Template:On This Day (nonfiction)/April 16
1178 BC: A solar eclipse occurs. Homer's Odyssey contains a passage which may reference the eclipse: "The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world."
1495: Mathematician and astronomer Petrus Apianus born. Apianus' works on cosmography, Astronomicum Caesareum (1540) and Cosmographicus liber (1524), will be extremely influential in his time.
1673: Leibniz wrote to Oldenburg about series: "I conjecture that Mr. Collins himself does not speak of these summations of infinite series because he brings forward the example of the series 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, ... which if it is continued to infinity cannot be summed because the sum is not finite, like the sum of the triangular numbers, but infinite. But now I am cramped by the space of my paper."
1682: Mathematician John Hadley born. Hadley will lay claim to the invention of the octant, two years after Thomas Godfrey claims the same. Hadley will also develope ways to make precision aspheric and parabolic objective mirrors for reflecting telescopes.
1705: Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton knighted by Queen Anne at Trinity College.
1864:Inventor Thomas Blanchard dies. Blanchard pioneered the assembly line style of mass production in America, and also invented the major technological innovation known as interchangeable parts.He also invented America's first car (1825), powered by steam, which he called a "horseless carriage".
1958: Chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin dies. Franklin made contributions to the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
1958: The United States military announces that the search for hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb was unsuccessful.
2008: Mathematician Edward Lorenz dies. Lorenz introduced the strange attractor notion, and coined the term butterfly effect.