Template:Selected anniversaries/May 24

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  1089: Celebrated jurist and monk Lanfranc dies.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  1928: Mathematician Bertram Kostant born. He will be one of the principal developers of the theory of geometric quantization.

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  1940: Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.

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  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.