The "full list" of scientific discoveries, or at least, those that are recorded in this blog (though I confess that I am beginning to have my doubts about quite a few of them: how many of these “so-called” achievements have actually done more harm than good?):
January 1 1801: First asteroid discovered 1801
January 2 1839: first ever photograph of the moon, taken
by Louis Daguerre
January 7 1610: Galileo Galilei
discovered the first 3 satellites of Jupiter (see the Index of Names for his other listings)
Jan 24 1984: Apple Computer unveiled the Macintosh
computer
Jan 28 1807: First street to be lighted by gas lamps
Jan 31 1966: Luna 9 launched; 1971 Apollo 14 launched
Feb 1 1949: RCA Victor unveiled the 45 rpm record, today
in 1949
Feb 18 1930: Planet Pluto “discovered” by Clyde Tombaugh
at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
March 1 1896: Radioactivity discovered by Henri
Becquerel
March 5 1979: Voyager 1 passed Jupiter
March 8 1618: Johannes Kepler announced the 3rd law of planetary motion
March 21 1543: Mikolaj Kopernik's "De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium" published
March 25 1655: Titan (moon of Saturn) discovered by
Christiaan Huygens
March 31 1781: Uranus discovered by William Herschel (or
possibly on the 13th?)
April 3 1966: Luna 10 (USSR) became the first spacecraft
to orbit the moon
April 6 648 BCE: first recorded eclipse/Archilocus (there are
others on June 4 and Oct 13, while June 4 disputes “first recorded”). April 6
also records eclipses on January 9th 2001, in August 1978 in Botswana, and on
August 21 2017, plus the Transit of Venus on June 8 is mentioned, but not
blogged on that date
April 12 1961: Vostok 1 (USSR), first man in space (Yuri
Alexseyevich Gagarin), launched
April 14 1629: Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn's
rings
April 20 1902: Pierre and Marie Curie isolated radium
June 6 1971: Soyuz 11 (USSR) (first humans to die in
space) launched
June 13 1983: Pioneer 10 (US) became the first manmade
object to leave the solar system
June 22 1978: Charon (Pluto's moon) discovered by James
Christy and Robert Harrington
July 4 1976: the spacecraft Viking landed on Mars
July 16 1969: Apollo 11 (US), first manned lunar landing
mission, launched. Ist atom bomb tested (but see Jan 27)
July 17 1975: Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in
space
July 20 1976: Viking 1 (US) landed on Mars; 1969: Apollo
11 (US) landed the first man, Neil Armstrong, on the moon (4:17 pm)
August 4 1971: First satellite launched from a manned spacecraft
(Apollo 15)
August 7 1959: Explorer 6 takes 1st photos of earth from
space; 1961: Vostok 2 orbited the earth 17 times
August 11 1877: Asaph Hall, US astronomer, discovered
the two moons of Mars (Phobos and Deimos)
August 23 1966: First image of Earth from the vicinity
of the Moon (Lunar Orbiter 7)
August 25 1981: Voyager 2 (US) made its closest approach
to Saturn
September 3 1976: Viking 2 (US) softlanded on Mars
September 23 1846: Neptune discovered by Johann
Gottfried Galle
October 4 1957 : Sputnik 1 (USSR), first manmade space
satellite, launched. 1959: Luna 3 (USSR), first satellite to photograph
the distant side of the moon, launched; it returned its first images of
the Moon's farside on Oct 7 (which is why I
have the event on both dates; but see Oct 7 for my questioning the whole thing)
October 15 1984: First photographic evidence of another
solar system presented
October 16: China set off its first atom bomb, today in
1964 (America has carried out more than 50 nuclear tests over the years,
starting on July 16, above, and not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
October 22 1975: Venera 9 (USSR) returned the first
photographs of Venus' surface
October 24 1851: Two of Uranus' moons discovered (Ariel
and Umbriel) by William Lassell
October 28 1914: Dr. Jonas Edward Salk born. Who did
what? Developed the polio vaccine? Seriously? But that's an enormous thing to
have done - why have I never heard of him? And Bill Gates born on the same day
- but a different year: 1955
November 7 1980 : Voyager I photographs identify 95 separate Saturn rings
November 8 1895: Wilhelm Conrad
Roentgen discovered X-rays; Edmund Halley, he of the comet, born today in 1656;
and Christian Barnard in 1922 - but see
December 3 for that
November 11 1925: Cosmic Rays named, and reported, by
Robert Millikan in the journal “Science”, though actually the work had been
done by Victor Hess in 1912
November 12 1980: Voyager 1 (US) made its closest
approach to Saturn
November 13 1971: Mariner 9 (US) became the first
spacecraft to orbit Mars
November 15 1738: Sir William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, born
today
November 17 1970: Lunokhod I, Russia's belated response
to Kennedy, landed on the moon
November 20 1877: The first recording of human speech
may or may not have been made today by Thomas Edison
November 21 1783: First manned balloon flight, by Jean
de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes
November 22 1977: Concorde began flying to New York from
London and Paris
Nov 23 1948: the Zoom lens patented by Frank G Back
November 25 1611: Orion Nebula discovered by Nicholas Peiresc
December 2 1971: Mars 3 (USSR) made the first
softlanding on Mars; and in 1982, the first heart transplant sadly failed; see
December 3
December 3 1973: Pioneer 10 (US) made the first flyby of
Jupiter
December 3 1787, first steam-powered boat demonstrated;
and the first successful human heart transplant, surgical team led by Dr.
Christian Barnard, 1967
December 4 1978: Pioneer Venus 1 (US) became the first
craft to orbit Venus
December 5 1846: C.F. Schoenbein obtained the patent for
cellulose nitrate explosive - does this really count as an achievement, or should it go with Henry
Ford’s cars on a special GER list for the sciences? and then what about, also
on Dec 5:
1876 Daniel Stillson of Massachusetts patented the 1st
adjustable pipe wrench
and
1879 the 1st automatic telephone switching system patented - by Almon B
Strowger as it happens, in Kansas City
and
1893 1st electric car, the "Still Car", named
for its creator
December 7 1945: Microwave oven patented by Percy L. Spencer; and 1972:
Apollo 17 (US), final manned lunar landing mission, launched.
December 10 1984: the first "planet" outside
our solar system was discovered - the man in charge was Dr Donald McCarthy Jr
December 11 1719: 1st recorded display of Aurora
Borealis in US (New England) - apparently it sent the entire colony into
mass-hysteria, mostly of a typically religious sort: click here for the tale
December 11 1843: Robert
Koch, German pioneer bacteriologist, born;
and still on December 11, but now in 1844: anaesthesia
first used in dentistry by Horace Wells (though actually the pioneering work on
N2O (nitrous oxide or laughing gas) was done fifty years previously by Humphrey
Davy)
December 18 1856: Joseph Thompson, discoverer of the
electron, born; also Edwin Howard Armstrong, inventor of FM radio, born today
in 1890
December 24 1948: the first solar heating system was set
up, by Dr. Mária Telkes, in Dover, Massachussetts
The almanacs also tell me that:
on Jan 1 in 1797, the first parachute
jump was made, by André-Jacques Garnerin
that
in 1911, an airplane was used in war for the first
time: in the 1911 Italo-Turkish War as it happens, with Italian Army Air Corps
Blériot XI and Nieuport IV monoplanes bombing a Turkish camp at Ain Zara in
Libya.
that
in 1934, "instantaneous phonograph recording
was made possible" - by who though? I thought that Thomas Edison already
invented this
all definitely
worthy of a place in the basement of the Science Hall of Fame, but unlikely to
achieve more than this brief mention here
that
in 1938, something called a Xerographic copier was invented, by one Chester F. Carlson, a machine that I take to be the Xerox;
*
There are also huge numbers of "discoveries" on the China pages that need adding, but, as observed in my intro to that page, they don't really count as genuine and authentic scientific discoveries anyway, because that description can only apply if you are male (they fit on that account), white (debateable; they are generally regarded as a pale shade of yellow), European (definitely not) and Christian (most certainly not). The example below is not the earliest; I just haven’t got around to going them all yet.
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