Today in History – May 23, 1930 – U.S. Plant Patent Act of the Hawley-Smot Trariff allows plants to be patented. This new U.S. Plant Patent Act provided, for the first time, patent protection for new and distinct varieties of asexually reproduced plants. Plant breeders now had a financial incentive to perform plant breeding experiments and exercise control over their discoveries. The new law was motivated by the work of Luther Burbank, who had performed over 100,000 horticultural experiments and developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants during his 50 years of dedication to plant improvement. After selling his rights to the Russet Burbank potato in 1871 he moved to California and established a nursery garden, a greenhouse and experimental farms in Santa Rosa that one can visit today as a park and museum.

Thomas Edison testified before Congress in support of the 1930 Plant Patent Act saying: This [bill] will, I feel sure, give us many Burbanks.

Luther Burbank died in 1926, but he was granted 16 patents posthumously. He set the precedent for plant breeding in agricultural engineering and bioengineering.

The Engineering Pathway has a number of resources on Luther Burbank. For more educational resources, see our agricultural engineering education community site. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – May 22, 1906 – Wright brothers patent improvements to “flying machine”. From the patent: Our invention relates to that class of flying machines in which the weight is sustained by the reactions resulting when one or more aeroplanes are moved through the air edge-wise at a small angle of incidence, either by the application of mechanical power or by the utilization of the force of gravity. The objects of our invention are to provide means for maintaining or restoring the equilibrium or lateral balance of the apparatus, to provide means for guiding the machine both vertically and horizontally, and to provide a structure combining lightness, strength, convenience of construction, and certain other advantages which will hereinafter appear.

Years earlier, on December 17, 1903, the Wright Flyer stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Over the next few years, the Wright brothers developed more capable airplanes and grabbed the world’s attention in their European and American flights in 1908.

December 17, 2003 marked 100 years of flight, starting with the first successful Kitty Hawk flight. The Wright brothers were in the spotlight, while their sister, Katharine Wright, remained in shadow. Katharine, a teacher who graduated from Oberlin College, was the only one of the three to graduate from college and is reported to have scored very high in algebra exams in high school. She is credited with being the Wright brothers’ business manager and publicist. Perhaps she was one of the first teachers to bring aviation ideas into the classroom?

Aviation, and more recently space travel, continues to inspire awe and inspire. The National Academy of Engineering places the invention of the airplane as one of the top modern mileposts: Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century. Women were there from the beginning; discover the 100 most influential women in aviation and aerospace on this timeline.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on “100 Years of Flight“, as well as on aviation and aeronautic engineering. For related curricula, visit the Aeronautical Engineering Education community.

Today in History -  May 20, 1899 – the American Physical Society (APS) is founded for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics. It was originally formed at Columbia University by 36 scientists from 17 institutions who elected Henry Rowland as their first president and A.A. Michelson as the first vice-president. It has since grown to a membership of more than 46,000 and publishes some of the most prestigious physics journals in the world. As the APS has grown, it has become ever more involved in issues of public outreach and education. For more information on educational resources in physics, see the APS Education web pages, search the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on applied physics, or visit the comPADRE Digital Library for physics and astronomy education, a partnership of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the APS, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Society for Physics Students.

Also on this date in 1790, Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo flight across the Atlantic. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the history of flight or view our Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

Today in History – May 18, 2004 – Founding of the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT).

Alas women now only represent a small fraction of computer science graduates and are not fully represented in the world of information technology and computing. This is one reason I enthusiastically agreed to co-found and serve as founding CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) with the overarching goal to achieve parity in the professional information technology (IT) workforce and to educate, disseminate, and advocate a national, multi-year implementation plan that generates tangible progress within 20 years.

Why is this issue important? Innovation thrives with a diversity of ideas and input. As IT becomes pervasive in our lives, we need women’s full participation in the the creation of the technology upon which our society increasingly depends. Further, U.S. Department of Labor projections forecast that our economy will add 1 million professional IT jobs by 2014. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, however, the perception of a job shortage has caused a sharp decline in enrollment at 4 year computer science programs. Women’s lack of participation results in ideas not realized, products not implemented and jobs going unfilled.

It was in May 2004 that NCWIT held our first meetings in Boulder, Colorado, and announced our formation and funding from the National Science Foundation. What started as a collective passion to ensure that women are fully represented in computing and IT has become a movement involving the work of over 170 organizations, spanning K-12 to faculty and non-profits to corporations, working in areas spanning from outreach to entrepreneurship to institutional reform.  At our May 2009 annual meeting we celebrated our fifth birthday (see me introducing the keynote speaker at the start of conference below,  Jessica Jackley, Cofounder of Kiva). Jessica’s story is a fantastic inspiration for us all!!

NCWIT is now a coalition of over 100 universities, corporations and non-profits who all feel we can and must do a better job of attracting women to computing. We have developed interventions across the entire educational and career pipeline, including new ideas in curriculum, outreach, recruiting and retention. We are also studying women’s participation in key innovation metrics such as IT patenting, open source and entrepreneurship.

The history of computing owes much to contributions of talented women. Ada Byron Lovelace is credited first envisioning programming with her statement: “The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”. Six of the ENIAC programmers were women at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II who had been calculating ballistics trajectories by hand. Admiral Grace Hopper, inventor of the first computer compiler, coined the term “computer bug” and is the namesake for the Grace Hopper Conference – Celebration of Women in Computing.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the ENIAC, history of computing, Ada Lovelace and women in information technology. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, Information Science Education, Information Technology Education,  Computer Engineering Education and Software Engineering Education community pages at Engineering Pathway.

Today in History – May 17, 1954 – Official groundbreaking of the CERN laboratory occurred in Geneva. A small number of scientists first envisioned CERN vision as an opportunity to bring nations together through science and build a world-class laboratory for nuclear and particle physics in Europe. CERN’s founding convention emphasized that that it should foster international collaboration, promote contacts between and interchange of scientists and make its results freely available through advanced training and publications. “When the 12 founding Member States ratified the CERN convention on 29 September 1954,” explains CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar, “they gave the new organization a mission to provide first class facilities, to coordinate fundamental research in particle physics, and to help reunite the countries of Europe after two world wars.“

Today, CERN has achieved its mission and more, hosting around half the world’s particle physicists, with membership that includes 60 countries and 8,000 scientists; it boasts a large number of Nobel Laureates as well. CERN supports the world’s largest set of complex scientific instruments so study the basic particles of matter and related energy releases when they collide. “It is no accident,” says Aymar, “that many of the countries about to join the European Union are already members of CERN. Scientific collaboration has proved to be a valuable step on the way to collaboration at the political level.“

The 50th anniversary of CERN officially began on 8 March 2004 with the launch of a Swiss postage stamp dedicated to CERN (see upper left figure).

More recently, CERN launched the Large Hadron Collider as the center for world-wide research on particle physics for the next decade.

CERN has also stimulated a number of other developments beyond fundamental particle physics. It was here that the World Wide Web was launched when CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled: Information Management : a Proposal” in 1990. His idea, later refined by collaborator Robert Cailiau, was to “merge the technologies of personal computer, computer networking and hpertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system“. The first web server in the U.S. came on-line in December 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California. The first browsers in the X-window system. The version called Mosaic published in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois became the version that was most widely used with its easy to use user interface and ability to run on a wide range of computer platforms. The world’ first WWW conference was held at CERN in May 1994, attended by 400 users and developers. By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers and exponentially increasing traffic. The rest is history. In March 2009, CERN celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Web.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the CERN and particle physics, including their educational site. For related educational resources, visit the Engineering Science Education Community site. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.