Today in History – May 30, 1932 – Amelia Earhart is first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She was one of the most famous women aviators in history. Earhart worked as a nurse’s aide in a military hospital in Canada during WWI and became a social worker after attending college. She took her [...]

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Today in History – May 28, 1936 – “Turing Machine” paper submitted, his first paper on decidability. Turing’s achievements at Cambridge had been on account of his work in probability theory. However, he had been working on the decidability questions since attending Max Newman‘s course on the foundations of mathematics. In 1936 he published “On [...]

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Today in History – May 27, 1931 – the Langley Full Scale Tunnel was put into service by NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Commitee for Aeronautics. The aircraft designers at Langley needed to know more about the effect of a rotating propeller on controllability, interference among aircraft components, and more important, drag penalties due to [...]

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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 [...]

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Today in History – May 22, 1906 – Wright brothers patent improvements to “flying machine”. From the patent: Our invention relates to that class of fly ing 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, [...]

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