May 24
1089: Celebrated jurist and monk Lanfranc dies.
1543: Mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus dies. He formulated a model of the universe that places the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe.
1686: Physicist and engineer Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit born. He will help lay the foundations for the era of precision thermometry by inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer and the Fahrenheit scale.
1734: Chemist and physician Georg Ernst Stahl dies. His works on phlogiston continue to be accepted as an explanation for chemical processes until the late 18th century.
1844: Samuel Morse sends the message "What hath God wrought" (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.
1928: Mathematician Bertram Kostant born. He will be one of the principal developers of the theory of geometric quantization.
1940: Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.
1974: Physicist Clyde Cowan dies. Cowan, along with Frederick Reines, discovered the neutrino in 1956; Reines received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 in both their names.
2024: Alley (24 May 2024).