Template:Selected anniversaries/August 16: Difference between revisions
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||1852: Johann Heinrich Graf born ... mathematician who was rector of the University of Bern and promoter of the Swiss National Library. Pic. | ||1852: Johann Heinrich Graf born ... mathematician who was rector of the University of Bern and promoter of the Swiss National Library. Pic. | ||
||1858: U.S. President James Buchanan inaugurates the new transatlantic telegraph cable by exchanging greetings with Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. However, a weak signal forces a shutdown of the service in a few weeks. | ||1858: U.S. President James Buchanan inaugurates the new transatlantic telegraph cable by exchanging greetings with Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. However, a weak signal forces a shutdown of the service in a few weeks ... 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first official telegraph message across the Atlantic Ocean from London to the US. (Test messages had been exchanged for 10 days). Her message to President Buchanan, in Washington DC, began transmission at 10:50am and was completed at 4:30am the next day, taking nearly 18-hrs to reach Newfoundland. With 99 words, consisting of 509 letters, it averaged about 2-min per letter. The message was forwarded across Newfoundland by an overhead wire supported on poles; across Cabot Strait by submarine cable to Aspy Bay (Dingwall), Cape Breton; and by an overhead wire across eastern Canada and Maine, via Boston to New York. This earliest Transatlantic cable went dead within a month. | ||
||1863: Frederic Stanley Kipping born ... chemist. He undertook much of the pioneering work on silicon polymers and coined the term silicone. Pic not Wikipedia: https://www.google.com/search?q=frederick+kipping&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS702US702&oq=Frederick+Kipping&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i60j69i61j0l2.527j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 | ||1863: Frederic Stanley Kipping born ... chemist. He undertook much of the pioneering work on silicon polymers and coined the term silicone. Pic not Wikipedia: https://www.google.com/search?q=frederick+kipping&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS702US702&oq=Frederick+Kipping&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i60j69i61j0l2.527j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 | ||
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||1957: Irving Langmuir dies ... chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate. | ||1957: Irving Langmuir dies ... chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate. | ||
||1960, Captain Joseph W. Kittinger made the longest delayed parachute jump on record when he bailed out of a balloon at 102,800 feet. He dropped 84,700 feet (31,330 m) or 16.04 miles (31.3 km), falling for 4 min 49 sec, before opening his main 28-foot parachute over New Mexico. Before opening his main parachute, his near free-fall was stabilized with a six-foot canopy to prevent a fatal flat spin. During the near free fall, he may have broken the sound barrier, reaching 714 mph (1149 kph) in the rarified air at high altitude. He wore a pressure suit. Layers of clothes gave protection in the sub-zero temperatures. He had proved man could survive a fall in near-space. | |||
||1966: Vietnam War: The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigations of Americans who have aided the Viet Cong. The committee intends to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 people are arrested. | ||1966: Vietnam War: The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigations of Americans who have aided the Viet Cong. The committee intends to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 people are arrested. | ||
Revision as of 20:06, 14 August 2018
1650: Monk, cosmographer, and cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli born. He will gain fame for his atlases and globes; some of the globes will be very large and highly detailed.
1694: Mathematician, astronomer, and crime-fighter Christiaan Huygens reveals in autobiography that he uses statistical analysis and games of chance to catch math criminals in the act.
1705: Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli dies. He discovered the fundamental mathematical constant e, and made important contributions to the field of probability.
1821: Mathematician and academic Arthur Cayley born. He will be the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way, as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws.
1898: Mathematician and crime fighter Erik Ivar Fredholm publishes new class of integral equations which anticipate the use of Hilbert spaces in high-energy literature.
1899: Chemist and academic Robert Bunsen dies. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.
2017: Researchers publish new evidence that "suicide-by-Ultravore" is on the rise.