On May 13, 1857, Dr. Ronald Ross was born into an age when many suspected that putrid air was the culprit that killed hundreds of thousands of people and who called this killer disease malaria from the Italian mal’aria [“bad air”]. Toward the end…
On April 18, 1906, the most destructive earthquake in US history devastated much of San Francisco. This event, approximately 8.0 on the yet-to-be-invented Richter scale, occurred along the San Andreas Fault, a tectonic plate boundary from which the Earth’s crust spreads horizontally as the…
On March 17, 2002, NASA launched the GRACE twins, two Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites. They flew about 220 km ( 137 mi ) apart in a polar orbit at 485 km (300 mi) above Earth, measuring regional areas of its gravity field,…
On January 4, 1809, inventor and educator Louis Braille was born near Paris. He played and “helped’ his father who made harnesses and other leather goods in his workshop. On one fateful day, playing with an awl, a sharp, pointed tool for piercing leather,…
On December 30, 1863, American physician and bacteriologist William Hallock Park was born. He specialized in nose and throat diseases in New York City and soon became interested in the new science of bacteriology. In NYC, a lengthy epidemic of diphtheria had become the…
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 December 17, 1972, the recovery ship USS Ticonderoga picked up the Apollo 17 command module from the Pacific Ocean. The splashdown, a return-to-Earth routine of manned spacecraft in that day, marked the capping moment of the capping mission of the Apollo manned lunar…
On December 6, 1901, American landscape photographer Eliot Furness Porter was born. A chemical engineering graduate from Harvard and a medical graduate from its School of Medicine, he taught biochemistry at the university. As a boy on family camping trips, Porter had been attracted…
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 10, 2003, Congaree was designated a National Park, a South Carolina wilderness area, that was formerly the Congaree Swamp National Monument. It is an alluvial or flood plain, part of a river system where sediment deposits build up on one side and…