On December 26, 1791, English mathematician and pioneer computer scientist Charles Babbage was born. He spent much of his life trying to plan and build a machine that would make as many calculations as possible. Error free, of course. He had read about the…
On November 13, 1981, after eight years in the planning and construction, the Canadarm first flew aboard STS-2. Officially known as the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, the RMS was Canada’s contribution to the Space Shuttle Program. Intended to assist moving materials around from and…
On November 1, 1880, astronomer, meteorologist, natural scientist, and Arctic explorer, Alfred Lothar Wegener was born in Berlin. Like many before him, Wegener was intrigued with the similarities of continental coastlines that seemed to once have fit together. Instead of merely regarding present coastlines,…
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 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…
On October 22, 1896, American biochemist and nutrition researcher Charles Glen King was born. For about 200 years, limes and lemons and a few certain other foods were known to be effective in preventing and treating scurvy, a nutritional deficiency disease that, untreated, leads…
On February 15, 1884, inventor and educator Alfred Carlton Gilbert was born. He paid for some of his university expenses by performing as a magician and launched a company to manufacture and sell magic kits. Upon graduating from Yale medical school, Gilbert chose to…