Valentina Tereshkova, Soviet cosmonaut extraordinaire, was born on March 6, 1937. She was the first woman to fly in space. She was working in a textile factory when she was selected for her parachuting abilities and proletariat background.
1930
Logician, mathematician and psychologist Christine Ladd- Franklin died on this day in 1930. Her theories of gradual development of color perception were integral to explaining color blindness. She was also the first American woman to complete all requirements necessary for a PhD, although her alma mater, Johns Hopkins, refused it to her at the time, waiting forty-four years to grant it to her in 1926.
1886
The first alternating current power plant opened on March 6, 1886 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It transmitted 500 volts with power driven by a water mill until a storm damaged the plant shortly afterwards and the project was abandoned.
1847
Alessandro Volta, inventor of the electric battery and namesake of the measure of electric potential, the volt, also died today 166 years ago. He invented the electric battery, and also studied the relationship between electrical potential (V ) and charge (Q ), discovering that for a fixed item, they’re proportional. Hence the volt.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
