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…
On April 20, 1798, geologist William Edmond Logan was born in Montreal. He began assessing coal suppliers for an uncle’s copper plant in Wales. Logan became involved in mapping out coal resources nearby that were so accurate, that the Geological Survey of Great Britain…
On April 4, 1947, the largest sunspot group known was being recorded, often referred to as the “Great Sunspot of 1947”. Sunspots are counted in groups rather than individually. That April, this largest group of sunspots eventually covered a total area of the sun’s…
On March 31, 1839, Russian military explorer Nikolai Przewalski was born. A curious boy who wanted to travel, he realized early that his best chances for this were increased if he joined the army; the army travelled! When he finally became a commissioned officer,…
On March 29, 1910, Prince Albert I inaugurated the Musée Océanographique de Monaco / Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He stocked it with specimens he collected over his 30 years of sea exploration and expeditions. Some of these specimens had not been seen before. The…
On March 24, 1693, English clockmaker John Harrison was born. As England’s maritime exploits, explorations, and economy grew, the country’s mariners had run smack up against a seemingly impenetrable wall. They required convenient and accurate measure of their positions at sea, specifically their longitude,…
On March 16, 1750, astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born in Germany. She had a bad health childhood that included smallpox and Typhus that left her with a slightly scarred face and shorter than a parking meter. Her parents kept her at home as…