1752 – Mary Dixon Kies, American inventor, is born.
Mary Dixon Kies was an American female inventor. On May 5, 1809, her patent for a new technique of weaving straw with silk and thread to make hats was signed by President James Madison. Some sources state that she was the first American woman to receive a patent, however others state that Hannah Slater was the first.
1768 – Joseph Fourier, French mathematician and physicist, is born.
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier’s law are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
1866 – Antonia Maury, American astronomer and astrophysicist, is born.
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Antonia Maury was an American astronomer who published an important early catalog of stellar spectra…
…After completing her undergraduate work, Maury went to work at the Harvard College Observatory as one of the so-called Harvard Computers, highly skilled women who processed astronomical data. In this capacity, Maury observed stellar spectra and published an important catalogue of classifications in 1897.
Edward Charles Pickering, the observatory’s director, disagreed with Maury’s system of classification and explanation of differing line widths. In response to this negative reaction to her work, she decided to leave the observatory. However, Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung realized the value of her classifications and used them in his system of identifying giant and dwarf stars.
In 1908, Maury returned to Harvard College Observatory where she remained for many years. Her most famous work there was the spectroscopic analysis of the binary star Beta Lyrae, published in 1933.
1911 – Walter Lincoln Hawkins, African-American scientist and inventor, is born.
Walter Lincoln Hawkins was an African-American scientist and inventor who, while working at Bell Laboratories in the 1940s, made universal service possible. Hawkins developed a plastic to cover telephone wires ; a new material that was lightweight,and less expensive than the lead sheathing used at that time. He is a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
1965 – Ranger program: NASA launches Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes.
Ranger 9 was a Lunar probe, launched in 1965 by NASA. It was designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact. The spacecraft carried six television vidicon cameras – two wide-angle (channel F, cameras A and B) and four narrow-angle (channel P) – to accomplish these objectives. The cameras were arranged in two separate chains, or channels, each self-contained with separate power supplies, timers, and transmitters so as to afford the greatest reliability and probability of obtaining high-quality television pictures. These images were broadcast live on television to millions of viewers across the United States. No other experiments were carried on the spacecraft.
2006 – The social media site Twitter is founded.
Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, “tweets,” restricted to 140 characters. Registered users can post tweets, but those who are unregistered can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, SMS or a mobile device app. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, United States, and has more than 25 offices around the world.
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July, whereby the service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”. As of 2016, Twitter had more than 319 million monthly active users. On the day of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter proved to be the largest source of breaking news, with 40 million tweets sent by 10 p.m. (Eastern Time) that day.
