The "full list" of scientific discoveries – or, at least, of those that are recorded in this blog (unlike Jan 1, which leaves them out, this version includes the special list for the epoch of Sanctorius which is on March 29; this list is also chronological, where the Jan 1 list follow the calendar) - 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?:
Names in green
are on the Index of Names; names in Amber are among the Merely Mentioneds
648
BCE: Archilocus is the
first to make a written account of an eclipse (on April 6); there are others on June 4 and Oct
13, while June 4 disputes
his “firstness”. 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
1543: Mikolaj Kopernik's "De revolutionibus orbium
coelestium" published (March 21)
1602: Tycho Brahe's "Astronomia Instauratae
Progymnasmata" locates 777 fixed stars (March 29) (Galileo Galilei is working on gravitation and
oscillation but hasn’t risked publishing yet)
1603: Fabricio di Acquapendente discovered vascular valves (though
he didn’t really; it had been known about for centuries) (March 29)
1603: Hugh Plat discovered coke by heating coal (March 29)
1604: Giambattista Della Porta described a machine that could use
steam pressure (March 29)
1605: Gaspard Bauhin published "Theatrum anatomicum", an
encyclopaedia of anatomy (March 29)
1606: Galileo Galilei invented the proportional compass (March 29)
1608: Johannes
Lippershey invented
the telescope (March 29)
1609: Johannes Kepler published his 1st and 2nd Laws in
"Astronomia Nova" (March 29)
1610: Galileo Galilei discovered the first 3
satellites of Jupiter (see the Index of Names for his
other listings) (Jan 7)
1610: Jean Beguin created "Tyrocinium
chymicum", the first chemistry textbook [in the Christian world] (March 29)
1610: Thomas Harriot discovered sunspots (surprising that Galileo didn’t see them
first; he is recorded in the same year, using Lippershey's telescope to observe the satellites of Jupiter) (March 29)
1611: Marco de Dominis published a scientific explanation
of rainbows (March 29)
1611: Santorio Sanctorius devised a temperature scale for Galileo's air thermometer (melting snow = 0 degrees, boiling
water = 110 degrees)
1611: Orion Nebula discovered by Nicholas
Peiresc (Nov 25)
1614: John Napier calculated logarithms (March 29)
1614: Santorio Sanctorius published "De medicina statica", a study of metabolism and
perspiration (March 29)
1616: Willebrord Snellius proved the laws of refraction and
1617: the same man established
the technique of trigonometrical triangulation for cartography (March 29)
1618: Johannes Kepler announced the 3rd law of planetary motion (March 8)
[and I am including this here, but only because pub quizzes still think this is the correct
answer: 1619: William Harvey “discovered” what the Arab world had known for
centuries, the circulation of the blood (March 29)]
1626: Sanctorius adapted his
thermometer for use with humans (March 29)
1627: Kepler published the
Rudolphine Tables, map-referencing 1005 fixed stars (March 29)
1629: Giovanni Branca in "Le Machine" described a steam turbine (March 29)
1629: Christiaan
Huygens discovered Saturn's rings (April 14), and then, in 1655, Titan, Saturn’s
moon (March 25)
1629: Albert Girard introduced brackets and abbreviations into mathematics (March 29)
1656: Edmund Halley, he of the comet, born today in 1656 (Nov 8)
1684: Gottfried Leibniz published his invention of Calculus (see Nov 18 but more on the Index of Names)
1719: the first recorded display of Aurora Borealis in the US
- apparently twenty thousand year old Algonquin tales of the fire built by Nanahbozho don’t count as genuine recordings (Dec 11)
1781: Uranus discovered by Frederick William Herschel (March 31 and Nov 15)
1783: First manned balloon flight, by Jean de
Rozier and the Marquis
d'Arlande on Nov 21
1787: first steam-powered boat demonstrated (Dec 3)
1797: the first parachute jump was made, by André-Jacques Garnerin (Oct 22)
1801: Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid,
Ceres (Jan 1)
1807: The first street to be lit by gas lamps can be found on Jan 28
1839: first ever photograph of the moon, taken by Louis Daguerre (Jan 2)
1843: Robert Koch, the German bacteriologist who discovered the anthrax disease cycle in
1876, the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis in 1882, and that of cholera in
1883, can be found celebrating his own birthday in good health on Dec 11
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 Humphry
Davy (Dec 11)
1846: Neptune discovered by Johann Gottfried Galle (Sept 23)
1846: C.F. Schoenbein obtained the patent for cellulose nitrate explosive on Dec 5; but does this really count as an achievement, or should it go with Henry Ford’s
cars on a special GER list for the sciences?
1851: Two of Uranus' moons - Ariel and Umbriel - discovered by
William Lassell (Oct 24)
1876 Daniel
Stillson of Massachusetts
patented the 1st adjustable pipe wrench Dec 5 (believe me, for people in the
trade, this was a huge scientific achievement)
1877: Asaph
Hall, US astronomer, discovered the two
moons of Mars (Phobos and Deimos) on Aug 11
1877: The first recording of human speech may or may not have
been made today by Thomas Edison (Nov 20)
1879: the 1st automatic telephone switching system patented -
by Almon B Strowger as it happens, in Kansas City (Dec 5)
1895: Wilhelm
Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays (Nov 8 )
1896: Radioactivity discovered by Henri
Becquerel (March 1)
1897: Joseph
Thompson, discoverer of the electron, is
blogged on his 1856 birthday (Dec 18), but the great achievement actually took place on April
30 1897
1902: Pierre and Marie Curie isolated radium
(April 20)
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 (Nov 11)
1911: an airplane was used in war for the first time: (well they obviously thought it was a major piece of human progress) Oct 22
1930: Planet Pluto “discovered” by Clyde
Tombaugh at the Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona (Feb 18)
1933: “Edwin
Howard Armstrong, inventor of FM radio”, can be
found “born today in 1890” on Dec 18. When I first put these scientists’ names on the blog,
I was too busy finding the names to research them any further; so a number are
listed for their birthday (which does not merit inclusion on a scientific
achiements list), because I didn’t know the date of their real achievement(s).
In Armstrong’s case it was December 26 1933, and so I am listing him here on
that date
1934:
instantaneous phonograph recording was made possible - by who though? The Library of Congress (click here) offers an entire pdf of information about the development
of the recording industry, but no name (Oct 22)
1938: something
called a Xerographic copier was invented, by one Chester F. Carlson, a machine
that I take to be the Xerox (Oct 22)
1945: First atom bomb tested (July 16, but see Jan 27)
1945: Microwave oven patented by Percy
L. Spencer (Dec 7)
1948: the first solar heating system was set up, by Maria Telkes, in Dover, Massachussetts (Dec 24)
1948: the Zoom lens patented by Frank G Back (Nov 23)
1949: RCA Victor unveiled the 45 rpm record (Feb 1)
1955: Dr. Jonas Edward Salk reduced polio to virtually zero with one vaccine? (Oct 28)
1957: Sputnik 1 (USSR), the first manmade space satellite,
launched (Oct 4)
1959: Explorer 6 takes the first photos of Earth from space (Aug 7); and in the same year Luna 3 became
the first satellite to photograph the far side of the moon (Oct 4, but see Oct 7 for my questioning the whole thing)
1961: Vostok 2 orbited the earth 17 times (Aug 7)
1964: China set off its first atom bomb (Oct 16) - America has carried out more than fifty nuclear tests over the
years, starting on July 16 1945, and not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki
1967: the first successful human heart transplant, surgical
team led by Dr Christian Barnard (Dec 3 )
1966: Luna 9 launched on Jan 31; Luna 10 became the first
spacecraft to orbit the moon on April 3; and Lunar Orbiter 7 photographed the first image of Earth from the
vicinity of the Moon on Aug 23
1969: Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission,
launched. The first man to walk on the moon’s surface, Neil
Armstrong, did so at 4:17 pm (that’s 02.56
GMT) on July 21
1970: Lunokhod I, landed on the moon (Nov 17)
1971: Apollo 14 launched (Jan 31)
1971: Soyuz 11 (the first humans to die in space) launched on June 6
1971: The first satellite launched from a manned spacecraft
(Apollo 15) on Aug 4
1971: Mariner 9 became
the first spacecraft to orbit Mars (Nov 13), while Mars 3 made the first softlanding on Mars on Dec 2
1972: Apollo 17, the final manned lunar landing mission,
launched (Dec 7)
1973: Pioneer 10 made the first flyby of Jupiter (Dec 3)
1975: Apollo and Soyuz docked in space (July 17); later that year Venera 9 returned the first photographs of
Venus' surface (Oct 22)
1976: Viking 1 landed on Mars (July 4), and I am by no means clear what
the difference is, but Viking 2 “softlanded” on Mars later in the same year (Sept 3)
1977: Concorde began flying to New York from London and Paris (Nov 22)
1978: Charon (Pluto's moon) discovered by James
Christy and Robert Harrington (June 22)
1978: Pioneer Venus 1 became the first craft to orbit Venus (Dec 4)
1979: Voyager 1 passed Jupiter (March 5)
1980: Photographs taken from Voyager 1 identify ninety-five
separate rings of Saturn (Nov 7); its closest approach to Saturn is on Nov 12
1981: Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn (Aug 25)
1982: the first artificial heart transplant sadly failed on Dec 2, but see Dec 3 (and 1967, above)
1983: Pioneer 10 became the first manmade
object to leave the solar system (June 13)
1984: Apple unveiled the Macintosh computer (Jan 24); that’s Bill Gates I believe, who can be found on Oct 28
1984: The first hotographic evidence of another solar system
presented (Oct 15), and at the same time the first "planet" outside our solar
system was discovered - the man responsible for that latter was Dr
Donald McCarthy Jr (Dec 10)
*
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 through them all yet.
c200 BCE: The multi-tube
seed drill was invented
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