On November 2, 1885, the Banff Hot Springs Preserve was established. Two years later and enlarged, it was renamed Rocky Mountains Park – Canada’s first national park – then renamed Banff National Park in 1930. The preserve’s original 26 km2 (10 mi2 ) expanded…
On October 31, 1994, Death Valley became a National Park. Located in eastern California’s Mojave Desert, Death Valley is in the lowest, driest place in North America, and the hottest in the world. Its valley floor is 86 m (282 ft) below sea level…
On September 30, 1905, bird photographer Alfred Donald Trounson, OAM, was born. He spent most of his life as a British diplomat on government assignments in Italy and New York. At his last posting in Australia, the song of a backyard bird launched Trounson’s…
On September 17, 1857, self-taught physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in Russia. Enamoured by the possibility of space flight and the potential of rockets to make it happen, he wrote about the subject in science fiction and technical papers… in hundreds of publications. He…
On September 5, 1892, Danish anthropologist and cartographer Therkel Mathiassen was born. He studied Arctic cultures at sites from Greenland to Nunavut and followed the spread of culture and emigration of Inuit ancestors. He named these the Thule people. Mathiassen located little groups of…
On August 31, 1821, German physician and physicist Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was born. He became a universal scholar – natural science, medicine, physiology, physics, chemistry, music, acoustics, electromagnetics, meteorology, and their related technologies. He explored current theories, performed his own experimental research,…
On May 26, 1951, astrophysicist Sally Ride was born. Selected to the first group of astronauts chosen for the space shuttle program, she was the first American woman in space. Ride received training in many fields for her NASA service and executed several astronaut…
On May 24, 1686, self-taught physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was born. He was also a self-taught engineer and, having once worked as a glass blower, became an innovative maker of scientific instruments. At the time, although thermometers were available for trade, no two ever…
On December 18, 1971, Capitol Reef National Park in the south-central Utah desert was signed into law. It is the home of several unusual geologic formations such as the Waterpocket Fold. In the Late Cretaceous approximately 70 to 50 million years ago, a monocline…
On December 17, 1908, American physical chemist Willard Frank Libby was born. He specialized in radiochemistry, the chemistry of radioactive materials. Radiochemistry includes the study of both natural and man-made radioisotopes. Isotopes are variants of a specific chemical element that differ from each other…