A date in history of medicine, science, environmental study, space exploration of benefit to our knowledge of earth and life sciences of interest.
On July 15, 1943, British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born. As a research student, Bell Burnell assisted in the physical construction and operation of a Cambridge university radio telescope, consisting of thousands of poles wired and cabled over several acres of land. Additionally,…
On July 6, 1785, botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker was born. Always interested in botany, he collected and organized plant specimens from his earliest years. With his discovery of a new moss, Hooker was elected a Fellow of the Linnaean Society and, at 21,…
Right to the Core On June 4, 1889, geophysicist and mathematician Beno Gutenberg was born and made the study of Earth’s interior his life’s work. He was the first to determine the radius of Earth’s core. Perhaps the most important information geologists gather about…
On May 27, 1907, Rachel Louise Carson was born. She spent her entire life loving the natural world, particularly the ocean. She studied English and marine biology and wrote copy for weekly education broadcasts for U.S. Bureau of Fisheries [later named the U.S. Fish…
On May 25, 1889, Russian-born scientist, engineer, pilot and entrepreneur Igor Sikorsky was born. In 1913 he built the first fixed-wing four-engine aircraft in the world, achieving speed and altitude records only ten years after the Wright Brothers flight in 1903. Learning as he…
On May 11, 1906, world-renowned aviator Jacqueline Cochran was born. She held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other flyer during her career, receiving over 200 awards as a pilot. In 1941, Cochran piloted a bomber to England and, as a flight…
On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveller as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight in a space capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. He splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean where, in the routine retrieval of that…
On May 2, 1497, John and Sebastian Cabot set sail from Bristol, England, financed by Italian banks and authorized by Henry VII to find and investigate new lands. Cabot father and son reached a new found land on June 24th. Thinking it to be…
On April 26, 1900, physicist and seismologist Charles Francis Richter was born. A Californian intrigued by earthquakes and the waves of energy they release, he worked with Beno Gutenberg, a world authority on Earth’s interior physics and the man who proved Earth had a…
On April 21, 1838, John Muir was born. Muir was a naturalist who championed the creation of the first National Forests in the United States of America and co-founded the Sierra Club. As an explorer and writer, he inspired President Theodore Roosevelt’s innovative wildlife…