Today in History – March 8, 1775 – Priestley discovers oxygen through experiments with mice. Oxygen was independently discovered in the 1770’s; the most famous names associated with this discovery are Joseph Priestley, Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier. Credit is usually given to Joseph Priestley as he had the first publication [...]

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Today in History-March 3, 1831–Thomas Jennings became the first African-American to receive a patent for his invention of ‘dry-scouring’, a process better known today as dry-cleaning.
As a free man, he established a local business in New York in which he sold clothing. However, customers became disgruntled that there was no means to effectively clean the [...]

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Today in History – February 29, 1940 – The Nobel Prize in Physics was presented to Ernest Lawrence “for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements”. Due to WWII, the prize could not be awarded in Sweden and was awarded instead in [...]

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James Chadwick and the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

Today in History – February 27, 1932 – Chadwick publishes his discovery of the neutron. Until 1932, the atom was known to consist of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by enough negatively charged electrons to make the atom electrically neutral. Most of the atom was empty [...]

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Today in History – February 23, 1893 – Rudolf Diesel patents the diesel engine in Germany. 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 [...]

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