Science Teachers’ Assocation of NSW inc 2018–19 Calendar
MONDAY
TUESDAY
WEDNESDAY
1759, the British Museum
in London, world’s
oldest public national
museum, was opened to
small groups, admitted
by advance ticket for
conducted tours.
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1600, Johannes Kepler
arrived in Prague to
collaborate with Tycho
Brahe, who died Oct
1601, leaving his data
& instruments to the
mathematically skilled
Kepler, resulting in the
laws of planetary motion.
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1901 birth of Allen Du
Mont, US engineer
who perfected the first
commercially practical
cathode-ray tube;
important for much
scientific equipment and
an essential component
of television sets prior to
flat screens.
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1941, in Oxford, the first
injection of penicillin into
a human test subject was
conducted by Ernst Chain
and Howard Florey, who
developed this antibiotic. 1912, Robert Millikan
began his famous
experiment with 58
drops of oil. He earned
a 1923 Nobel Prize for
measurements of the
charge ‘e’ on the electron.
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1957, first use of an
external artificial
pacemaker coupled
with an internal heart
electrode; led to the
development of the
pacemaker industry.
1872 birth of Lafayette
B. Mendel, American
biochemist, whose
discoveries concerning
the value of vitamins and
proteins helped establish
modern concepts of
nutrition.
1723 death of
Christopher Wren,
English architect,
mathematician and
astronomer, who
designed some of
London’s most famous
buildings.
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SATURDAY
SUNDAY
1633, Galileo, age 68, left
Florence, Italy, to face the
Inquisition in Rome. By
June 1633, he gave in to
threats and renounced
his belief that the Earth
revolved around the Sun.
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1630 death of Henry
Briggs English
mathematician who
constructed the
decimal-based common
(Briggsian) logarithms
that use base 10.
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1972, the first hand-held
scientific calculator
marketed. Named
HP-35 for having 35
keys, it was the first to
perform logarithmic and
trigonometric functions
with one keystroke. 1880, the steamship SS
Strathleven arrived in
London with the first
successful shipment
of frozen mutton from
Australia. It had left two
months earlier and was
a breakthrough, since
previous exports of meat
had been in tins.
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1932, the neutron was
described in an article in
Nature by its discoverer,
James Chadwick, English
physicist who worked
with Ernest Rutherford,
investigating the
structure of the atom. 1865, Gregor Mendel,
aged 42, who discovered
the basic laws of
genetics, read his first
scientific paper to the
Brünn Society for the
study of Natural Sciences
in Moravia.
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1968 death of Howard
Florey, Australian
pathologist, who, with
Ernst Chain, researched,
isolated and purified
penicillin for general
clinical use.
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1936 death of Ivan
Pavlov, Russian
physiologist: 1904 Nobel
Prize for his work on
the ‘conditioned reflex.’
His famous experiment
trained a hungry dog to
salivate by associating a
bell sound with food. 1953, Crick and Watson
first announced the
double helix structure
of DNA. Their paper, A
Structure for Deoxyribose
Nucleic Acid, was
published in the 25 Apr
1953 issue of Nature.
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Australia Day
2006 death of
Nicholas Shackleton,
English geologist and
paleoclimatologist who
helped identify carbon
dioxide as a greenhouse
gas.
1977, deep-ocean
researchers discovered
extremophile life when
the submersible, Alvin,
went to the Pacific Ocean
floor near the Galapagos
and found food chains
fed by chemosynthetic
energy.
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FRIDAY
1825 birth of Edward
Frankland, English
chemist, one of the first
researchers in structural
chemistry, who became
known as the father of
valency.
1976, commercial
supersonic passenger
service began with two
simultaneous Concorde
jet airplane flights.
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THURSDAY
1932 birth of Dian
Fossey whose life work
was to study mountain
gorillas in Rwanda. She
founded the Karisoke
Research Center where
she was murdered in
1985, probably by local
poachers.
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1680 death of Jan
Swammerdam, Dutch
naturalist, known for
skilled microscopic
observations & accurate
illustrations, the first to
describe red blood cells
in 1658 and observe that
muscles change shape
but not volume.
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1903 birth of John
Eccles, Australian
neurophysiologist,
shared 1963 Nobel Prize
in Medicine for research
on the nerve synapse.
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1956 death of Meghnad
N. Saha, Indian
astrophysicist noted for
the thermal ionisation
equation, which, in
the form perfected by
E. Arthur Milne, has
remained fundamental
in all work on stellar
atmospheres.
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1869, Dmitri Mendeleev
worked with a set
of cards to make a
systematic arrangement
of chemical elements.
His result, copied onto a
document dated today,
became the Periodic
Table.
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1955 birth of Steve Jobs
who co-founded Apple
computers.
1946, Selman A.
Waksman announced
his discovery of the
antibiotic streptomycin,
the first effective
antibiotic specific against
tuberculosis.
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Science dates compiled by Sue Siwinski
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