Today in History- September 30, 1935 – Dedication of Hoover Dam, Boulder City, Nevada. The concrete-arch dam, originally called Boulder Dam, supplied the first U.S. hydroelectric plant to produce over a million kilowatts. Hoover Dam serves Nevada and the Los Angeles area. Hoover Dam was built at the height of the Depression and provided thousands [...]

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Today in History – September 27, 2003 – The first European mission to the moon was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket carrying the SMART-1 exploration probe, along with two commercial satellites. It took 15 months to reach lunar orbit, covered over 60 million miles with only 13 gallons of fuel. After being captured by lunar [...]

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Today in History – September 25, 1974 – Scientists first reported that freon gases released from aerosol spray cans were destroying the ozone layer (Molina, M. j., and F. S. Rowland, “Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Catalysed Destruction of Ozone”, Nature, 249, 810-814, 1974). It was not until March 22, 1985 that the Vienna Convention [...]

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In honor of National Manufacturing Week, the Engineering Pathway highlights Manufacturing Engineering Education in September. Check out our Manufacturing Engineering Education Disciplinary Community and related manufacturing engineering educational resources, such as NIST’s Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL) or the Manufacturing Video Library. Find out How Everyday Things are Made with courseware hosted by Stanford’s Alliance for [...]

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Today in History – September 20, 1954 – the first FORTRAN program is run at IBM. The first public release of the FORTRAN programming language was not until April 19, 1957. FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, named so because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code. Developed by [...]

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