Template:Selected anniversaries/August 12: Difference between revisions

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||1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: Thirteen prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union.
||1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: Thirteen prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union.


||1953 – The first testing of a real thermonuclear weapon (not test devices): The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of "RDS-6s" (Joe 4), the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb.
||1953: The Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb, in Kazakhstan. Eight days later, the USSR published (20 Aug 1953) news of the H-bomb test. The explosion, with a yield of 400 kilotons (about 30 times the power of the bomb dropped on Japan, 6 Aug 1945), came less than 10 months after the first U.S. bomb test, Mike, (1 Nov 1952) announced by President Harry Truman on 7 Jan 1953. Notably, the Soviet bomb was more portable than the U.S. device—small enough to fit in a plane, and be easily weaponizeable, though its size limited the amount of thermonuclear fuel and explosive force. It had their own “layer cake” design of lithium-6 deuteride and tritium fuel layered with uranium. The American test was designed for greater explosive power.


||1955 – James B. Sumner, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1887). Pic.
||1955 – James B. Sumner, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1887). Pic.
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||George Braxton Pegram (d. August 12, 1958) was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. Pic.
||George Braxton Pegram (d. August 12, 1958) was an American physicist who played a key role in the technical administration of the Manhattan Project. Pic.


||1960 – Echo 1A, NASA's first successful communications satellite, is launched.
||1960: The U.S. launched the first telecommunications satellite, Echo 1, from Cape Canaveral, packed in a Thor-Delta rocket. At the altitude for low Earth orbit, above almost all of the Earth's atmosphere, the satellite was deployed and inflated with gas at low pressure to form a 100-ft (30.5-m) diameter spherical balloon made of metallized Mylar, 0.5 mils (12.7-μm) thick. Thus it is known as a balloon satellite, as originally conceived by William J. O'Sullivan (26 Jan 1956). Its orbit was at about 1,000 miles (1600-km). It was merely passive, to reflect microwave signals between points on Earth, similar to the way the Moon reflects light while the Sun is below the horizon. A commemorative stamp was issued 15 Dec 1960. Echo 1 remained in orbit until 24 May 1968. Telstar 1 followed 10 Jul 1962.


||1964 – Ian Fleming, English spy, journalist, and author (b. 1908)
||1964 – Ian Fleming, English spy, journalist, and author (b. 1908)
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||Gregor Wentzel (d. August 12, 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his early years, he contributed to X-ray spectroscopy, but then broadened out to make contributions to quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and meson theory.
||Gregor Wentzel (d. August 12, 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his early years, he contributed to X-ray spectroscopy, but then broadened out to make contributions to quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and meson theory.
||1978: The ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer) was launched. After completing its original mission in 1982, it was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) when it was gravitationally manuvuered to intercept the comet P/Giacobini-Zinner. On 11 Sep 1985, it flew relatively unscathed through the gas tail of that comet P/Giacobini-Zinner, at a speed of 21 km/sec at its closed approach of some 7,800-km downstream from the nucleus. The probe found a region of interacting cometary and solar wind ions, and encountered a comet plasma tail about 25,000 km wide. Water and carbon monoxide ions were also identified, which confirmed the “dirty snowball” theory proposed by Fred Whipple (1950).


||1979 – Ernst Boris Chain, German-Irish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906)
||1979 – Ernst Boris Chain, German-Irish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906)

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