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 asserts ‘gravitation as a determiner of the curvature in a space-time continuum.’ It is obvious from the quote the complexity of this theorem and even to this day people have trouble grasping the concepts. His contribution of this theory has helped us better understand the fourth dimension known as time. The theory of relativity introduced concepts that changed the way we think of time and gravity, making it monumental in our history.

For related curricular resources, visit the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Einstein and relativity or the Nuclear Engineering Education community.

Today in History – December 2, 1982- Dr. William C. DeVries carried out a series of five implants in Utah over the next three years using the Jarvik total artificial heart. Although the first patients did not live past a year, further patients received the artificial heart designed by Robert K. Jarvik, MD, as a temporary device while awaiting heart transplants. The unusual openness of this medical experiment allowed doctors and designers to learn how to improve the clinical outcomes in subsequent patients with the Jarvik 7, “a device that is still used today and has the highest success rate of any mechanical heart or assist device in the world.” For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Jarvik artificial heart and the human heart and heart transplants.

Readers may want to view our November 29 blog on the first open heart surgery in 1994 that laid the foundation for today’s heart surgery. Working as a team, the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr. Alfred Blalock (center photo), surgical technician Vivien T. Thomas (portrait, second from right), and pediatric cardiologist Dr. Helen Taussig (right photo) developed a method for improving the flow of oxygen into the blood by connecting one of the heart’s major arteries with another feeding into the lungs.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on biomedical engineering or go to the Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Education Community site.

Also on this date in history in 1957 the first full-scale U.S. nuclear power plant begins operating in Shippingport, Pennsylvania – 15 years to the day after Fermi’s experiment at the University of Chicago. The reactor plant was designed by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in cooperation with the Division of Naval Reactors of the Atomic Energy Commission. The Shippingport nuclear powerplant was retired in 1982. Concerns about public safety, terrorist use of nuclear materials and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident killed the commerical nuclear indutry in the U.S. However, the nuclear option is being reconsidered in light of its lighter environmental impact over fossil fuels for generating electricity. As with all technologies, engineers must work with the public to evaluate the ethical and social consequences of any technological development and deployment. See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on nuclear energy or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education community site for more information.

Today in History – November 9, 1939 – The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Ernest Lawrence “for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements”.

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 or the Chemical Engineering Education 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 – November 6, 1944 – Plutonium is first produced at the Hanford Atomic Facility as part of the Manhattan Project, subsequently used in the Fat Man Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan and bringing an end to World War II. Although nuclear engineering has its roots in weapons of mass destruction, peaceful uses led to the development of medical isotopes, nuclear imaging, cancer treatments and nuclear energy. With the high cost of fossil fuels and the need for energy self-sufficiency there is an interest in rethinking the world’s nuclear energy strategy. As with all technologies, engineers must work with the public to evaluate the ethical and social consequences of any technological development and deployment.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Manhattan Project and nuclear engineering. or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education Community site.

Also on this day in history, New York State is the first eastern state to fully enfranchise women in 1917. Alas we have a long way to go to achieve gender equity in science and engineering as the National Academy’s report titled “Beyond Bias and Barriers” highlighted: Women face barriers to hiring and promotion in research universities in many fields of science and engineering — a situation that deprives the United States of an important source of talent as the country faces increasingly stiff global competition in higher education, science and technology, and the marketplace.

Today in History – September 29, 1954 – CERN convention ratified. 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.“ The official groundbreaking of the CERN laboratory occurred in Geneva on May 17, 1954.

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 – 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 – 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. Today is the 25th anniversary.

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 resettled 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 (estimates of related deaths from cancer range from 4,000 to over 200,000) no one questions that there were catastrophic social and economic consequences, with costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Only recently has the government of Ukraine indicated that it will  lift restrictions on tourism around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They have also announced that a 20,000-ton steel confinement  structure for the whole plant will be completed in 2013. Given Japan’s nuclear emergency after the March 11, 2011 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunamis, the world scrutiny of the new Chernobyl containment should be high.

Although Chernobyl is still considered the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe, the crisis at  Fukushima Daiichi is far from being over. Although the Japanese boiling water reactor using GE technology had an outside containment, unlike Chernobyl, the daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around the amount released from Chernobyl. Recent forensic modeling analyses estimate that 70 percent of the core of one reactor is damaged and that another has undergone a 33 percent meltdown. This level of damage raises many questions about what should be added to the nuclear regulatory code to improve reactor safety. The quantity of radioactive waste that must be removed raises the issue that we don’t have good solutions for long term radioactive waste disposal.

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.