1848 – Women’s rights: A two-day Women’s Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York.
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women’s rights convention. It advertised itself as “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman”. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19–20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other women’s rights conventions, including one in Rochester, New York, two weeks later. In 1850 the first in a series of annual National Women’s Rights Conventions met in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Female Quakers local to the area organized the meeting along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was not a Quaker. They planned the event during a visit to the area by Philadelphia-based Lucretia Mott. Mott, a Quaker, was famous for her oratorical ability, which was rare during an era in which women were often not allowed to speak in public.
The meeting comprised six sessions including a lecture on law, a humorous presentation, and multiple discussions about the role of women in society. Stanton and the Quaker women presented two prepared documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions, to be debated and modified before being put forward for signatures. A heated debate sprang up regarding women’s right to vote, with many – including Mott – urging the removal of this concept, but Frederick Douglass, who was the convention’s sole African American attendee, argued eloquently for its inclusion, and the suffrage resolution was retained. Exactly 100 of approximately 300 attendees signed the document, mostly women.
The convention was seen by some of its contemporaries, including featured speaker Mott, as one important step among many others in the continuing effort by women to gain for themselves a greater proportion of social, civil and moral rights, while it was viewed by others as a revolutionary beginning to the struggle by women for complete equality with men. Stanton considered the Seneca Falls Convention to be the beginning of the women’s rights movement, an opinion that was echoed in the History of Woman Suffrage, which Stanton co-wrote.
The convention’s Declaration of Sentiments became “the single most important factor in spreading news of the women’s rights movement around the country in 1848 and into the future”, according to Judith Wellman, a historian of the convention. By the time of the National Women’s Rights Convention of 1851, the issue of women’s right to vote had become a central tenet of the United States women’s rights movement. These conventions became annual events until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
1921 – Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate is born.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique. She was the second American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine after Gerty Cori.
1963 – Joe Walker flies a North American X-15 to a record altitude of 106,010 meters (347,800 feet) on X-15 Flight 90. Exceeding an altitude of 100 km, this flight qualifies as a human spaceflight under international convention.
Joseph Albert “Joe” Walker flew the world’s first two spaceplane flights in 1963, thereby becoming the United States’ seventh astronaut. Walker was a Captain in the United States Air Force, an American World War II pilot, an experimental physicist, a NASA test pilot, and a member of the U.S. Air Force Man In Space Soonest spaceflight program. His two X-15 experimental rocket aircraft flights in 1963 that exceeded the Kármán line – the altitude of 100 kilometres (62 miles), generally considered to mark the threshold of outer space – qualified him as an astronaut under the rules of the U.S. Air Force and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI)…
…Walker was the first American civilian to make any spaceflight, and the second civilian overall, preceded only by the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova one month earlier. Flights 90 and 91 made Walker the first human to make multiple spaceflights.
1983 – The first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head in a CT is published.
On July 19, 1983, M. Vannier (Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, St. Louis) and his co-workers J. Marsh (Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Deformities Institute, St. Louis Children’s Hospital) and J. Warren (McDonnell Aircraft Company) published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single CT slices of the human head. This was a quantum leap for further three-dimensional imaging and surgical planning in Oral and maxillofacial surgery, Neurosurgery and Otolaryngology.
