Science History - Daily

On September 7th in the year 1936, the world quietly lost an entire species, though almost nobody realized the magnitude of what was happening at the time. In an enclosure at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania, a thylacine, commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, died after apparently being locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters and exposed to a bitter cold night followed by blist...

On September 6th, 1766, in the small English village of Eaglesfield in Cumberland, a boy was born who would quietly rearrange the way humanity understood the very fabric of matter. His name was John Dalton, and though he came from humble Quaker weaver stock with little formal schooling, he grew into one of the towering figures of chemistry and physics. Dalton was something of a...

September fifth carries some wonderful science history, but let's take a joyride with NASA's Voyager 1, which launched on this date in 1977 from Cape Canaveral atop a Titan IIIE Centaur rocket. Here's the delicious irony to start with, Voyager 1 actually left Earth about two weeks after its sibling Voyager 2, yet because it was placed on a faster, shorter trajectory, it ended up...

On September the fourth, back in 1888, a quiet revolution in how humanity would see itself and its world clicked into place, quite literally, when George Eastman secured the trademark registration for a peculiar little word he had invented himself: Kodak. He had already filed for the patent on his groundbreaking roll-film camera earlier that year, but it was this moment, the off...

On September third in 1976, NASA's Viking 2 spacecraft touched down on the rusty plains of Utopia Planitia on Mars, becoming only the second spacecraft in history to successfully land on the Red Planet and send back data from its surface. Its twin, Viking 1, had landed just six weeks earlier on July twentieth of that same year, but Viking 2 carried its own sense of drama and dis...