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 [...]

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Today in History - April 20, 1940 - RCA Demonstrates Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The history of the SEM begins in 1928 and RCA’s demonstration in 1940. In 1965 the first SEM was marketed by the Cambridge Instrument Company. The provided link includes an article that details the history of the SEM from 1928 to [...]

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Today in History - April 6, 1938 - Teflon ® is discovered. In 1938, Du Pont researcher Roy J. Plunkett and his technician Jack Rebok accidentally discovered the chemical compound polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) that was later marketed as a commercial product in 1946 under the name Teflon®. Discovery of Teflon® is a good example of serendipity [...]

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Today in History - March 27, 1933 - Polyethylene is discovered. Polythene is also known as polyethene or polyethylene. It was discovered in 1933 by Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett, two scientists working at ICI’s research laboratory at Winnington, Durham, who accidentally discovered the white, waxy solid while attempting to react ethylene with benzaldehyde [...]

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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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