Feynman was born in New York, New York. He received the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics with S. Tomonaga and J. Schwinger "for t fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary parti
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1916: Einstein presented his general theory of relativity.
  
• 1916: Karl Schwarzschild died in Potsdam, Germany. He predicted the existence of black holes from Einstein's equations.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1891: Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, died in Paris. He demonstrated in 1840 that light can cause chemical reactions that produce an electric current.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1881: Theodore von Karman was born in Budapest, Hungary. He applied aerodynamics to the design of airplanes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1686: Otto von Guericke died in Hamburg, Germany. He worked extensively with vacuums.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 12:

• 1895: William Giauque was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario. He discovered that oxygen is a mixture of 3 isotopes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1684: Edme Mariotte died. He studied gases and fluids. In France, Boyle's Law is known as Mariotte's Law.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 13:

• 1992: First space walk involving 3 astronauts occurred. They caught a 4.5 ton communications satellite with their hands after failing to do so with a mechanical capture bar. After capture, the satellite was sent to a higher orbit.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Igor Sikorsky flies the first helicopter.
  
• 1938: Charles-Edouard Guillaume died. His Nobel lecture "Invar and elinvar" was presented on December 11, 1920.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1878: Joseph Henry died in Washington D.C. He worked extensively with electricity and magnetism. His work often paralleled that of M. Faraday, but had more practical applications.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 14:

• 1973: Skylab was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1949: Truman signed the bill establishing a rocket range at Cape Canaveral.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 15:

• 1958: Sputnik 3 was launched.
  
• 1859: Pierre Curie was born in Paris, France. He received the 1903 Nobel Prize with his wife M. Curie "for their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel" who also shared the 1903 Nobel Prize.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 16:

• 1950: J. Georg Bednorz was born in Neuenkirchen, W. Germany. He was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physics with K. A. Mueller "for their discovery of a new class of superconductors."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 17:

• 1977: Erwin Mueller died in Washington, D.C. He designed the field-ion microscope in 1951.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1630: The cloud belts on Jupiter were first observed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 18:

• 1980: Mt. St. Helen's erupted.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Apollo 10 was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Tennessee Valley Authority founded.
  

Historical Physics Events of May 19:

• 1971: USSR spacecraft Mars 2 was launched. It enters orbit of Mars on November 27.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: US finds forty bugs in its Soviet embassy.
  
• 1910: The Earth passed through comet Halley's tail.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 20:

• 1982: Merle Tuve died. He and his colleagues demonstrated in 1936 that neutrons were not simply protons joined to electrons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: Philipp Edward Anton von Lenard, died at Messehausen. He received the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with cathode rays.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Pan Am starts routine transatlantic service.
  

Historical Physics Events of May 21:

• 1964: James Franck died in Germany while visiting Goettingen. His Nobel lecture "Transformations of kinetic energy of free electrons into excitation energy of atoms by impacts" was presented December 11, 1926.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1921: Andrei Sakharov was born near Moscow's Novodevichy Monastery. He is credited with development of the Soviet nuclear weapon and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: August Adolph Eduard Kundt died in Israelsdorf. He studied the speed of sound in various gases.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1792: Gustave-Gaspard de Coriolis was born in Paris, France. He explained in 1835, how the Earth's rotation affects the motion of a moving body.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 22:

• 1906: The Wright brothers received a patent on the airplane.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1783: William Sturgeon was born in Whittington, England. He made the first electromagnet in 1823.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 23:

• 1991: David Frisch, co-creator of the PSSC film "Relativistic Time Dilation", died.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1924: Robert Andrew Millikan presented his Nobel lecture "The electron and the light-quanta from the experimental point of view."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1910: A total eclipse of the moon was seen on the west coast.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He received the 1956 Nobel Prize with W.H. Brattain and W. Shockley "for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effe He also shared the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics with L
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 24:

• 1962: M. Scott Carpenter became the second American to orbit the Earth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1960: The Midas reconnaissance satellite was launched (5000 lbs)
  
• 1844: Morse taps out "What hath God wrought?"
  
• 1686: Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdansk, Poland). He constructed the first mercury thermometer in 1714.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1543: Nicolas Copernicus died. His heliocentric theory of planetary motion was published a few months before his death.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 25:

• 1961: President John F. Kennedy outlined the goal of the Apollo missions - to land an American on the Moon within a decade.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1921: Jack Steinberger was born in Bad Kissingen, Germany. He received the 1988 Nobel Prize for Physics with L. M. Lederman and M. Schwartz "for the first use of a neutrino beam and the discovery of the muon neutrino."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1865: Pieter Zeeman was born in Zonnemaire, The Netherlands. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize for Physics with H. A. Lorentz "for their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 26:

• 1957: Heinrich Geissler was born in Igelshieb, Germany. He made the first good vacuum tubes in 1855. After some modifications they were used to discover the electron.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 27:

• 1914: Sir Joseph Wilson Swan died in Warlingham, England. He developed a practical carbon-thread electric lamp, independently of Thomas Edison.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1897: John Cockcroft was born in Todmorden, England. He and Ernest Walton were the first to use a particle accelerator (1932), with which they later discovered the transmutation of atomic nuc They were awarded the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1781: Giovanni Beccaria died in Turin, Italy. He published a paper in 1753 that supported Benjamin Franklin's ideas about electricity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 28:

• 1937: Golden Gate Bridge opens.
  
• 1906: Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard presented his Nobel lecture "On cathode rays."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 29:

• 1919: Arthur Eddington collected photographs during a solar eclipse that he later were used to confirm that light is deflected by gravitational fields testing Einstein's theory of relativity.
  

Historical Physics Events of May 30:

• 1964: Leo Szilard died in La Jolla, California. He and Walter Zinn confirmed in 1939 Hahn's and Strassman's observations that fission reactions can be self-sustaining. This work lead to the development of the atomic bomb.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1912: Wilbur Wright died in Dayton, Ohio. He and his brother Orville flew the first airplane in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: First Indy 500 held.
  
• 1908: Hannes Alfven was born in Norrkoping, Sweden. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics, with L. Neel, "for fundamental work and discoveries in magneto-hydrodynamics with frui applications in different parts of plasma physics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1667: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, succeeded in becoming a member of the Royal Society, in spite of much opposition because she was a woman. Almost 300 years passed before another woman was admitted to the Royal Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of May 31:

• 1986: L. James Rainwater died in Yonkers, New York. His Nobel lecture "Background for the Spheroidal Nuclear Model Proposal" was presented December 11, 1975.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: The last of Wernher von Braun's V-2 rocket equipment was smuggled out of Germany, just prior to Russian occupation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1931: John Robert Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois. He received the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. Bardeen and L. N. Cooper "for their development of a theory of superconductivity."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 1:

• 1796: Nicholas Carnot was born in Paris, France. He was the first to apply physics to the problem of engine efficiency and changes in heat (1824).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 2:

• 1983: Pioneer II officially left the solar system.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1962: GE/Zenith Stereo FM system adopted.
  
• 1920: Max Planck presented his Nobel lecture "The genesis and present state of development of the quantum theory."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 3:

• 1965: Gemini 4 was launched. This mission included the first American space walk (Edward H. White II, 21 min).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: Charles Glover Barkla presented his Nobel lecture "Characteristic Roentgen radiation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: Johannes Stark presented his Nobel lecture: "Structural and spectral changes of chemical atoms."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Arthur Eddington developed and measured photographs that showed that light from stars is bent when passing close to the Sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1899: Georg von Bekesy was born in Budapest, Hungary. He received the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his explanation of how the ear detects sound.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 4:

• 1942: Albert Speer, Germany economic minister, met with scientists doing nuclear research. Allegedly, as a result of the meeting, Germany concentrated on nuclear reactors, not on weapons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1934: Italian Senator Corbino, at a royal session of the Academy of Lincei, announced that Enrico Fermi's research group had created element 93.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: W. C. Swan made the first rocket glider flight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Henry Ford goes on his first drive.
  

Historical Physics Events of June 5:

• 1900: Dennis Gabor was born in Budapest, Hungary. He received the 1971 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of holography.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1783: The first unmanned hot air balloon flight occurred in Annonay, France
  

Historical Physics Events of June 6:

• 1942: The first nylon parachute jump took place in Hartford- CT.
  
• 1905: Pierre Curie presented his Nobel lecture "Radioactive substances, especially radium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1850: Carl Ferdinard Braun was born in Fulda, Germany. He received the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics with G. Marconi "for their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 7:

• 1938: George Paget Thomson presented his Nobel lecture "Electronic Waves."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1877: Charles Glover Barkla was born in Widnes, Lancashire, England. He was awarded the 1917 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discovery of the characteristic Roentgen radiation of the elements."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1862: Philipp Edward Anton von Lenard was born in Pozsony (Pressburg) in Hungary. He received the 1905 Nobel Prize "for his work on cathode rays."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 8:

• 1918: Bern Matthias was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He developed a material in 1967 that acted as a superconductor at 20.05 K.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1869: Ives McGaffey patents the vacuum cleaner.
  
• 1625: Giovanni Domenico Cassini was born in Perinaldo, Italy. He was the first to observe the gap in Saturn's rings that now bears his name (1675).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 9:

• 1933: Heinrich Rohor was born in Switzerland. He invented the scanning tunneling microscope with G. Binnig.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1776: Amedeo Avogadro, the Italian scientist known as one of the founders of physical chemistry, was born.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Matthew Skellett.

Historical Physics Events of June 10:

• 1682: The first recorded tornado in the U.S. touched down in what is now Connecticut.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 11:

• 1945: A committee of scientists submitted a report to Secretary of War Stimson. It advocated international control of atomic energy and opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 12:

• 1979: The first human powered flight across the English channel occurred.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1967: Venera 4 was launched for Venus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Becquerel discovers the beta ray.
  
• 1851: Oliver Joseph Lodge was born in Staffordshire, England. In 1851, he suggested that the Sun emits radio waves. This was confirmed during the 1940's.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 13:

• 1983: 6/13/1983 Pioneer 10 left the solar system.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1972: Georg von Bekesy died in Hawaii. He received the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his explanation of how the ear detects sound.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Charles-Edouard Guillaume died in Sevres, France. He developed the nickel-steel alloy, invar, in 1896. He received the 1920 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1916: Friedrich Ernst Dorn died in Halle, Germany. He discovered radon in 1900, independently of E. Rutherford.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Erwin Mueller was born in Berlin, Germany. He developed the field-emission microscope, the first instrument to resolve individual atoms.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Luis W. Alvarez was born in San Francisco, California. He received the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his decisive contribution to elementary particle physics, in particular discovery of a large number of resonance states made possible through his
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1831: Birthday of James C. Maxwell
  

Historical Physics Events of June 14:

• 1973: Frank Oppenheimer received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Teaching and Learning."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1736: Charles-Augustin Coulomb was born in Charente, France. He demonstrated in 1785 that electrical and magnetic forces obey an inverse square law, like gravity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 15:

• 1940: A paper in Physical Review announced the discovery of plutonium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1752: Benjamin Franklin flew his kite during a thunderstorm.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 16:

• 1977: Wernher von Braun died in Alexandria, Virginia. He was a central figure in the Apollo space program.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: The first major orbital plane charge by U.S. spacecraft took place. The rocket moved from a 100 mile circular orbit to a 21000 mile orbit- then moved to an equatorial orbit.
  
• 1963: Valentina V. Tereshkova (USSR) became the first woman in space.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1773: Thomas Young was born. He published his wave theory of light in 1802.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 17:

• 1981: Albert A. Bartlett received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Are We Overlooking Something?"
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Artist M.C. Escher was born in Leevwarden- The Netherlands.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1861: William Crookes was born in London, England. He made the cathode tubes that were later used to identify electrons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 18:

• 1987: Donald Glenn Ivey received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Educational Television - An Oxymoron?"
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1178: Canterbury monks reported the moon being struck by a meteor.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 19:

• 1985: E. Leonard Jossem was presented the Melba Newell Phillips Award for "exceptional contributions to physics education through leadership in the American Association of Physics Teachers."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1985: James Gerhart received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Handling Numbers."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: H. Victor Neher received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Millikan: Teacher and Friend."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1961: Research on space suit components began in Rhode Island by VanCraft Knitwear.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1953: The Rosenbergs, accused atomic spies, were executed.
  

Historical Physics Events of June 20:

• 1955: The longest duration for a solar eclipse (7 min. 8 sec.) was observed in the Philippines.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 21:

• 1957: Johannes Stark died at his country estate Eppenstatt near Traunstein in Upper Bavaria. He received the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics for his study of spectral lines in electric fields.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1874: Anders Jonas Angstrom died in Uppsala, Sweden. He discovered hydrogen in the solar spectrum in 1862.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1859: A patent was issued to Andrew Lanergan, Boston, for a rocket.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1820: Alexis-Therese Petit died in Paris, France. He and P. Dulong discovered the relationship between specific heat and atomic mass in 1818.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 22:

• 1993: Stephen W. Hawking made a guest appearance on the season finale of "Star Trek, The Next Generation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1978: Pluto's moon Charon was discovered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1978: Transit I-B was the first navigational satellite ever lauched (US).
  Source: Submitted by Veronica Griggs.
• 1864: Hermann Minkowski was born in Alexotas, Russia. He introduced the fourth dimension (time) to Einstein's relativity theory, thereby relating gravitation to curvature in 4-D space.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 23:

• 1988: H. Richard Crane was presented the Melba Newell Phillips Award for "exceptional contributions to physics education through leadership in the American Association of Physics Teachers."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1988: Robert G. Greenler received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Beetles, Bubbles, and Butterflies - Iridescence in Nature."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1982: Paul G. Hewitt received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "The Missing Essential - A Conceptual Understanding of Physics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: A laboratory accident caused damage to uranium experiments being conducted by Werner Heisenberg in Germany.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1912: Alan Turing, the man with the original concept of the computer, was born.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Matthew Skellett.
• 1902: Einstein began his job as technical officer in the Swiss Patent Office.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1891: Wilhelm Eduard Weber died in Goettingen, Germany. He and K. Gauss built an electric telegraph in 1833. It crossed a distance of 2 km.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1868: Christopher Sholes patents the typewriter.
  
• 1775: Etienne-Louis Malus was born in Paris, France. He observed that reflected light was polarized, and first used that term in 1808.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 24:

• 1940: First use of coax cable to send TV.
  
• 1930: Radar was first used to detect an aircraft.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1883: Victor Franz Hess was born in Waldstein Castle, near Peggau in Steiermark, Austria. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize for Physics with C. D. Anderson "for the discovery of cosmic radiation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 25:

• 1907: J. Hans D. Jensen was born in Hamburg, Germany. He received the 1963 Nobel Prize with M. G. Mayer and E. P. Wigner "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: Hermann Oberth was born in Hermannstadt, Transylvania. His 1924 publication, The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, was the first discussion of the feasibility of sending rockets into space.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 26:

• 1986: Mario Iona received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Why Johnny Can't Learn Physics from Textbooks I have Known."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1935: Stephan von Molnar was born in Leipzig, Germany. He worked with the magnetic properties of europium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1883: Sir Edward Sabine died in Richmond, England. In 1852, he related the changes in the Earth's magnetic field to sunspot activity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1824: Lord Kelvin was born in Belfast, Ireland. He worked extensively with thermodynamics, and in 1851, he proposed the concept of absolute zero.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1730: Charles Messier, the French astronomer, was born.
  

Historical Physics Events of June 27:

• 1991: Don Herbert received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Behind the Scenes of Mr. Wizard."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1984: Earl F. Zwicker received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Life, Learning, and the Phunomenological [sic] Approach."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Merle Tuve was born. He and his colleagues showed that the nuclear force between two protons was equal to that between a proton and a neutron.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 28:

• 1990: Lillian C. McDermott received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. Her lecture presentation was titled "What We Teach and What is Learned - Closing the Gap."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: First passenger service by Boeing Clipper.
  
• 1906: Maria Goeppert Mayer was born in Kattowitz, Upper Silesia (then Germany). She received the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. H. D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure. E. P. Wigner also shared the 1963 Nobel Prize.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 29:

• 1989: Peter Lindenfeld received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "The Einsteinization of Physics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Aleksander Friedmann was born. He concluded from Einstein's general relativity theory that the universe began as a single point mass. (Big Bang Theory)
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of June 30:

• 1983: A leap second was added 6:59:60 EST
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Lord Rayleigh died at Witham, England. His Nobel lecture, "The density of gases in the air and the discovery of argon," was presented December 12, 1904.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: A large fireball exploded above the Stony Tunuska River, Siberia. This explosion caused seismic shock and a firestorm followed by black rain and an illumination that could be seen for hundreds of miles. No one knows cause of the explosion. The explosion i
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Albert Einstein submitted his paper on the special theory of relativity entitled "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" to Annalen der Physik.
  Source: The Timetables of Science (Hellemans & Bunch); submitted by Emily Vigour.

Historical Physics Events of July 1:

• 1971: Sir William Lawrence Bragg died in Ipswich, England. He shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his father, W. H. Bragg.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1960: Werner von Braun became director of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 2:

• 1940: The U.S. government granted a patent to G. M. Giannini and Co. for the process of inducing radioactivity in materials. Giannini was representing Enrico Fermi and his collaborators.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1914: Albert Einstein gave his inaugural address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1906: Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine. He received the 1967 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially for discovery concerning the energy production in stars."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1862: William Henry Bragg was born in Westward, Cumberland. He received the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics with his son W. L. Bragg "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of Roentgen rays."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 3:

• 1989: There was an occultation of the star 28 Sgr by Saturn, providing the best opportunity to study Saturn's rings since the final Voyager flyby.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 4:

• 1934: Marie Sklodowska-Curie died in Savoy, France. In addition to the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, Marie Curie was also awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1910: Giovanni Schiaparelli died in Milan, Italy. He excited imaginations world-wide after his (erroneous) observation of canals on Mars in 1877.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1054: A supernova was observed in the constellation Taurus. The remnants of this explosion now form the Crab Nebula (M1).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 5:

• 1911: George Johnstone Stoney died in London, England. He coined the term "electron" in 1874, and offered an estimate for the charge of the then unknown particle (approx. 10^-20 C).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1820: William John Macquorn Rankine was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He introduced the concept of potential energy in 1853.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1686: Newton's Principia was published by the Royal Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 6:

• 1979: Newspapers reported that Skylab was about to fall.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: The Dutch newspaper Het Parool published physicist Andrei Sakharov's article on war and peace. He would later win the Nobel Peace Prize.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1909: Einstein resigned his position of technical officer at the Swiss Patent Office to become an associate professor in Zurich.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1885: Pasteur conducted his first rabies vaccination.
  

Historical Physics Events of July 7:

• 1930: Construction began on the Boulder (now Hoover) Dam.
  
• 1914: Goddard received a patent for the two-stage rocket.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1855: Michael Faraday writes a letter to the Editor of the Times of London in which he expresses his concern over the level of pollution in the Thames River.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1854: Georg Simon Ohm died in Munich, Germany. He published his law relating electric current to the resistance and voltage in 1872.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1843: Camillo Golgi, an Italian physician famed for his microscopic studies of the nervous system was born.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Carrie Duncan.

Historical Physics Events of July 8:

• 1979: Sin-itiro Tomonaga died in Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics along with R. Feynman and I. Schwinger.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Jansky began the science of radio astronomy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: A device known as a radio compass was used for the first time on a United States Navy airplane near Norfolk, Virginia
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Marie Childs.
• 1895: Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russia. He was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with P.A. Cherenkov and I.M. Frank "for their discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: Pyotr Kapitsa was born in Kronshtadt, Russia. He was the first to use the term "superfluidity", and he explained this behavior in helium cooled below 2.2 K.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1695: Christiaan Huygens died in The Hague, Netherlands. He worked with pendulums and clocks, and explained the wave theory of light. He was also the first to correctly identify Saturn's rings.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 9:

• 1979: Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1926: Ben Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois. He worked with Neils Bohr on the atomic nucleus theory.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1856: Amedeo Avogadro, Count of Quarenga, died in Turin, Italy. He stated his law relating the volume of gases and the number of particles contained within in 1811.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1595: Kepler conceived the idea that the planets' orbits can be inscribed by geometrical solids. This idea, although erroneous, led Kepler to discover his laws of planetary motion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 10:

• 1962: Telstar, a communications satellite, successfully launched signals of voice and picture transmission from Europe to America and back. Signals were picked up by a 38 ton antenna in Andover, Maine.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Marie Childs.
• 1920: Owen Chamberlain was born in San Francisco, California. He was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize for Physics with E.G. Segre "for their discovery of the antiproton."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1913: The highest temperature ever recorded in the Continental United States was measured in Death Valley, California. The record breaking temperature was 134 degrees F.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Marie Childs.

Historical Physics Events of July 11:

• 1979: Skylab fell.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1944: Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and his wife Laura became citizens of the United States.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Albert Einstein presented his Nobel lecture "Fundamental ideas and problems of the theory of relativity" to the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists of Gothenburg.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1916: Alexander M. Prokhorov was born in Australia. He received the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics with N.G. Basov and C. H. Townes "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Samuel Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Netherlands. He formulated the hypothesis of the electron spin along with G. Uhlenbeck.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1834: Michael Faraday testified before a Select Committee of the Houses of Parliament on the state of London's sewers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1811: William Robert Grove was born in Swansea, Wales. He made the first electric fuel cell in 1839, based upon the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1747: In a letter to Peter Collinson, Benjamin Franklin described a discovery that would lead to the invention of the lightning rod and introduced the terms "positive" and "negative" and "to electrise plus or minus."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 12:

• 1913: Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. was born in Los Angeles, California. He received the 1955 Nobel Prize for Physics with P. Kusch "for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1813: Claude Bernard, a French researcher credited with founding the field of experimental medicine, was born on this day. He found that the liver stores sugar as glycogen.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Carrie Duncan.

Historical Physics Events of July 13:

• 1974: Patrick Blackett died in London, England. He received the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work with the Wilson cloud chamber. He was the first to photograph a nuclear reaction (1925).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Lise Meitner, part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, fled Nazi-controlled Austria. According to a 1997 Physics Today study, Meitner's omission from receiving the Nobel Prize with her colleague Hahn in 1946 was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel.
  Source: Physics Infomall; Physics Today; Wikipedia.
• 1921: Gabriel Lippmann died at sea during a trip from North America to France. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of color photography.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 14:

• 1970: Biologist Hamiliton Smith broke new ground for biotechnology. He described a new class of enzymes, restriction enzymes, that scientists now use to snip DNA.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Carrie Duncan.
• 1965: Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to photograph another planet as it flew by Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1777: Hans Christian Oersted was born in Rudkobing, Denmark. He announced his discovery of electromagnetism in 1820.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 15:

• 1975: Apollo/Soyuz was launched.
  
• 1904: Pavel Cherenkov was born in Voronezh, USSR. He won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with I. Frank and I. Tamm for their work with light emission from high-speed charged particles within a medium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 16:

• 1982: Landsat 4 was launched.
  
• 1969: Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon, was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: The Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, occurred at Alamogordo, NM.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Frits Zernike was born in Amsterdam. He was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his demonstration of the phase-contrast method- especially for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1739: Charles Francois de Cisternay Du Fay died in Paris, France. He was the first to explore the nature of static electric charges. He found two varieties, and he discovered that unlike charges attract and like charges repel each other.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 17:

• 1929: Goddard Space Center successfully launched a liquid-propellant rocket for the fourth time.
  
• 1850: Vega became the first star (excluding the sun) to have its picture taken.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 18:

• 1997: Geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who helped discover the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet that crashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994, was killed in an auto accident. He was 69.
  
• 1921: Astronaut John Glenn was born. He was the first American to orbit the Earth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discover polonium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1853: Hendrick Antoon Lorentz was born at Arnhem, The Netherlands. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with P. Zeeman 'for their researches into the influence of magnetism upon radiation phenomena.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1635: Robert Hooke was born in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, England. In 1676 he discovered the relationship between the tension of a spring and its stretch, now known as Hooke's Law.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 19:

• 1928: Enrico and Laura Fermi were married in Rome. Enrico Fermi later received a Nobel Prize in 1938 and Laura Fermi wrote his biography "Atoms in the Family".
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 20:

• 1975: Viking I landed on Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men to reach the moon when they landed Apollo 11, the Eagle.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: The German physicist Gerd Binnig was born on this date in 1947. Binnig shared the 1986 Physics Nobel Prize with Heinrich Rohrer for the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope.
  Source: Encyclopedia Britanica; submitted by Brian Smith.
• 1937: Guglielmo Marconi died in Rome and radio stations throughout the world observed two minutes of silence in tribute. His Nobel lecture, "Wireless telegraphic communication," was presented December 11, 1909.
  Source: Physics Infomall; Wikipeida.
• 1920: Mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann died in Selaca Lake Maggiore, Italy. Riemann's contributions to mathematics continue to help us solve modern physics problems.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 21:

• 1962: Light emitting diodes (LEDs) were developed for use in wrist watches.
  Source: Smithsonian Museum of Science; submitted by Brian Smith.
• 1938: German SS Commander Heinrich Himmler wrote to Werner Heisenberg to inform him that he had been cleared of Johannes Stark's charges that he was under the influence of "Jewish Physics".
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 22:

• 1962: Mariner 1 was launched for Venus. It was later destroyed due to a malfunction of the carrier.
  
• 1932: Reginald Fessenden, the inventor of AM radio in 1906, died in Hamilton, Bermuda.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1887: Gustav Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with J. Frank "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 23:

• 1984: A possible ring around Neptune was first observed. Neptune is now known to have incomplete rings (arcs).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1972: Landsat 1 was launched.
  
• 1945: Werner von Braun and 126 rocket scientists and engineers were authorized to enter the U.S.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1904: The ice cream cone was invented in St. Louis.
  

Historical Physics Events of July 24:

• 1974: Sir James Chadwick died in Cambridge, England. He discovered the neutron in 1932.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: First use of chaff to defeat radar.
  
• 1898: Aviatrix Amelia Earhart was born.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 25:

• 1909: The English Channel was first crossed by airplane.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 26:

• 1971: Apollo 15 was launched for the fourth lunar landing.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 27:

• 1866: The Atlantic telegraph cable was completed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1848: Baron Roland von Eoetvoes was born in Budapest, Hungary. He demonstrated in 1891 that inertial and gravitational masses are identical.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1848: Friedrich Ernst Dorn was born in Guttstadt (Dobre Miasto, Poland). He discovered radon in 1900, independently of E. Rutherford.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1759: Pierre de Maupertuis died in Basel, Switzerland. In 1736, he led an expedition to Lapland, where he proved that the Earth is flattened near the North Pole. This discovery showed that Newton's theory of gravity was correct.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 28:

• 1964: The first successful Ranger mission, Ranger 7, was launched. It sent back 4316 photos of the lunar surface before impact.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1915: Charles H. Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize with N. G. Basov and A. M. Prokhorov "for their fundamental work in the field of quantum electro which has led to the construction of oscillators
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1904: Pavel Alekesjevic Cherenkov was born in the Voronezh Region. He received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with I. M. Frank and I. E. Evgen'evic "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1866: Congress approved an act to switch the U.S. to the metric system.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 29:

• 1958: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, was authorized by Congress (Bill P185-568).
  
• 1914: The first US transcontinental telephone service was ignaugurated when 2 people held a conversation between New York and San Fransico.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Marie Childs.
• 1898: Isidor Isaac Rabi was born in Raymanov, Austria. He received the 1944 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of July 30:

• 1964: Ranger 7 impacted on the Moon. It sent back the first close-up photos of the lunar surface.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1928: E.U. Condon and Ronald W. Gurney wrote a letter to the journal Nature in which they described quantum mechanical tunneling of alpha particles.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1871: Lord Ernest Rutherford was born in Spring Grove, New Zealand.
  

Historical Physics Events of July 31:

• 1971: The first men to ride in a vehicle on the moon did so in the (LRV) or lunar rover vehichle. The LRV carried Apollo 15 astronauts, David R. Scott and James B. Irwin, for five miles on the lunar surface.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Marie Childs.
• 1969: Mariner 6 made its closest approach to Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1718: John Canton was born in Stroud, England. He developed a method for making an artificial magnet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 1:

• 1896: Sir William Robert Grove died in London, England. He produced the first fuel cell in 1839.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 2:

• 1939: Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President F.D. Roosevelt suggesting the feasibility of an atomic bomb.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1932: Carl Anderson discovers the positron in cosmic ray track in a cloud chamber.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1922: American inventor Alexander Graham Bell died in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1820: John Tyndall was born in Leighinbridge, Ireland. He popularized Maxwell's theory of heat as the motion of molecules.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 3:

• 1851: TGeorge Francis Fitzgerald was born in Dublin, Ireland. He theorized, independently of Hendrik Lorentz that objects would contract when moving at near-light speeds.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1610: Kepler first looked through a telescope.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 4:

• 1972: A huge solar flare was observed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 5:

• 1969: Mariner 7 flew by Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Astronaut Neil Armstrong was born.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 6:

• 1945: The U.S. (Enola Gay) dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 7:

• 1620: Kepler's mother was arrested for witchcraft, in response to Kepler's publication of a fantasy story about a trip to the Moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 8:

• 1985: Japan launched the Planet A Halley probe.
  
• 1980: Orbiter 1 was shut down.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1931: Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, England.
  
• 1902: Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England. He received the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with E. Schroedinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for research obtained with it, especially for artificial radioactive elements."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 9:

• 1969: Cecil Powell died near Bellano, Italy. He and his colleagues discovered the pion in 1947, and he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Prize for Physics for his photographic study of atomic nuclei.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 10:

• 1966: The first lunar orbiter was launched (USA).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: Robert Hutchings Goddard died in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the American pioneer in rocket science.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1915: Henry Moseley died in action at Gallipoli, Turkey. In 1913, he determined that the number of electrons an element has is equal to its atomic number.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 11:

• 1955: American physicist Robert Wood died. He worked extensively with optics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1909: First use of SOS as a disaster signal.
  
• 1877: American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the Martian moon Deimos.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1854: Macedonio Melloni died in Portici, Italy. He measured the energy of reflected sunlight from the Moon in 1846.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 12:

• 1960: Echo 1, the first U.S. passive communications satellite, was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1953: The first hydrogen (fusion) bomb was tested by the USSR.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1887: Erwin Schroedinger was born in Vienna, Austria. He received the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with P. A. M. Dirac "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 13:

• 1992: Anders Jonas Angstroem was born in Medelpad, Sweden. He discovered the existence of hydrogen in the Sun, from observing the solar spectrum in 1862.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1992: Robert G. Fuller received the AAPT Robert A. Millikan Lecture Award. His lecture presentation was titled "Hypermedia and the Knowing of Physics - Standing Upon the Shoulders of Giants."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1819: George Stokes was born in Skreen, Ireland. He described how water droplets fall through air in 1857. His theory can be applied to any small particle in any fluid.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 14:

• 1966: The first Lunar Orbiter spacecraft reached the moon and began transmitting photographs.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: Frederic Joliot-Curie died in Paris, France. He and his wife Irene won the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their synthesis of new radioactive elements.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Arthur Dempster was born in Toronto, Canada. He discovered the U-235 isotope of uranium in 1935.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 15:

• 1892: Prince Louis-Victor de Broglie was born in Dieppe, France. He received the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discovery of the wave nature of electrons."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1865: Hantaro Nagaoka was born in Nagasaki, Japan. He suggested a model for the atom comprised of a positive nucleus surrounded by a ring of electrons.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 16:

• 1960: Kittinger made the highest parachute jump 102800 feet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1858: President Buchanan used the first transatlantic cable.
  
• 1845: Gabriel Lippmann was born in Hollerich, Luxembourg. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his method of reproducing colors photographically based on the phenomenon of interference."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 17:

• 1970: The Russian probe Venera 7 was launched. It became the first satellite to return signals from Venus' surface.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Otto Stern died in Berkeley, California. He won the 1943 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on the magnetic momentum of molecular beams.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1877: Asaph Hall discovered the Martian moon Phobos.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 18:

• 1985: The Suisei probe was launched by Japan for a rendezvous with Halley's comet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1868: Helium was discovered on the sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 19:

• 1968: George Gamow died in Boulder, Colorado. He suggested the idea of electron tunneling in 1928, and he was influential in the development of the Big Bang theory in 1948.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: The first truly geosynchronous satellite, Syncom 3, was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1871: Orville Wright was born in Dayton, Ohio. He and his brother Wilbur designed the first airplane in 1903.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 20:

• 1977: Voyager 2 was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1975: Viking 1 was launched for a rendezvous with Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1961: 8/20/1961 Percy Bridgman died in Randolph, New Hampshire. He received the 1946 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the laws of high-pressure physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 21:

• 1950: The G. M. Giannini corporation filed a $10,000,000 lawsuit claiming that the U.S. government had infringed on patent rights concerning artificially induced radioactivity. The suit was later withdrawn.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: An accident at the Los Alamos laboratory of the Manhattan Project resulted in the first known fatality due to exposure to large amounts of radiation from a nuclear reactor.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1814: Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, died in Auteuil, France. He described heat as a kind of motion in 1798.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1789: Augustin Louis, Baron Cauchy was born in Paris, France. He invented the formulas that describe turbulence in 1815.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 22:

• 1940: Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge died in Lake, England. He predicted in 1851 that the Sun emits radiowaves, nine decades before they were observed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1915: James Hillier was born in Brantford, Ontario. He helped improve the electron microscope.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1834: Samuel Pierpont Langley was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He invented the bolometer to measure the radiation from the Sun in the visible and infrared regions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 23:

• 1806: Charles-Augustin Coulomb died in Paris, France. He proved in 1785 that the attraction and repulsion of charged particles obey an inverse square law.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 24:

• 79: Mount Vesuvius engulfs Pompeii.
  
• 1989: Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius died in Bonn, Germany. He was the first to use the term "entropy" (1865).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1832: Nicholas Carnot died in Paris, France. His work contributed to the discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 25:

• 1975: John Dunning died in Key Biscayne, Florida. He worked with fission of uranium, and contributed to the development of the atomic bomb in 1940.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: Antoine-Henri Becquerel died at Le Croisic. His Nobel lecture "On radioactivity, a new property of matter" was presented December 11, 1903.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Konstantin Edwardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian schoolteacher) completed the computations for rocket propulsion after 15 years of work. He also designed reaction engines that could escape the Earth's atmosphere.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1867: Michael Faraday died in Hampton Court, England. He discovered in 1831 that changes in a magnetic field produce an electric current, independently of J. Henry.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1822: Sir William Herschel died in Slough, Buckinghamshire, England. He made a reflecting telescope, completed in 1789, that was 49 inches (124.5 cm) in diameter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 26:

• 1980: Johann Lambert was born in Mulhause, Germany. He proved in 1768 that p is an irrational number and that it is not equal to the ratio of any two natural numbers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1980: Voyager 2 reached Saturn.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: James Franck was born in Hamburg, Germany. He was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with G. Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 27:

• 1962: Mariner 2 was launched for Venus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1958: Ernest Orlando Lawrence died at Palo Alto, California. His Nobel lecture "The evolution of the cyclotron" was presented on December 11, 1951. was presented on 11 Dec. 1951.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 28:

• 1973: 8/28/1973 Newspapers in the Soviet Union carried a letter which was signed by 40 academicians and which denounced Andrei Sakharov for actions that "discredit the good name of Soviet scien These actions would win Sakharov, a Soviet physicist, the Nobe
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. speaks about his dream.
  

Historical Physics Events of August 29:

• 1914: Bernard Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. He discovered that silver iodide can be used to produce precipitation when seeded into clouds.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1831: Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction; currents could be induced by making or breaking an electric circuit and its accompanying electromagnetic field.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 30:

• 1984: Space shuttle Discovery was launched for the first time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: J.J. Thomson died in Cambridge, England. His Nobel lecture "Carriers of negative electricity" was presented December 11, 1906.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1928: Wilhelm Wien died in Munich, Germany. His Nobel lecture "On the laws of thermal radiation" was presented December 11, 1911.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1912: Edward Mills Purcell was born in Taylorville, Illinois. He received the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics with F. Bloch "for their development of new methods for nuclear magn precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1871: Ernest Rutherford was born in Brightwater, New Zealand. He discovered the proton in 1914, and correctly described the structure of the atom in 1911. In 1908, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of August 31:

• 1979: Comet Howard Koomur Michels collided with the Sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1821: Birthday of Hermann L. F. von Helmholtz.
  

Historical Physics Events of September 1:

• 1962: The USSR attempted to launch a spacecraft to Venus, but the Spacecraft failed to leave Earth orbit.
  Source: Space Calendar by: Ron Baalke (NASA); submitted by Lea Alice Lancaster.
• 1877: Francis William Aston was born in Harborne, England. He built the first mass spectrograph.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1859: The first solar flare was observed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1747: In a letter to Peter Collinson, a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, Benjamin Franklin used his ideas about the "two states of Electricity, the plus and minus" to explain how a Leiden jar stores electrical charge.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 2:

• 1908: Hermann Minkowski presented a lecture "Space and Time" in which he described his mathematical formulation of the Special Theory of Relativity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1877: Frederick Soddy was born in Eastbourne, England. He worked with Rutherford on the radioactive decay of elements.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1752: September 2 was adjusted to become September 14.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 3:

• 1976: Viking 2 landed on Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Jeffery Goldstone was born in Manchester, England. He predicted in 1961 that zero mass particles would result from symmetry breaking. These particles became known as Goldstone particles.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Carl David Anderson was born in New York, New York. He was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize for Physics, with V. F. Hess, "for his discovery of the positron."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 4:

• 1956: IBM announced a 5 MB, one-ton disk.
  
• 1904: Einstein's superior at the Swiss Patent Office said that Einstein had "proved himself very useful." He was given a pay raise but not a promotion because he was "not yet fully accustomed to matters of mechanical engineering."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 5:

• 1977: Voyager 1 was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1906: Ludwig Boltzmann died in Duino, Italy. He developed statistical mechanics. He also shares the credit for the kinetic theory of gases with James Clerk Maxwell.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 6:

• 1922: William Lawrence Bragg presented his Nobel lecture "The diffraction of x-rays by crystals."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1892: Sir Edward Victor Appleton was born in Bradford, England. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his investigations of the physics of the upper atmosphere, especially for the discovery of the so-called Appleton layer."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1867: The Aurora asteroid was discovered.
  
• 1857: Johann Salomo Schweigger died in Halle, Germany. He invented the galvanometer in 1820. It measures the direction and intensity of electric current.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1732: Johan Carl Wilcke was born in Mecklenburg, Germany. He introduced the concept of specific heat in 1782.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 7:

• 1940: The Saturday Evening Post published an article on nuclear weapons - the last public article for almost five years.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 8:

• 1981: Hideki Yukawa died in Kyoto, Japan. He predicted the existence of mesons in 1935, and he won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: The T.V. series Star Trek premiered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1894: Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz died in Charlottenburg, Germany. He was among the first to identify the law of conservation of energy (1847).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 9:

• 1975: Viking 2 was launched for Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Luigi Palmieri died in Naples, Italy. He developed the first seismometer in 1855.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1737: Luigi Galvani was born in Bologna, Italy. His work with muscle response to electric current lead Alessandro Volta to invent the electric battery in 1791.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 10:

• 1892: Arthur Holly Compton was born in Wooster, Ohio. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize for Physics with C.T.R. Wilson "for his discovery of the effect named after him."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 11:

• 1985: ICE became the first spacecraft to encounter a comet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 12:

• 1970: Luna 16, was the first space probe to land on the Moon without humans aboard; scoops up samples and returns them to Earth(USSR).
  Source: Handbook of Current Science & Technology, Henry Holt, 1992; submitted by Veronica Griggs.
• 1959: USSR launched Luna 2- the first man-made object to hit the moon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Ernest Rutherford is quoted in the London Times as saying that the possibility of energy from the nucleus is "the merest moonshine".
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1897: Irene Joliot-Curie was born in Paris, France. She developed the first artificial radioative element (a radioactive form of phosphorus) with Frederic Joliot-Curie.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1758: Charles Messier began his catalogue of astronomical objects with the Crab Nebula.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 13:

• 1922: The hottest recorded day occurs in Libya: 136 degrees.
  
• 1845: Micheal Faraday discovered when plane polarized light passes through a piece of glass with a high refractive index, the plane of polarization can be rotated by intense magnetic force.
  Source: Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 11, pg.17; submitted by Shelly Bowman.

Historical Physics Events of September 14:

• 1959: Luna 2 (USSR) crashed between the lunar craters Archimedes and Autolycus in Mare Imbrium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: Igor Sikorsky flies first helicopter.
  
• 1712: Giovanni Domenico Cassini died in Paris, France. He was the first to observe the polar ice caps on Mars (1666) and he measured the rotation rate of Jupiter (1665).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1698: Charles Francois de Cisternay Du Fay was born in Paris, France. He was the first to notice that electric charges have two types, and that like charges repel each other and unlike charges attract (1733).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 15:

• 1941: Werner Heisenberg arrived in German-occupied Copenhagen to visit Neils Bohr. Heisenberg had a "vague hope" to convince Bohr that physicists should not work on nuclear weap The meeting went badly, and Bohr and Heisenberg's friendship ended.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1929: Murray Gell-Mann was born in New York, New York. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 16:

• 1736: Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit died in The Hague, The Netherlands. He constructed the first reliable thermometer in 1714.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 17:

• 1942: General Leslie Graves was named to head the Manhattan Project, the effort to build a fission weapon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1857: Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born in Izhevskoye, Russia. He was the first to publish realistic ideas about rocket technology (1895).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1826: Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born in Breselenz, Hanover. He developed the mathematics now widely used to solve problems in modern physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 18:

• 1967: Sir John Cockcroft died in Cambridge, England. He and Ernest Walton were the first to split an atom within a particle accelerator (1932). They received the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of the transmutation of atomic nuclei in accelerat
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Armand-Hippolyte Fizeau died in Ventueil, Seine-et-Marne. He measured the speed of light in air in 1849. He used a rotating gear and measured the time light took to pass between the gear's teeth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1819: Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault was born in Paris, France. He was the first to measure the distance between the Earth and the Sun (1862).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 19:

• 1935: Rocket theorist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky died in Kaluga, Russia. In 1895, he proposed that liquid fuel be used in rockets.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1843: Gustave-Gaspard de Coriolis died. He published his description of how moving bodies are affected by the Earth's rotation in 1835.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1761: Pieter van Musschenbroek died in Leiden, Holland. He invented a method of storing static electricity (the Leiden jar) in 1746, independently of Ewald Georg von Kleist.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1710: Ole Roemer died in Copenhagen, Denmark. Knowing the distances between Earth and Jupiter, he calculated the speed of light to be 240,000 km/sec.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 20:

• 1996: Paul Erdös, a Hungarian mathematician and considered a pioneer in the fields of number theory and combinatorics, died. He was born 26 Mar 1913.
  
• 1954: Under the supervision of John Backus at IBM, the first FORTRAN computer program was run.
  
• 1842: James Dewar was born in Kincardine, Scotland. He invented a thermos bottle which became known as the Dewar flask. He died
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 21:

• 1974: Louis-Paul Cailletet was born in Chatillon-sur-Seine, France. He and Raoul Pictet liquified oxygen in 1877.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1974: Mariner 10 made its second flyby of Mercury (<30,000 mi).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1950: Edward Arthur Milne died in Dublin, Ireland. He predicted the varying temperatures within the solar atmosphere, and the existence of the solar wind in 1921.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1926: Donald Arthur Glaser was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He received the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the invention of the bubble chamber."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1853: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was born in Groningen, The Netherlands. He received the 1913 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his investigations of the properties of ma at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 22:

• 1966: Vladimir Veksler died in Moscow. He designed the synchrocyclotron in 1945.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: Frederick Soddy died in Brighton, Sussex. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work with isotopes of radioactive elements.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1922: Chen Ning Yang was born in Hofei, Anwhei, China. He was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics with Tsung Dao Lee "for their penetrating investigation of the so-ca parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particle
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1791: Michael Faraday was born in Newington, Surrey, England. He suggested in 1845 that light was an electromagnetic wave.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 23:

• 1846: Neptune was discovered by Johann Gottfried Galle.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1819: Armand Hippolyte Fizeau was born in Paris, France. He predicted the red shift in light sources moving away from the observer in 1848.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 24:

• 1970: A lunar sample was first collected by a robot.
  
• 1945: Hans Wilhelm Geiger died in Potsdam, E. Germany. He developed the radiation detector known as the Geiger Counter with Ernest Rutherford in 1908.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1907: John Ray Dunning was born in Shelby, Nebraska. He was the first to confirm Meitner's theory of uranium fission experimentally.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 25:

• 1962: Andrei Sakharov, concerned about the effect on the environment, tried unsuccessfully to stop the explosion of a Soviet nuclear weapon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1644: Ole Roemer was born in Aarhus, Denmark. He measured the speed of light in 1675, using the satellites of Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 26:

• 1978: Karl Siegbahn died in Stockholm, Sweden. He received the 1924 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on x-ray spectroscopy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: W. Heisenberg was ordered to join the German Nuclear Physics Research Group.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1688: Willem Jacon van Gravesande was born in Hertsgenbosch, Holland. He published a paper in 1721 that strongly supported Newton's physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 27:

• 1921: Radar was first tested.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: A telegram from Lorentz to Einstein announced that Eddington had measured deflection of light as it passed near the sun.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Albert Einstein submitted his second paper on the special theory of relativity "Does the inertia of a body depend on its energy content?" which states the relationship between mass and energy E=mc².
  Source: The Timetables of Science (Hellemans & Bunch); submitted by Emily Vigour.

Historical Physics Events of September 28:

• 1953: Edwin Hubble died in San Marino, California. He observed in 1929 that the farthest galaxies are receding faster than those that are closer, thus establishing the idea of an expanding universe.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1924: The first round-the-world flight was completed.
  
• 1860: Paul Ulrich Villard was born in Lyon, France. He was the first to observe gamma rays (1900).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1698: Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was born in St. Malo, France. In 1732, he published calculations that supported Newton's prediction of the shape of the Earth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 29:

• 1988: The space shuttle Discovery was launched, the first launch since the Challenger disaster in 1986.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: Neils Bohr and his family escaped from German-occupied Denmark and traveled to Sweden in a small boat.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1931: James W. Cronin was born in Chicago, Illinois. He and Val L. Fitch shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for Physics for demonstrating that charge parity and time symmetry could be violated.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy. He received the 1938 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by s
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of September 30:

• 1954: The U.S.S. Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was commissioned.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1905: Nevell Mott was born in Leeds, England. He received the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics with P. W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck "for work on amorphous semiconductors."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Hans Geiger was born in Neustadt-an-der-Haardt, Germany. He and E. Rutherford made the first Geiger Counter in 1908.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1870: Jean Baptiste Perrin was born in Lille, France. He received the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his work on the discontinuous structure of matter, and especially for his discovery of sedimentation equilibrium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 1:

• 1957: The Soviets announced the transmission frequencies of their first satellite.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 2:

• 1853: Dominique-Francois Arago died in Paris, France. He discovered the magnetic effect of electricity passing through a copper wire in 1820.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1791: Alexis-Therese Petit was born in Vesoul, France. He and P. Dulong discovered the relationship between specific heat and atomic mass in 1818.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1608: Johann Lippershey of Middleburg claimed a 30 yr license to build telescopes from the Estates General of the Netherlands. He was refused on the grounds that two others also claimed the invention.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 3:

• 1985: The space shuttle Atlantis made its first flight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1967: An X-15 rocket-plane reached 4520 mph- a record that still stands.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: Max Planck died in Goettingen, Germany. He received the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics for his quantum theory of light.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: A rocket reached outer space for the first time.
  
• 1716: Giovanni Beccaria was born in Mondovi, Italy. He wrote a paper in 1753 that supported Benjamin Franklin's theories about electricity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 4:

• 1959: Luna 3 (USSR) was launched. This spacecraft took the first photographs of the dark side of the moon.
  
• 1957: Sputnik 1 was put into orbit. It orbited every 1½ hrs.
  

Historical Physics Events of October 5:

• 1943: Neils Bohr traveled to England after his escape from German-occupied Denmark.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, met for the first time with Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi and others in Chicago.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Robert Hutchings Goddard was born in Worchester, Massachusetts. He was one of the first to design and construct rockets.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 6:

• 1903: Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was born in Dungarvan- County Waterford- Ireland. He was awarded the 1951 Nobel Prize with J. D. Cockcroft 'for their pioneer work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1889: Thomas Edison shows first movie.
  

Historical Physics Events of October 7:

• 1933: Einstein left Europe to become a permanent resident of the United States.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Max Planck discovered his equation for black body radiation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1885: Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen. He received the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for the investigation of the structure of atoms- and of the radiation emanating from them.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 8:

• 1959: The first photograph was taken of the far (dark) side of the moon. (USSR)
  
• 1942: General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, met with J. Robert Oppenheimer and E.O. Lawrence in Berkeley, California.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Marcus Oliphant was born in Adelaide, Austria. He discovered tritium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 9:

• 1975: The Nobel Committee announced that Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who is credited with development of the Soviet fusion weapon, was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to protect human rights in the USSR.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: Pieter Zeeman died in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He and Hendrik Lorentz shared the 1902 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of the effect of magnetism on electromagnetic radiation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1933: Jansky announced that radio waves emanated from the center of our galaxy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1879: Max von Laue was born in Pfaffendorf- near Koblenz. He received the 1914 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for his discovery of the diffraction of Röntgen rays by crystals.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1873: Karl Schwarzschild was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He developed equations in 1916 that were later used to predict the existence of black holes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 10:

• 1731: Henry Cavendish was born in Nice, France. In 1798, he determined the value for the gravitational constant G. With this number, he then calculated the mass of the Earth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 11:

• 1984: Astronaut Kathy Sullivan, on board the space shuttle Challenger, became the first American woman to walk in space.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts W. Schirra, D. Eisele and R. Cunningham.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1965: Cosmic rays were first measured.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt received Alexander Sachs- who discussed the contents of the letter of August/2/1936 signed by Albert Einstein.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1889: James Prescott Joule died in Sale, England. He determined the mechanical equivalent of heat in 1843, and in 1847, he discovered the law of conservation of energy, independently of I. Mayer.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1705: Guillaume Amontons died in Paris, France. He invented a thermometer based upon air pressure in 1702.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 12:

• 1860: Elmer Sperry was born in Cortland, New York. He invented the gyrocompass in 1911.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 13:

• 1993: Russell A. Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor Jr. were informed that they had won the Nobel Prize for Physics, for their discovery of a binary pulsar. This object was being used to Einstein's prediction that moving objects emit gravitational waves.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1813: Humphrey Davey and Michael Faraday begin a tour of Europe. During this tour they met with Gay Lussac, Arago, Humboldt, Cuvier, Rumford and Volta.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 14:

• 1992: Georges Charpak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. He invented detector devices used on particle accelerators to look deep into the structure of matter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: The first live telecast from a manned spacecraft, Apollo 7, was transmitted.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: Charles E. Yeager flew faster than the speed of sound in the X-1 rocket plane.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 15:

• 1951: Greek mathematical physicist Demetrios Christodoulou, recipient of the Bôcher Memorial Prize, was born. He is well known in the field of general relativity for his proof, together with Sergiu Klainerman, of the nonlinear stability of the Minkowski vacuum.
  Source: Wikipedia.
• 1937: New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, recipient of 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (born in 1871), died.
  Source: Wikipedia.
• 1910: Indian-born physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, 1983 Nobel Prize laureate (shared with William Alfred Fowler) for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars, was born.
  Source: Wikipedia.
• 1909: French physicist Marguerite Perey was born.
  Source: Wikipedia.
• 1804: Antoine Baume died in Paris, France. The Baume scale is used to measure the specific gravity of liquids.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1608: Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist and mathematician, was born. He is best known for his invention of the barometer.
  Source: New York Times.

Historical Physics Events of October 17:

• 1933: Albert Einstein arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from Nazi Germany.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1887: Gustav Robert Kirchhoff died in Berlin, Germany. He and Robert Bunsen introduced the spectroscope in 1859. They used it to study the solar spectrum and to discover the element cesium in 1860.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1820: Edouard-Albert Roche was born in Montpellier, France. He determined that within 2.5 planetary radii, the gravitational force of an orbiting body will not hold that body toget Saturn's rings lie within the Roche Limit for that planet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 18:

• 1989: Spacecraft Galileo was launched, beginning a 6-year journey to Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1967: The Venera 4 probe (USSR) parachuted through the Venetian atmosphere. Contact was lost 1 hr- 38 min. after the probe entered the atmosphere.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1757: Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur died in La Bermondier, France. He constructed an alcohol thermometer in 1730.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 19:

• 1942: General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer first met with Vanevar Bush, chair of the Military Policy Committee, to discuss the Manhattan Project.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1939: President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a letter to Albert Einstein thanking him for his letter of August 2 and informing him that a committee would "thoroughly investigate possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1937: Lord Ernest Rutherford died in Cambridge, England. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work with radioactivity, alpha particles and atomic structure.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Max Planck presented his equation for black body radiation to the German Physical Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1899: Robert Hutchings Goddard's Dream Day. This was the day Goddard climbed a cherry tree and dreamed of space travel. He celebrated it each year.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1875: Sir Charles Wheatstone died in Paris, France. In addition to the Wheatstone bridge, he also invented the stereoscope in 1832 and the first telegraph machine in 1831.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 20:

• 1891: James Chadwick was born in Cheshire- England. He was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for his discovery of the neutron.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 21:

• 1879: Edison first light bulb lasts for 13 hours.
  
• 1872: Jacques Babinet died in Paris, France. He suggested using the wavelength of light as the unit of standard measure in 1827. Today the standard meter is based upon the wavelength of krypton gas.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1803: John Dalton first published his Atomic Theory.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 22:

• 1966: The Soviet Union launches Luna 12 for orbit around the moon.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1938: Chester Carlson invented the photocopier. He tried to sell the machine to IBM, RCA, Kodak and others.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1934: Enrico Fermi's research group- in Rome- induced radioactivity in silver by slowing neutrons with paraffin and water before they struck the aluminum.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1881: Clinton Joseph Davisson was born in Bloomington- Illinois. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics with G. P. Thomson 'for their experimental discovery of the diffraction of electrons by crystals.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1842: William Robert Grave wrote to Michael Faraday and described a "voltaic pile of alternate tubes of hydrogen and oxygen" (the first fuel cell).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1797: Andre-Jacqes Garnerin made the first successful parachute descent from a balloon at some 2,200 feet over Paris.
  Source: HistoryNet.

Historical Physics Events of October 23:

• 1944: Charles Glover Barkla died in Braidwood, Edinburgh. He received the 1917 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on x-ray scattering from elements.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1944: Felix Bloch was born in Zürich- Switzerland. He received the 1952 Nobel Prize with E. M. Purcell 'for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: Il'ja Michajlovic Frank was born in Leningrad. He was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with P. A. Cerenkov and I. E. Tamm 'for the discovery and interpretation of the Cerenkov effect.'
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1873: William David Coolidge was born in Hudson, Massachusetts. He invented the hot-cathode x-ray tube in 1913.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 24:

• 1961: Coast-to-coast telegraph service began.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Pierre Weiss died in Lyons, France. He created the domain theory of ferromagnetism. This theory explains why magnets aligned pole-to-pole exhibit an increased magnetic force.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Anna Edson Taylor, 43, is the first woman to go safely over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1804: Wilhelm Eduard Weber was born in Wittenberg, Germany. He developed a logical system of fundamental units of electricity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1601: Tycho de Brahe died in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was the first to collect precise measurements of the positions of the planets. These data were later used by Kepler to develop his laws of orbits.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 25:

• 1975: The Venera 10 lander sent back the first photos of the Venetian surface.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Richard E. Byrd, U.S. aviator and explorer who made the first flight over the North Pole was born.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1806: Benjamin Banneker died in Baltimore- Maryland.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 26:

• 1934: Enrico Fermi- Emilio Segre- and others applied for a patent for their process to produce artificial radioactivity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 27:

• 1980: Bern Matthias died in La Jolla, California. He worked with high temperature (20.05) superconductors.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1980: John Van Vleck died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics with P. W. Anderson and N. F. Mott, for his work on the magnetic properties of atoms.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1972: The last signal was received from Mariner 9 during orbit 698 around Mars- just prior to the radio transmitter shutting off in response to NASA's 45960th command.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: Lise Meitner died in Cambridge, England. In 1939 she informed Niels Bohr that her former collaborators, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, had successfully split uranium. shared her announcement with those gathered at the Annual Conferences on Theoretical Phy
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1961: A Saturn rocket was launched for the first time. It had a 200 mile trajectory.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1873: Farmer Joseph F. Glidden applies for a patent on barbed wire.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1859: Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen announce the first measurements of frequencies of spectral lines.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1845: Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier died. He discovered that a current flowing across a contact between two different kinds of metal will release or absorb heat, depending upon current direction.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 28:

• 1937: The Earth experienced the closest known approach by an asteroid (Hermes).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1845: Zygmunt von Wroblewski was born in Grodno, Poland. He was the first person to liquefy hydrogen.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1831: Micheal Faraday succeeded in generating a steady current by rotating a copper disk, with leads from the center to the edge, between the poles of a permanent magnet. This device is now known as the homopolar gennerator.
  Source: Encyclopedia Americana, Vol. 11, pg.17; submitted by Jeff Stephenson.

Historical Physics Events of October 29:

• 1942: In a letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer, Victor Weisskopf suggested kidnapping Werner Heisenberg, the head of German nuclear research.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Albert Einstein began his university studies in Zurich, Switzerland.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 30:

• 1975: Sir George Thomson died in Cambridge, England. He and Clinton Davisson won the 1937 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of electron diffraction by crystals.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of October 31:

• 1992: Pope John Paul II formally announced that the Roman Catholic Church erred when it condemned Galileo for supporting a Sun-centered solar system.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1956: Sir Franz Simon died in Oxford, England. He developed magnetic methods to attain temperatures close to absolute zero.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1896: Lorentz and Zeeman announced the discovery of "magnetic splitting of spectral lines."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1828: Joseph Swan was born in Sunderland, England. He developed a practical carbon-thread electric lamp, independently of Thomas Edison.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 1:

• 1977: Chiron- the farthest known asteroid- was discovered.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1952: The Mike hydrogen bomb explosion destroyed Eluqelab Islet of Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshal Islands.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1911: Donald Kerst was born in Galena, Illinois. He built the first usable betatron.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 79: The city of Pompeii is buried by eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.
  Source: HistoryNet.

Historical Physics Events of November 2:

• 1966: Peter Debye died in Ithaca, New York. He received the 1936 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his study of dipolar moments.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1936: BBC starts TV with EMI 405-line system.
  

Historical Physics Events of November 3:

• 1973: Mariner 10 was launched- destined to encounter Venus and Mercury.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: Sputnik 2 was launched with the fox-terrier Laika aboard.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: Frank Piasecki flies first Vertol helicopter.
  

Historical Physics Events of November 4:

• 1847: Dr. James Simpson discovers chloroform.
  
• 1845: Michael Faraday discovered diamagnetism.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 5:

• 1967: The first photograph showing one full side of the Earth was taken.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer was informed that she was to receive the Nobel Prize for Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1879: James Clerk Maxwell died in Cambridge, England. His famous equations describing electromagnetism were introduced in 1864.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1845: Michael Faraday sent to the British Royal Society a paper which described the phenomena that became known as the Faraday Effect.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 6:

• 1919: The official announcement confirming that light is bent as it passes close to the sun was made to the Royal Astronomical Society and Fellows of the Royal Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1601: Johannes Kepler succeeded Tycho de Brahe as Imperial Mathematicus at Prague.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 7:

• 1940: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed on a typical breezy day in Tacoma Narrows, Washington. This event was filmed, and later used to study resonance and its effects upon construction.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in Trichinopolyin, India. He was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1878: Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria. She assisted Otto Hahn with the first nuclear fission experiments in 1938.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1867: Marie Sklowdowska-Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland. She received the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics with her husband P. Curie "for their joint researches on the radiation pheno discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel." Henri Becquerel also shared
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 8:

• 1895: Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen first observed the effects of x-rays while working with a cathode ray tube in Giessen, Germany.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1711: Mikhail Lomonosov was born in Deniskova, Russia. He formulated the laws of conservation of mass and energy in 1748.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1656: Edmund Halley was born in Haggerston, England. He first observed the comet that now bears his name in 1682. In 1705 he predicted it would return every 76 years. When it returned in 1758, the comet was named after him.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 9:

• 1967: The first Apollo flight took place - a Saturn 5 rocket with the Apollo 4 capsule.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1934: Carl Sagan was born.
  
• 1731: Benjamin Banneker was born in Ellicott's Mills, Maryland.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 10:

• 1989: Texas was chosen to be the site of the largest super collider yet to be constructed. In October of 1993, Congress voted to discontinue the project.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Enrico Fermi received word that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in nuclear physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 11:

• 1974: Burton Richter, Stanford University, and Samuel C.C. Ting, Brookhaven, announce the discovery of the J particle (J/Psi.)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: The patent for the laser was given to Gordon Gould, Columbia University graduate student.
  Source: The Timetables of Science (Hellemans & Bunch); submitted by Emily Vigour.
• 1935: An Explorer 2 balloon set an altitude record of 72,000 ft. over South Dakota. It took the first photograph that showed the curvature of the Earth.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 12:

• 1980: Voyager 1 reached Saturn
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1966: A total eclipse of the sun was photographed by Gemini XII Astronauts
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1960: The satellite Discoverer XVII is launched into orbit from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1859: The first flying-trapeze circus act is performed by Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon. He designed the garment that bears his name: The leotard.
  Source: HistoryNet.

Historical Physics Events of November 13:

• 1973: Mariner 10 fired its rockets executing the first mid-course correction en route to Venus.
  
• 1971: Mariner 9 entered orbit around Mars. This was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1957: Gordon Gould makes first laser.
  
• 1831: James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He developed the statistics to describe the behavior of molecules in a gas in 1859, independently of L. Boltzmann.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 14:

• 1969: Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice during lift-off- but the lunar landing mission was completed successfully.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1716: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz died in Hanover, Germany. He developed calculus independently of Newton. His mathematical notation is still used today.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 15:

• 1959: Charles Thomson Rees Wilson died in Carlops at Glencorse (near Edinburgh). His Nobel lecture "On the cloud method of making visible ions and the tracks of ionized particles" was presented on December 12, 1927.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1738: Frederick Wilhelm (William) Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany. He discovered infrared radiation in 1800.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1630: Johannes Kepler died in Ratisbon, Germany. His laws of planetary motion were discovered unintentionally, while he attempted to prove another theory.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 16:

• 1974: The first international interstellar radio message was sent by the Arecibo radio telescope.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1973: Skylab was visited for the last time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1965: Venera 3 was launched. This was the first spacecraft to touch another planet (Venus).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: Otto Hahn was notified that he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1717: Jean le Rond d'Alembert was born in Paris, France. He extended Newton's Laws to cover closed systems in 1743, and in 1747 he solved the partial differential wave equation in two dimensions.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 17:

• 1970: Luna 17 (USSR) set down the lunar rover Lunokhod 1. It transmitted photos for 10 months.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Eugene P. Wigner was born in Budapest, Hungary. He received the 1963 Nobel Prize, with M. G. Mayer and J. H. D. Jenson, "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary partic particularly through the discovery and applic
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 18:

• 1968: The Soviet Union recovered the Zond 6 spacecraft after a flight around the moon.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1962: Niels Bohr died in Copenhagen, Denmark. His Nobel lecture "The structure of the atom" was presented on December 11, 1922.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut in space was born on this day.
  Source: HistoryNet.
• 1897: Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was born in London, England. He received the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in nuclear physics and cosmic radiation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1883: The uniform time zone was adopted
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1839: August Adolph Eduard Eberhard Kundt was born in Schwerin, Germany. In 1866 he measured the speed of sound in different gases.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1789: Louis Jacques Daguerre, French painter, physicist, and photography pioneer, was born on this day.
  Source: HistoryNet.

Historical Physics Events of November 19:

• 1969: Apollo 12's lander Intrepid set down at Oceanus Procellarum, 600 ft. from Surveyor 3.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1829: Michael Faraday gave the first part of a lecture to the British Royal Society on the improvement of the optical quality of glass for telescopes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1700: Abbe Jean-Antoine Nollet was born in Pimprez, France. He made one of the first electrometers in 1747.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 20:

• 1889: Edwin Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri. In 1929, he correlated the distances to other galaxies and their receding speeds, and concluded that the universe is expanding.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1888: Bundy invents the time clock.
  
• 1882: Astronomer Henry Draper died in New York, New York.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 21:

• 1974: A team at the Stanford Linear accelerator have discovered the Y' particle, an excited state of the J.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1970: Sir Chandrasekhara Raman died in Bangalore, India. He received the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics for his laws of light diffusion.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1877: Edison annouces his "talking machine."
  

Historical Physics Events of November 22:

• 1955: The Soviet Union exploded a fusion weapon to test an idea of Andrei Sakharov. That evening Sakharov offered the following toast, "May all our devices explode as successf as today's but always over test sites and never over cities."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1944: Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington died in Cambridge, England. In 1919 he used a solar eclipse to test the validity of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1904: Louis Neel was born in Lyons, France. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics with H. Alfven for his "fundamental work and discoveries concerning antiferromagnetism ferrimagnetism which have led to important applications in solid state physic
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1833: Michael Faraday attempts to separate gases by selective absorption. He does not succeed.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 23:

• 1937: Jagadischandra Bose died in Giridh, India.
  
• 1929: Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh visited Goddard- leading to a $50000 grant from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the promotion of aeronautics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1887: Henry Moseley was born in Weymouth, England. He placed elements in the periodic table due to their x-ray spectra, and suggested that the atomic number of an element tells how many electrons an atom of that element has.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1837: Johannes Diderik van der Waals was born in Leyden, The Netherlands. He was awarded the 1910 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his work on the equation of state for gases and liquids."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 24:

• 1969: Apollo 12 Splashed down.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1926: 11/24/1926 Tsung Dao Lee was born in Shanghai, China. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize with Chen Ning Yang "for their penetrating investigation of the parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 25:

• 1933: The first liquid fueled Soviet rocket was launched; it flew 240 feet.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1915: Albert Einstein completed his theory of gravitation (the general theory of relativity).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1814: Julius Robert Mayer was born in Heilbronn. He was the first to state the Law of Conservation of Energy (1842).
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 26:

• 1965: French launch their first satellite becoming the third nation to enter the space age.
  

Historical Physics Events of November 27:

• 1971: USSR probe Mars 2 became the first man-made object to land on Mars; however, contact was lost soon after touchdown.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1895: The Nobel prize foundation was established.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1848: Henry Augustus Rowland was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. In 1886, he found precise wavelengths for approximately 14,000 lines in the solar spectrum.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1842: John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, was born in Terling Place, England. He received the 1904 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of argon.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1701: Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer and chemist, was born in Uppsala, Sweden. He invented the Celsius scale thermometer in 1742.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 28:

• 1964: US spacecraft Mariner 4 was launched for a rendezvous with Mars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1914: Johann Wilhelm Hittorf died in Munster, Rhenish, Prussia. He explained in 1853 why ions of a specific type gather at one of two electrodes in ionic solution.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1660: The Royal Society was founded.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1602: Otto von Guericke was born in Magdeburg, Germany. He began to produce good vacuums in 1645, and spent the following decades exploring their properties.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 29:

• 1954: Enrico Fermi died in Chicago, Illinois. His Nobel lecture "Artificial radioactivity produced by neutron bombardment" was presented December 12, 1938.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1803: Christian Doppler was born in Salzburg, Austria. He explained in 1842 why the sound emitted by a moving object changes pitch when it passes an observer.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of November 30:

• 1954: Mrs. E. Hulitt Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama was bruised by a meteorite at her home. She is the only person known to be injured by a meteorite.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1869: Nils Gustaf Dalen was born in Stenstorp, Sweden. He received the 1912 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunc with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1756: Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was born in Wittenberg, Germany. He worked with sound vibrations in solids.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 1:

• 1921: The first helium-filled balloon flight was made.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 2:

• 1971: USSR probe Mars 3 landed on Mars and transmitted information for 20 seconds before malfunctioning.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1942: Enrico Fermi supervised the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in a squash court at the University of Chicago.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1881: Heinrich Barkhausen was born in Bremen, Germany. He explained why iron emits sounds when subjected to a changing magnetic field.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 3:

• 1984: Bhopal chemical accident kills thousands.
  
• 1973: Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to fly by Jupiter.
  
• 1886: Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn was born in Orebro, Sweden. He received the 1924 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his discoveries and research in the field of x-ray spectroscopy."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1829: Michael Faraday gave the second part of a lecture to the British Royal Society on the improvement of the optical quality of glass for telescopes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 4:

• 1996: The Mars Pathfinder was launched. It arrived at Mars on July 4th 1997.
  Source: NASA; submitted by David Collins.
• 1978: Samuel Goudsmit died in Reno, Nevada. He and George Uhlenbeck hypothesized electron spin in 1925.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1965: Gemini 7 began the longest Gemini flight (320 hours).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Wolfgang Pauli, unable to attend a conference in Tubingen, Germany, wrote a letter to the conference participants. It began, "Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen and contained the hypothesis of the existence of the neutrino.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1893: John Tyndall died in Hindhead, England. He discovered in 1869 that a beam of light can be observed from the side if it passes through a colloidal solution.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 5:

• 1974: Pioneer 11 flew by Jupiter.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1932: Albert Einstein was granted a visa allowing him to travel to the United States.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1932: Sheldon Glashow was born in New York, New York. He received the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam for successfully unifying the weak force and electromagnetism.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1903: Cecil Frank Powell was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England. He received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear proce and his discoveries regarding mesons made with this method."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Werner Heisenberg was born in Wuerzburg, Germany. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, among other thi led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1868: Arnold Sommerfeld was born in Koenigsberg (Kalingrad), USSR. He altered the Bohr model of the atom to include elliptical orbits.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 6:

• 1973: Sir Robert Watson-Watt died in Inverness. He led the team that created the first radar.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: Neils Bohr and his son, Aage, arrived in the U.S. after their escape from German-occupied Denmark..
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1941: Vannevar Bush, head of the Uranium Project, announced an all-out effort to speed up nuclear research.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Enrico and Laura Fermi left Italy with their two children for Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. They did not return to Italy.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Clyde Cowan, Jr. was born in Detroit, Michigan. He and F. Reines were the first to observe neutrinos.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: George Uhlenbeck was born in Batavia, Indonesia. He and S. Goudsmit added half-integer quantum numbers to the hydrogen atom model in 1925.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 7:

• 1993: Wolfgang Paul died in Bonn, Germany. He shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physics with N. F. Ramsey and H. Dehmelt for his development of a method for isolating subatomic particles.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1972: Apollo 17 was launched for the sixth and longest lunar landing (12 days- 14 hrs.).
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1968: The OAO-2 satellite was launched (Orbiting Astronomical Observatory). It supported 11 telescopes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1910: Richard Brooke Roberts was born in Titusville, Pennsylvania. He discovered in 1939 that uranium, when undergoing a fission reaction, does not release all its neutrons at the same time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 9:

• 1937: Nils Gustaf Dalen died in Lidingoe, Sweden. He received the 1912 Nobel Prize for Physics for inventing automatic gas regulators for lighthouses and sea buoys.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1917: Leo Rainwater was born in Council, Idaho. He received the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics with Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in at nuclei and the development of the theory
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 10:

• 1993: The experimental fusion reactor at the Princeton Plasma Phsics Laboratory produced a record breaking 6.4 million watts of power. This is about a quarter of the power needed to run the reactor.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1906: Walter Zinn was born in Kitchner, Ontario. He developed an experimental breeder reactor near Idaho Falls, Indiana.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Wilhelm Roentgen received the first Nobel Prize for Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1831: Thomas Johann Seebeck died in Berlin, Germany. He discovered thermoelectricity in 1821.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1829: Michael Faraday gave the third part of a lecture to the British Royal Society on the improvement of the optical quality of glass for telescopes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 11:

• 1972: Astronauts stood on the Moon for the last time. (Apollo 17)
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1950: Hantaro Nagaoka died in Tokyo, Japan. He developed a model of the atom which had electrons orbiting in a ring around the nucleus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1945: Charles Fabry died in Paris, France. He discovered the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere in 1913.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1902: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz delivered the first Nobel lecture for Physics, "The theory of electrons and the propagation of light." Most Nobel lectures are presented on December 11 or December 12.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Max Born was born in Breslau, Poland. He received the 1954 Nobel Prize, with W. Bothe, "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wave function."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1863: Annie Jump Cannon was born in Dover, Delaware. She created the spectral subclasses for stars.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1781: David Brewster was born in Jedburgh, Scotland. He worked with optics and polarized light.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1748: Ewald Georg von Kleist died in Koslin, Pomerania (Poland). He invented the Leiden jar in 1746, independently of Pieter van Musschenbroek.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 12:

• 1961: Venera 1 was launched, the first space probe intended to reach another planet- Venus (USSR)
  Source: Submitted by Veronica Griggs.
• 1926: In a letter to Max Born, Albert Einstein wrote, "Quantum Mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a but does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate a
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: A radio signal crossed the Atlantic for the first time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 13:

• 1992: The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine was restarted after the nuclear accident in 1986.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1948: Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett presented his Nobel lecture "Cloud chamber researches in nuclear physics and cosmic radiation."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: Wolfgang Pauli presented his Nobel lecture "Exclusion principle and quantum mechanics."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1937: Clinton Joseph Davisson presented his Nobel lecture "The discovery of electron waves."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Philip Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indianna. He received the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics with N.F. Mott, and J.H. Van Vleck, "for work on amorphous semiconductors."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1920: A star's size was measured for the first time by A. A. Michelson at the Mt. Wilson Observatory.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Einstein's first paper "Deductions from the Phenomena of Capillarity" appeared in Annalen der Physik.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1724: Fraz Ulrich Theodosius Aepinus was born in Rostock, Germany. He believed that ordinary matter would repel itself in the absence of electricity.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 14:

• 1989: Andrei Sakharov, a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, died in Moscow.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1986: An experimental aircraft, piloted by Jeane Yeager and Dick Yuton, began the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1962: Mariner 2 flew within 22,000 miles of Venus. NASA announced that Mariner 2 had made radio contact with Venus.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1922: Nikolai G. Basov was born in Usman near Voronezh. He received the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics with C. H. Townes and A. M. Prochorov "for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplif
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1908: Gabriel Lippmann presented his Nobel lecture "Color photography."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Max Planck presented the concept of quanta of light to the German Physical Society.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1546: Danish astronomer Tycho de Brahe was born. His careful measurements of the positions of the planets enabled Kepler to develop his orbital laws.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 15:

• 1984: USSR launched spacecraft Vega to meet comet Halley.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1965: Two spacecraft met for the first time while in orbit (Geminis 6 and 7).
  
• 1958: Wolfgang Pauli died in Zurich, Switzerland. He received the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physics for his exclusion principle.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1852: Antoine Henri Becquerel was born in Paris, France. He received the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, with P. Curie and M. Curie, "for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 16:

• 1970: A USSR probe successfully landed on Venus for the first time.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1776: Johann Ritter was born. He discovered ultraviolet radiation in 1801.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 17:

• 1972: Apollo 17 lifted off from the Moon for home.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1969: Project Blue Book was closed by the US Air Force after concluding that there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1964: Victor Hess died in Mount Vernon, New York. He received the Nobel Prize for Physics, with Carl D. Anderson, for his discovery of cosmic radiation.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1907: Lord Kelvin died in Netherhall, Scotland. He worked extensively with thermodynamics. He developed a form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the concept of absolute zero in 1851.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1903: At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright brothers first achieved powered flight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1777: Joseph Henry was born in Albany, New York. He worked extensively with electricity and magnetism, often paralleling M. Faraday's research, but with more practical applications.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 18:

• 1944: Werner Heisenberg presented a seminar in Zurich, Switzerland. In the audience was U.S. intelligence agent Mae Berg, who was prepared to kill Heisenberg if it seemed that Heisenberg leading a German atomic bomb effort. Berg did not.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1856: Joseph John Thomson was born in Manchester, England. He was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 19:

• 1972: Apollo XVII landed.
  
• 1953: Robert Andrew Millikan died in San Marino, California. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of elemental electric charge and for his work with the photoelectric effect.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1946: Paul Langevin died in Paris, France. He developed sonar in 1915, with the idea of helping ships detect icebergs.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Otto Hahn wrote a letter to Lise Meitner and informed her of the discovery that uranium undergoes fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1852: Albert Abraham Michelson was born in Strelno, Prussia (Germany). He received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physics "for his optical precision instruments and meteorlogical investigations carried out with their aid."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 20:

• 1939: Max von Laue first viewed electron microscopy in the laboratory of Manfred von Ardenne.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1900: Giacobini discovered a comet destined to be the first comet visited by a spacecraft.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 21:

• 1968: The manned lunar orbiter Apollo 8 was launched.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1938: Otto Hahn sent Lise Meitner a copy of a paper which concluded that uranium undergoes fission.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: The Curies discovered radium.
  
• 1837: Michael Faraday read to the British Royal Society a paper "On Induction." In this paper he introduced the concept which later was called the dielectric constant.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 22:

• 1895: Wilhelm Roentgen took an x-ray photograph of the hand of his wife, Bertha. Exposure time was probably about 15 minutes.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1821: Michael Faraday entered into his diary a sketch of an apparatus for "electromagnetic rotations," the first motor.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 23:

• 1986: Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Laureate and Soviet physicist, was allowed to return to Moscow after almost six years of isolation in Gorky.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1947: Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain from Bell Labs invented the transistor.
  
• 1722: Axel Fredrik Cronstedt was born on December 23, 1722. He was a Swedish chemist who is known for his discovery of nickel and his mineral classification scheme.
  Source: Science Now; submitted by Carrie Duncan.

Historical Physics Events of December 24:

• 1979: The Franco-European launcher, Ariane, made its first flight.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1872: William John Macquorn Rankine died in Glasgow. Many of the modern terms used in thermodynamics first appeared in Rankine's Manual of the Steam Engine in 1859.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1854: Johann Elster was born in Bad Blankenburg, Germany. In 1901, he and Hans Geitel demonstrated that radioactivity is present in the natural environment.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1833: Michael Faraday performed experiments on molten tin-chloride, molten lead-chloride and other substances, which will lead him to the Law of Electrolysis.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1818: James Prescott Joule was born in Salford, England. He discovered the Law of Conservation of Energy in 1847, independently of Julius Mayer.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 25:

• 1984: First man-made comet was visible in the sky on this Christmas day. A sphere of chemicals from a West Germany satallite appeared to be yellowish-green, and in the constellation Virgo.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Jeff Stephenson.
• 1938: Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch calculated the energy released in fission of uranium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1930: Eugen Goldstein died in Berlin, Germany. He was the first to observe cathode rays.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1923: Albert Einstein wrote to Marie Curie to explain that he had resigned from a committee of the League of Nations because he felt it was more concerned with manipulating power than promoting peace.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1821: Michael Faraday demonstrated to his wife a primitive form of an electric motor.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1642: Isaac Newton was born in Woolstorpe, Lincolnshire, England. His birthday is also reported on January 4th. Can you explain why?
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 26:

• 1944: Hanford Works start plutonium separation.
  
• 1906: Ernst Ruska was born in Heidelberg, Germany. He created the first crude electron microscope. It achieved a magnification of 400.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1901: Robert Van de Graaff was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He designed a generator of static electricity in 1933 that could produce 7 million volts.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1898: Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Gustave Bemont discover radium.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1861: Emil Wiechert was born in Tilsit, Germany. He invented the inverted pendulum seismograph in 1900.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1831: Michael Faraday showed that a single loop of wire rotating in the Earth's magnetic field produces a current.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 27:

• 1939: Benjamin Harrison Brown received the 1939 Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1822: Louis Pasteur, father of the pasteurization process, was born of this day.
  Source: Netscape's this Day in History; submitted by Melanie Smith.
• 1571: Johannes Kepler was born in Weil, Wuerttemberg, Germany. His orbital laws resulted from years of careful calculations with Tycho de Brahe's measured positions of the planets. Teachers.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 28:

• 1932: Floyd Karker Richtmyer presented his paper "Physics is Physics" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Atlantic City. This paper published in February of 1933 as the first article in "The American Physics Teac
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1919: Johannes Rydberg died in Lund, Malmoehus, Sweden. He developed an equation to describe the positions of spectral lines in 1854, independently of Balmer.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1895: Wilhelm Roentgen's first paper, "On a New Kind of Ray," is sent to publishers announcing the X-Ray.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1882: Arthur Stanley Eddington was born in Kendal, England. He made major contributions to the field of astronomy, including the mass-luminosity law for stars and the composition of white dwarfs.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1873: William Harkins was born in Titusville, Pennsylvania. He predicted the existence of the neutron, later discovered by James Chadwick.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1663: Francesco Maria Grimaldi was born. He discovered the wave-like properties of light in 1618, but his work is largely ignored until Thomas Young rediscovers interference and diffraction of light in 1803.
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 29:

• 1948: Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal publicly revealed that the U.S. was considering artificial satellites.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1796: Johann Christian Poggendorf was born. He was the founder and editor of the "Annals of Physics and Chemistry." In 1821, he invented the galvanometer, a device for detecting weak electric currents.
  Source: Physics Infomall & Science Now.

Historical Physics Events of December 30:

• 1947: William Harley Barber received the 1947 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "Forty Years of Physics at Ripon College."
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1943: Neils Bohr and his son, Aage, joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1941: Arthur H. Compton presented the first Richtmyer Memorial Lecture of the American Association of Physics Teachers, "War Problems of the Physics Teachers," before the AAPT and the American Physical Society at Princeton University.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1941: Henry Crew received the 1941 AAPT Oersted Medal for Notable Contributions to the Teaching of Physics.
  Source: Physics Infomall.
• 1940: Robert Andrews Millikan received the 1940 AAPT Oersted Medal. His acceptance speech was titled "The Opportunity of the Physics Teacher."
  Source: Physics Infomall.

Historical Physics Events of December 31:

• 1924: Hubble announced the existence of extra-galactic objects (galaxies), significantly expanding the size of the Universe.
  Source: Physics Infomall.