Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On May 23, 2013, the Interstate-5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed suddenly, dumping two occupied cars into the river. Incredibly, not only did the occupants survive, they did not suffer any severe injuries. Often the results are much different and much more tragic. Today we discuss some of the famous bridge collapses through History, with an eye toward ones that are particularly deadly, interesting, or unique.  (See our previous article on August 1, 2007, “10 Famous Bridge Collapses.”) Digging Deeper 1. I-5 Bridge over the Skagit River, 2013. As stated above, this harrowing incident that dumped…

A Brief History On May 19, 1845, Sir John Franklin set off from Greenhithe, England in command of two British Royal Navy ships, the HMS Erebus and the fatefully named HMS Terror, on a voyage of discovery searching for the final leg of what he hoped would be a Northwest Passage around Canada to the Pacific. The tragic expedition is chronicled on the outstanding AMC television series, The Terror, which first aired in March of 2018.  In the series, Irish actor Ciarán Hinds portrays Captain Sir John Franklin as seen in the comparative image above. Digging Deeper Since Franklin and…

A Brief History On May 18, 1974, India’s Operation Smiling Buddha resulted in the successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, becoming the sixth nation to explode a nuclear device. Prior to India, only the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Soviet Union/Russia, United Kingdom, France and China) had developed nuclear weapons, at least officially. Digging Deeper India officially claimed a yield of about 13 kilotons, similar in size to the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Outside scientists estimated the explosion as less powerful, perhaps as little as 2 kilotons. Canada, which had supplied…

A Brief History On May 16, 1960, a scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, Theodore Maiman, operated the world’s first optical laser, a red (ruby) coherent light beam. We have published 2 articles about lasers (“November 14, 1967: The LASER is Patented” and “March 22, 1960: When Were Lasers Invented?”) and another article titled “Things That Did Not Exist (Or Were Different) on July 1, 1957” and today we list another 10 things that were not around when this author was born. (January 1957.) Digging Deeper 1. Video Games. Although rudimentary efforts to construct some sort of electronic video…

A Brief History On May 8, 1794, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the man generally regarded as the Father of Modern Chemistry, was put to death on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution. It seems this man of noble birth who had such an enormous impact on the sciences of chemistry and biology was more than merely a scientist, but also a businessman and an agent of the Ancien Régime, the monarchy of France prior to the Revolution. Digging Deeper Born in Paris in 1743, Antoine was given a fine education (earning a degree in law…