Today in History – August 31, 1921 – Lt. John A. Macready performed the first crop dusting flight on a surplus World War I Curtiss JN-6H (Jenny), taking off from McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio. The goal was to attack the Catalpa sphinx moth by dusting an orchard with a load of lead-arsenate from a [...]

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Today in History – August 27, 2003 – World’s largest battery is connected to provide emergency power to Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city. Backup power is critical here as Alaska could become an “electrical island” when the power lines go down. In fact, environmental conditions cause a total city blackout every two or three years. In [...]

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Today in History – August 9, 1898 -Rudolf Diesel patents the diesel engine in the U.S. Rudolf Diesel’s goal was to “improve on the efficiency of the gasoline-engine” that used the Otto cycle. His new concept for the engine was to compress the air in the cylinder adiabatically. Once this high level of compression causes [...]

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Today in History – July 27, 2010 – Plastic bottle catamaran named “Plastiki” completes epic pacific crossing. A crew of experts, scientists, and creatives, led by visionary explorer David de Rothschild,  sailed over 12,000 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made out of plastic bottles and recycled [...]

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Today in History – July 14, 1867 - Nobel first demonstrates dynamite. While in Paris, Nobel came to work with Ascanio Sobrero, the inventor of nitroglycerine. Though it was ten times stronger that black powder, it was highly unstable. Nobel was intrigued with nitroglycerine’s potential as a construction tool. But he knew he had to make [...]

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