1806 – Sarah Bagley, American labor organizer is born.
Sarah George Bagley was an advocate for women’s rights and one of the most important labor leaders in New England during the 1840s. An advocate of shorter workdays for factory operatives and mechanics, she campaigned to make ten hours of labor per day the maximum in Massachusetts. Her activities in support of the mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts put her in contact with a broader network of reformers in areas of women’s rights, communitarianism, abolition, peace, prison reform, and health reform. Sarah Bagley and her coworkers became familiar with middle-class reform activities, demonstrating the ways in which working people embraced this reform impulse as they transformed and critiqued some of its key elements. Sarah’s activities within the labor movement reveal many of the tensions that underlay relations between male and female working people as well as the constraints of gender that female activists had to overcome.
1912 – Glenn T. Seaborg, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate is born.
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work in this area also led to his development of the actinide concept and the arrangement of the actinide series in the periodic table of the elements.
Seaborg spent most of his career as an educator and research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, serving as a professor, and, between 1958 and 1961, as the university’s second chancellor.[3] He advised ten US Presidents – from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton – on nuclear policy and was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science. Throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control. He was a signatory to the Franck Report and contributed to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He was a well-known advocate of science education and federal funding for pure research. Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, he was the principal author of the Seaborg Report on academic science, and, as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education, he was a key contributor to its 1983 report “A Nation at Risk”.
Seaborg was the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which, while he was still living, was named seaborgium in his honor. He also discovered more than 100 atomic isotopes and is credited with important contributions to the chemistry of plutonium, originally as part of the Manhattan Project where he developed the extraction process used to isolate the plutonium fuel for the second atomic bomb. Early in his career, he was a pioneer in nuclear medicine and discovered isotopes of elements with important applications in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, most notably iodine-131, which is used in the treatment of thyroid disease. In addition to his theoretical work in the development of the actinide concept, which placed the actinide series beneath the lanthanide series on the periodic table, he postulated the existence of super-heavy elements in the transactinide and superactinide series.
After sharing the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan, he received approximately 50 honorary doctorates and numerous other awards and honors. The list of things named after Seaborg ranges from his atomic element to an asteroid. He was a prolific author, penning numerous books and 500 journal articles, often in collaboration with others. He was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the longest entry in Who’s Who in America.
1964 – Kim Weaver, American astrophysicist, astronomer, and academic is born.
Dr. Kimberly A. Weaver (born April 1964 in Morgantown, West Virginia) is an American astrophysics astronomer and professor. She has worked with NASA on several research projects. She is often seen on many television programs about astronomy. She is an expert in the area of x-ray astronomy.
1971 – Launch of Salyut 1, the first space station.
Salyut 1 (DOS-1) was the first space station of any kind, launched by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1971. More stations followed in the Salyut program, and heritage of that space station program is still in use on the ISS.
Salyut 1 originated as a modification of the military Almaz space station program then in development. After the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon in July 1969, the Soviets began shifting the primary emphasis of their manned space program to orbiting space stations, with a possible lunar landing later in the 1970s if the N-1 booster became flight-worthy (which it didn’t). One other motivation for the space station program was a desire to one-up the US Skylab program then in development. The basic structure of Salyut 1 was adapted from the Almaz with a few modifications and would form the basis of all Soviet space stations through Mir.
Civilian Soviet space stations were internally referred to as “DOS” stations, although publicly, the Salyut name was used for all Almaz and DOS stations. Several military experiments were nonetheless carried on Salyut 1, including the OD-4 optical visual ranger, the Orion ultraviolet instrument for characterizing rocket exhaust plumes, and the highly classified Svinets radiometer.
Construction of Salyut 1 began in early 1970 and after nearly a year, it was shipped to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Some remaining assembly work had yet to be done and this was completed at the launch center.
Launch was planned for April 12, 1971 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight on Vostok 1, but technical problems delayed it until the 19th. The first crew launched later in the Soyuz 10 mission, but they ran into troubles while docking and were unable to enter the station; the Soyuz 10 mission was aborted and the crew returned safely to Earth. Its second crew launched in Soyuz 11 and remained on board for 23 days. This was the first time in the history of spaceflight that a space station had been manned, and a new record in time spent in space. This success was, however, overshadowed when the crew was killed during re-entry, as a pressure-equalization valve in the Soyuz 11 re-entry capsule had opened prematurely, causing the crew to asphyxiate. After this accident, missions were suspended while the Soyuz spacecraft was redesigned. The station was intentionally destroyed by de-orbiting it after six months in orbit, because it ran out of fuel before a redesigned Soyuz spacecraft could be launched to it.
2015 – Please post old Arduino packaging that says “Manufactured under license from Arduino” #TeamArduinoCC
Hey folks, as a lot of you know there’s a huge Arduino vs Arduino dispute (Hackaday / MAKE coverage / Arduino.cc). We’re currently making an official Arduino with Arduino.cc so we’re not commenting at this time for all sorts of good reasons, however, we, as in the Arduino.cc community, could use your help. If you could dig up any old Arduino packaging that has “Manufactured under license from Arduino by SMART PROJECTS” and post the photos – that could be pretty helpful for “team Arduino.cc”.
PLEASE INDICATE what country where you purchased the products in and what year!
Pictured above, an Arduino UNO from September 2014 from Becky Stern’s desk. She had it unopened and we were able to see an important detail “Manufactured under license from Arduino by SMART PROJECTS S.r.l. Via Romano, 12 10010 Scarmagno Italy.
