Today in History – April 22, 1970 – First Earth Day. Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, says that the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. He wanted President Kennedy to give visibility to pollution and the environmental degradation that was appearing throughout the country, but was going unnoticed by the political establishment. The anti-Vietnam War demonstrations called “teach-ins” were popular on college campuses and he decided to organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment, tapping into both the energy of the student anti-war movement and the environmental cause. A Sunday, November 30, 1969, New York Times article by Gladwin Hill forecast that this was going to be a massive event:

“Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam…a national day of observance of environmental problems…is being planned for next spring…when a nationwide environmental ‘teach-in’ …

Senator Gaylord Nelson explains that Earth Day worked “because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated.”

Today with global warming and another energy crises, sustainability is a top international concern and an estimated 1 billion people will do something to observe the anniversary of the first Earth Day. People will participate in marches and protests, family and community activities, clean-up days, tree-planting events, saving water, saving energy, nature walks, and sustainability events.  A coalition of U.S. government agencies provides more on the history of Earth Day, environmental progress and Earth Day activities.

I am pleased to see a dramatic change in government action to aggressively workon climate and environmental issues. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson challenges all Americans to “begin building the green economy“, Department of Energy’s Steven Chu tackling global warming, and .

Expressions like “Green is the new black”, “Green is the new red, white and blue” and “green commerce”, such as that highlighted in ABC’s “Green Gadgets for Earth Day” news, demonstrate that green design is big business today. Alas some of these efforts are really “green washing” and are more effective at ringing up sales than in helping the environment. We should encourage life cycle analysis thinking with our students to seriously look at the long term environmental impact of new products, energy options and strategies.

The Engineering Pathway has a number of resources on green design, manufacturing and sustainability as well as on environmental ethics. For more educational resources, see our agricultural engineering education, environmental engineering education and chemical engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines, including interdisciplinary communities such as the Green Design and Sustainable Engineering education community.

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 1965. The author (McMullan), himself an important contributor to this field, traces developments such as the first attempts to image solids (Ruska 1933 and the more successful Von Borries 1940).He discusses von Ardenne’s 1938 highly magnified probe and Mahl’s 1941 transmission electron microscope (TEM).

The author speaks at some length about the Cambridge microscopes since this is where he worked with Oatley and added significant contributions to the field. Other contributors from around the world are detailed. Since this is an excellent article on the history of the SEM until 1965, added here will be a few contributions since that year.

An environmental scanning electron microscope, since it doesn’t need to operate in a vacuum like a standard SEM. Allows for the examination of almost any sample under any gaseous condition. Danilatos in the 1980s first used the term environmental SEM and the first commercial environmental SEM was produced by Electroscan.

In the 1990s Chumbley at Iowa State University, working with R.J. Lee Group, successfully created a remote, web-based control for a SEM. He calls this Project ExCel. This microscope allows pre-collegiate teachers to use the SEM in their classroom by remotely logging in to the SEM at Iowa State and controlling it over the internet. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’seducational resources on SEMs and microscropy or view our Materials Engineering Education and our Ceramic Engineering Education community sites.

Also on this date in 1902 the Curies isolate radium and in 1964 the first picture phone is demonstrated. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s nuclear engineering, information technology and picture phones.

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.

Today in History – January 09, 1839 – Louis Daguerre announces his photographic process.

The first permanent photograph was made in 1826 by Joseph Niepce. Together with Louis Daguerre they further refined the process. The process involved silver-coated copper plates mixed with iodine to create a layer of silver iodine. After being exposed to light for several minutes the plate was exposed to mercury vapor and heated to 75 degrees Celsius. Though the prints that these created were not reproducible they were still amazingly popular. These pictures were known as daguerrotypes, and took several minutes of exposure. In fact when taking portraits subjects had to remain still for several minutes. And pictures of scenery often didn’t show people because they moved to fast to be caught by the slow exposure. In 1839 the French Academy of Sciences announced this process.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on photographic processes. For related educational resources, visit the Chemical Engineering Education, and the Materials Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – December 10, 1964 – Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The title of his Nobel lecture was “The Quest for Peace and Justice”. Martin Luther King, Jr. attended segregated public schools in Georgia, graduating from high school at the age of fifteen; he received the B. A. degree in 1948 from Morehouse College, a distinguished Historically Black College in Atlanta from which both his father and grandfather had graduated. After three years of theological study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania where he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, he was awarded the B.D. in 1951. He completed his doctorate in theology at Boston University in 1955. King was a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1957, he and other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — 28 August 1963 — saw more than 250,000 protesters; here King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Martin Luther King and community service learning. Or visit our Engineering Diversity or Broadening Participation in Computing community sites.

Also on this date, Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and Robert S. Mulliken the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1966.

Albert Einstein entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics in 1896. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctorate. Einstein’s well chronicled research includes Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950), General Theory of Relativity (1916), Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926), and The Evolution of Physics (1938). Among his non-scientific works, About Zionism (1930), Why War? (1933), My Philosophy (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950) are perhaps the most important. In the 1920′s, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory.

In the 1920′s, Einstein embarked on the construction of unified field theories, although he continued to work on the probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Robert Mulliken earned a B.Sc. Degree in 1917 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., and a Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago, Ill., in 1921. He was an American physicist and chemist, primarily responsible for the early development of molecular orbital theory, i.e. the elaboration of the molecular orbital method of computing the structure of molecules. Robert Mulliken received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1966.

For related curricular resources, visit the Nuclear Engineering Education and the Chemical Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

This date also marks the one-millionth Model T Ford assembled in 1915. The Ford Model T (colloquially known as the Tin Lizzie and the Flivver) was an automobile produced by Henry Ford’s Ford Motor Company from 1908 through 1927. The model T set 1908 as the historic year that the automobile came into popular usage. It is generally regarded as the first affordable automobile, the car that “put America on wheels”; some of this was because of Ford’s innovations, including assembly line production instead of individual hand crafting.

For related curricular resources on Henry Ford and automotive engineering. Or visit the Manufacturing Engineering Education, the Industrial Engineering Education and the Mechanical Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

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 – 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 1965. The author (McMullan), himself an important contributor to this field, traces developments such as the first attempts to image solids (Ruska 1933 and the more successful Von Borries 1940).He discusses von Ardenne’s 1938 highly magnified probe and Mahl’s 1941 transmission electron microscope (TEM).

The author speaks at some length about the Cambridge microscopes since this is where he worked with Oatley and added significant contributions to the field. Other contributors from around the world are detailed. Since this is an excellent article on the history of the SEM until 1965, added here will be a few contributions since that year.

An environmental scanning electron microscope, since it doesn’t need to operate in a vacuum like a standard SEM. Allows for the examination of almost any sample under any gaseous condition. Danilatos in the 1980s first used the term environmental SEM and the first commercial environmental SEM was produced by Electroscan.

In the 1990s Chumbley at Iowa State University, working with R.J. Lee Group, successfully created a remote, web-based control for a SEM. He calls this Project ExCel. This microscope allows pre-collegiate teachers to use the SEM in their classroom by remotely logging in to the SEM at Iowa State and controlling it over the internet. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’seducational resources on SEMs and microscropy or view our Materials Engineering Education and our Ceramic Engineering Education community sites.

Also on this date in 1902 the Curies isolate radium and in 1964 the first picture phone is demonstrated. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s nuclear engineering, information technology and picture phones.

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 in scientific discovery. Plunkett was researching chemical reactions of the gas perfluoroethylene in order to synthesize new types of refrigerant gases. Rebok found an apparently defective cylinder of this gas and when they opened it found a slippery white powder that had unusual properties – a chemically inert, a very high melting point and low surface friction. He realized it was formed by an unexpected polymerization.

In the beginning, the use of Teflon ® did not “stick” and it took many years to go to market. Although it is sometimes cited as an example of a spin-off from the US space program, its first significant use was in the Manhattan Project, as a material to contain highly-reactive uranium hexafluoride. DuPont sold Teflon ® as a commercial product in 1946 with use in nail polish, plastics, cookware, machinery and wiring.

In recent years, concerns have been expressed about the safety of Teflon ®-coated cookware based on the assumption that toxic substances may be given off when Teflon ® is heated to high temperatures experienced in cooking. However, definitive data supporting this concern appear to be lacking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “does not believe there is any reason for consumers to stop using any consumer or industrial related products” which are sold under the Teflon ® brand, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has found Teflon ® non-stick coatings acceptable for conventional kitchen use.

DuPont supplemented the original Teflon ® with a functionally superior prouct 1n 1976 called Silverstone ®, a three-coat fluoropolymer system that produces a more durable finish than Teflon ®. Its most conroversial use is in Teflon ®-coated armor-piercing “cop-killer” bullets.

Although protected as a registered trademark, the word “Teflon ®” threatens to enter popular usage as a general term describing non-stick surfaces. It has even been applied to public officials who seem immune to accusations of misconduct.

For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on teflon ® / polytetrafluoroethylene. For related curricular resources, visit the Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering or the Materials Engineering Education disciplinary communitity.

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 in an autoclave. The first patents for polythene were registered in 1936, and a year later the first practical use for the material, as a film, was discovered. Polythene was used as an insulating material for radar cables during World War II, and the substance was a closely guarded secret. After the war it began to be produced commercially and used to make a wide range of products. These objects illustrate the variety of household items in everyday use that are made from polythene.

Polyethylene has the advantages of excellent chemical, electrical, and moisture-vapor resistance. It’s principal disadvantage is poor mechanical strength. It is widely used in packaging films and sheets, containeres, wire cable insulation, pipe, linings, coatings, toys, and housewares.

Polyethylene can be manufactured as a high-density or low-density product. High density polyethylene, manufactured by a low-pressure process, is commonly used for blow-molded bottles and other containers, as well as injection-molded articles and pipe. Low density polyethylene, manufactured by a high-pressure process, is used primarily for films. U.S. manufacturers of polyethylene have included Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical), Dow, DuPont, and Conoco-Phillips.

For more information see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on polyethylene and other polymers. For related curricular resources, visit the Chemical, Biochemical, Biomolecular Engineering disciplinary communities. Further information and flow charts for the high-pressure and low-pressure processes are available in Shreve’s Chemical Process Industries, Fifth Edition, by George T. Austin, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1984.

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.