Today in History – January 13, 1942 – Henry Ford patents a plastic automobile. The plastic car Ford patented used soy-based plastics and was 25% to 33% lighter than conventional cars of his day. Ford’s dream was to use agricultural-based plastics to provide another market for farmers to sell their crops. Sustainability in design is [...]

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Today in History – December 16, 1915 – Albert Einstein publishes the General Theory of Relativity. General Theory of relativity is a theory of gravity. Ninety-one years ago on this day he published his mathematical formula for the theory of relativity. The theory introduced the famous concept of gravitation and inertia equivalence, which in turns [...]

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Today in History – November 14, 1985 – Fullerenes were first introduced in the journal Nature,. Earlier in September during 11 days of collaborative research, Robert F. Curl, Jr., Richard Smalley and Sir Harold W. Kroto discovered the first fullerene, C60, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms. The discovery was coined buckminsterfullerenes or buckyballs after [...]

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Today in History- October 21, 1824 – Portland cement is patented by Joseph Aspdin, a stone mason in Yorkshire, England (UK patent No. 5022). He made it by burning finely pulverized lime and clay at high temperatures in kilns and grinding the mixture into a powder. This hydraulic cement would then harden with the addition [...]

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Today in History- October 9, 1936 – Hoover Dam goes online and begins transmitting electricity to Los Angeles. For over a decade afterwards, the Hoover power plant was the world’s largest hydroelectric installation in the U.S. with an installed capacity of 2.08 million kilowatts, generating more than 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year. Hoover Dam was [...]

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