Today in History – June 27, 1954 – First nuclear power plant begins operation. In the mid-1950′s, both the Soviet Union and western countries were exploring the non-military uses of the atom. However, even this non-military work was done in secret and not much was known about it in the West at the time. The Obninsk Power Plant in the USSR, was the world’s first nuclear power plant to generate electricity at 5 megawatts. Ordered by Stalin for nonmilitary purposes, this graphite-moderated and water-cooled reactor could be switched to plutonium production if needed.

Two years later in Calder Hall (England) and three years later in Shippingport two other power plants started operation.

On April 29, 2002, the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant was decommissioned after 48 years of commercial operation.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on nuclear power. Or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education community site for more information.

Today in History – June 25, 1903 – Marie Curie defends her doctoral thesis, then gets Nobel Prize five months later. Did she just procrastinate? Or were thesis standards higher a century ago at the Sorbonne? I haven’t seen a good explanation for the delay, other than she was busy discovering new elements.

Earlier in 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie made repeated separations of the various substances in pitchblende (photo on left) and used a Curie electrometer to identify two unidentified radioactive fractions that remained in pitchblende after uranium was removed. They discovered that the one containing mostly bismuth also contained a new element they named “polonium” in honor of the country of Marie’s birth. The barium fraction contained another new element, which they named “radium” from the Latin word for ray. They were able to add two new elements in the Periodic Table. While the chemical properties of the two new elements were completely dissimilar, they both had strong radioactivity. Radium was later isolated as a pure metal in 1902, but the discovery was not published in the popular press until this day in 1903.

Evidently, Marie Curie was so focused on her research that she had neglected to complete the writing of her thesis, which she finally got around to defending on June 25, 1903 titled: “Research on radioactive substances”.

Marie and Pierre Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Henri Becquerel, their contributions associated with the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity. Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”. Alas Pierre Curie was not able to share the Nobel Prize this time as he was killed earlier in a carriage accident in a rainstorm in Paris on April 11, 1906. The curie is a unit of radioactivity originally named in honor of Pierre Curie by the Radiology Congress in 1910, after his death.

Marie Curie was the first person to win two Nobel prizes. Her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie (photo below right), also won a Nobel Prize in 1935.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Marie and Pierre Curie and radium. Or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education community site for more information. Also our resources on women in science and engineering and gender equity today.

Today in History – June 8, 1940 – The discovery of element 93, neptunium (symbol Np), a decay product of uranium-239, was announced by Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson working at the University of California at Berkeley. Neptunium was named after the planet Neptune and, at the time, was the first element heavier than uranium. Such elements with stable isotopes are called transuranium elements. McMillan was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1951 for the discovery of Neptunium. McMillan was a member of the Radiation Laboratory under Professor E.O. Lawrence with research on nuclear reactions and their products, and the design and construction of cyclotrons and other equipment. He succeeded Lawrence as director of what is now the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1958. McMillan was also a member of the Faculty in the Department of Physics at Berkely from 1935 till his retirement in 1974. Today, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), named after Ernest Lawrence, has taken the lead in a diverse range of projects in particle physics and energy, such as environmental energy technologies.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on radiactive elements, particle physics and the cyclotron or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education or the Chemical Engineering Education community sites for more information.

Today in History -  May 20, 1899 – the American Physical Society (APS) is founded for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics. It was originally formed at Columbia University by 36 scientists from 17 institutions who elected Henry Rowland as their first president and A.A. Michelson as the first vice-president. It has since grown to a membership of more than 46,000 and publishes some of the most prestigious physics journals in the world. As the APS has grown, it has become ever more involved in issues of public outreach and education. For more information on educational resources in physics, see the APS Education web pages, search the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on applied physics, or visit the comPADRE Digital Library for physics and astronomy education, a partnership of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the APS, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Society for Physics Students.

Also on this date in 1790, Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo flight across the Atlantic. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the history of flight or view our Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

Today in History – May 17, 1954 – Official groundbreaking of the CERN laboratory occurred in Geneva. A small number of scientists first envisioned CERN vision as an opportunity to bring nations together through science and build a world-class laboratory for nuclear and particle physics in Europe. CERN’s founding convention emphasized that that it should foster international collaboration, promote contacts between and interchange of scientists and make its results freely available through  advanced training and publications. “When the 12 founding Member States ratified the CERN convention on 29 September 1954,” explains CERN’s Director General Robert Aymar, “they gave the new organization a mission to provide first class facilities, to coordinate fundamental research in particle physics, and to help reunite the countries of Europe after two world wars.“

Today, CERN has achieved its mission and more, hosting around half the world’s particle physicists, with  membership that includes 60 countries and 8,000 scientists; it boasts a large number of Nobel Laureates as well.  CERN supports the world’s largest set of complex scientific instruments so study the basic particles of matter and related energy releases when they collide.  “It is no accident,” says Aymar, “that many of the countries about to join the European Union are already members of CERN. Scientific collaboration has proved to be a valuable step on the way to collaboration at the political level.“

The 50th anniversary of CERN officially  began on 8 March 2004 with the launch of a Swiss postage stamp dedicated to CERN (see upper left figure).

More recently, CERN launched the Large Hadron Collider as the center for world-wide research on particle physics for the next decade.

CERN has also stimulated a number of other developments beyond fundamental particle physics. It was here that the World Wide Web was launched when CERN’s Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled: Information Management : a Proposal” in 1990.  His idea, later refined by collaborator Robert Cailiau, was to “merge the technologies of personal computer, computer networking and hpertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system“. The first web server in the U.S. came on-line in December 1991 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California.  The first browsers in the X-window system. The version called Mosaic published in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois became the version that was most widely used with its easy to use user interface and ability to run on a wide range of  computer platforms. The world’ first WWW conference was held at CERN in May 1994, attended by 400 users and developers. By the end of  1994, the Web had 10,000 servers and exponentially increasing traffic. The rest is history. In March 2009, CERN celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Web.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the CERN and particle physics, including their educational site.  For related educational resources, visit the Engineering Science Education Community site. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – April 26, 1986 – The Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the Ukraine and parts of Belarus, Russia; it was the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe. The steam explosion and fire sent a cloud of radioactive dust over much of Europe, releasing at least five percent of the radioactive core of the reactor. The accident was a result of flaws in the reactor design and inadequately trained personnel. The safety systems had actually been turned off during a testing operation and an uncontrollable power surge was allowed to occur. As the Soviet design had no external containment, there was no final barrier to contain radioactive material once the steam explosions started. These design and training flaws are attributed to lax nuclear safety standards in the former Soviet Union. Over thirty  people, mostly emergency workers and children, were killed soon after the explosion.

On May 2-4 approximately 160,000 people were evacuated from the area around the plant operator’s town of Pripyat. Eventually an additional 210,000 people resetled into less contaminated areas. The long term environmental and health effects are still being measured.  The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has  issued several reports and has conducted extensive longitudinal studies on the Chernobyl accident.  Although there is some dispute as to exactly how may long-term radiation-related deaths occurred, no one questions that there were catastrophic social and economic consequences, with costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Chernobyl and nuclear energy and safety or view our Nuclear Engineering Education and Engineeering Ethics community sites. Readers may be interested in the Alsos digital library on nuclear issues and their resources on Chernobyl as well.

Today in History – April 14, 1932 – First atom is split by a proton beam on a lithium target.

Two physicists, Englishman Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Irishman Ernest Walton developed the first nuclear particle accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator. With this equipment, they succeeded in being the first to split the nucleus of an atom. When a proton from the beam supplied by the accelerator struck a lithium nucleus, their unstable combination disintegrated into two alpha particles (helium nuclei). They shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Their accelerator cost 500 pounds, the most ever for a single piece of equipment at the Cavendish Laboratory. The beam of protons produced in a discharge tube containing hydrogen was accelerated through three cylinders containing high-intensity electrical fields. The beam passed through a mica window, hit targets of lithium or boron, and produced alpha particles which were confirmed by photographing their tracks in a cloud chamber.

Annotations of two books which provide interesting insights into the lives of these scientists and details of their work are found in Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues (http://alsos.wlu.edu).

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on particle physics or view our Nuclear Engineering Education community site.

Today in History – April 14, 1932 – First atom is split by a proton beam on a lithium target.

Two physicists, Englishman Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Irishman Ernest Walton developed the first nuclear particle accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator. With this equipment, they succeeded in being the first to split the nucleus of an atom. When a proton from the beam supplied by the accelerator struck a lithium nucleus, their unstable combination disintegrated into two alpha particles (helium nuclei). They shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work.

Their accelerator cost 500 pounds, the most ever for a single piece of equipment at the Cavendish Laboratory. The beam of protons produced in a discharge tube containing hydrogen was accelerated through three cylinders containing high-intensity electrical fields. The beam passed through a mica window, hit targets of lithium or boron, and produced alpha particles which were confirmed by photographing their tracks in a cloud chamber.

Annotations of two books which provide interesting insights into the lives of these scientists and details of their work are found in Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues (http://alsos.wlu.edu).

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on particle physics or view our Nuclear Engineering Education community site.

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 on the discovery (“Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air”). Earlier Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered that red-hot manganese oxide (MnO₂) produces a gas he called “fire air”. In 1774 Priestly reproduced an earlier experiment by pharmacist Pierre Bayen in which heated mercury oxides produced a discharge of gas and a loss of mass. Lavoisier also performed a similar experiment and made note of the gas in his notebook. On March 8, 1775, Priestley demonstrated with mice that sealed containers of the new gas could support life longer than atmospheric gas. He experimented on himself and said that he felt “peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury.” He speculated that the gas was “dephlogisticated air”, using what would soon be a discredited phlogiston theory. The name “oxygen” was actually coined by Lavoisier and he is credited with best appreciating the discovery’s significance and developing a systematic theory of combustion.

For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Joseph Priestley and the discovery of oxygen. For related curricular resources, visit the Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering disciplinary communities.

Also on this date is International Women’s Day.

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 Berkley, California on this date.

In 1929 Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator designed to bombard atoms of various elements, disintegrating the atoms to subparticles, sometimes resulting in completely new elements. Hundreds of radioactive isotopes of the known elements were discovered from the cyclotron, including the transuranium element, plutonium, the first synthetic element to be produced on a large scale. Ernest Lawrence’s brother, John, collaborated with him in studying medical and biological applications of the cyclotron, laying the foundation for today’s diagnostic tools and radiation treatment for cancer.

During World War II Ernest Lawrence made vital contributions to the development of the atomic bomb under the Manhatten Project. After the war he worked hard to obtain international agreement on the suspension of atomic-bomb testing and was a member of the U.S. delegation at the 1958 Geneva Conference on this subject. His work to “control the atom” from misuse was controversial and his lack of support for colleagues brought before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities during the control war came under criticism by both the right and the left.

This discovery provides an interesting case in engineering ethics and the social implications of technology. Today, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), named after Lawrence, has taken the lead in a diverse range of projects in particle physics and energy, such as environmental energy technologies.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on particle physics and the cyclotron or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education, Chemical Engineering Education or Engineering Ethics community sites for more information.

It is interesting to note that Lawrence grew up in a small town in South Dakota. My grandfather, who worked as an aeronautical and civil engineer, went to high school with him and recalls that small towns in the West provided fertile ground for young minds excited about opportunities in science and engineering. The Hewlett Foundation has recently re-visited this concept and is funding the Engineering Schools of the West Initiative.

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 space, with its mass concentrated in a tiny nucleus. The nucleus was thought to contain both protons and electrons because the proton (otherwise known as the hydrogen ion, H+) was the lightest known nucleus and because electrons were emitted by the nucleus in beta decay.”

So how was the neutron discovered? After four years as a prisoner of war in WWI in Germany, James Chadwick returned to his native England to rejoin the mentor of his undergraduate days, Ernest Rutherford, who was now head of Cambridge University’s nuclear physics lab. Chadwick received a PhD under Rutherford in 1921 and then became his assistant director of the lab.

In 1919 Rutherford discovered the proton, a positively charged particle within the atom’s nucleus. But Rutherford and Chadwick and other researchers were finding that the proton did not seem to be the only particle in the nucleus.

As they studied atomic disintegration, they kept seeing that the atomic number (number of protons in the nucleus, equivalent to the positive charge of the atom) was less than the atomic mass (average mass of the atom). Take the helium atom, for example, with an atomic mass of 4, but an atomic number (or positive charge) of 2. Since electrons have almost no mass, it seemed that something besides the protons in the nucleus were adding to the mass. One leading explanation was that there were electrons and additional protons in the nucleus as well — the protons still contributed their mass but their positive charge was canceled out by the negatively charged electrons. So in the helium example, there would be four protons and two electrons in the nucleus to yield a mass of 4 but a charge of only 2. Rutherford also put out the idea that there could be a particle with mass but no charge. He called it a neutron, and imagined it as a paired proton and electron. There was no evidence for any of these ideas.

Chadwick kept the problem in the back of his mind while working on other things. Experiments in Europe caught his eye, especially those of Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie. They used a different method for tracking particle radiation. Chadwick repeated their experiments but with the goal of looking for a neutral particle — one with the same mass as a proton, but with zero charge. His experiments were successful. He was able to determine that the neutron did exist and that its mass was about 0.1 percent more than the proton’s. He published his findings with characteristic modesty in a first paper entitled “Possible Existence of Neutron.” He received the  Nobel Prize in physics in 1935 for this discovery.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on James Chadwick and the neutron. or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education and the Chemical Engineering Education community sites for more information.