Quirky Science round-up : August

55 B.C. – Britain was invaded by Roman forces under Julius Caesar.  Rome has still not paid any reparations for its brutal act.

1774 – Oxygen was discovered in air by chemist Carl Wilhelm and scientist Joseph Priestly. It was about time as it was getting pretty hard to breathe by that point.

1797 – Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, was born after her mother was strapped to a table and zapped by lightning.

1846 – The Smithsonian Institution was chartered by the U.S. Congress. The “Nation’s Attic” was made possible by $500,000 given by scientist Joseph Smithson. Luckily the first person who offered to fund the Institute, I. Ninkompoop, decided to pass.

1871 – Orville Wright was born. Everyone knows that two wrongs don’t make a right, but two Wrights can make a plane.

1876 – Thomas Edison patented the mimeograph. This was a device for “automatically painting your face white and adding decorative tears.”

1877 – The two moons of Mars were discovered by Asaph Hall, an American astronomer. He named them Phobos and Deimos. Thomas Edison patented the moons a week later.

1859 – Nathan Ames patented the escalator. Ames was recognized by being honored as the laziest man alive. Naturally, Edison contested the claim.

1865 – Disinfectant was used for the first time during surgery by Joseph Lister. Before this they only used it as a mouthwash.

1877 – Thomas Edison made the first sound recording on his new invention, the phonograph. His first recording was “You’re fired!” spoken to Nikola Tesla.

1881 – Alexander Fleming was born. Fleming discovered penicillin in 1929 and created the world’s first superbugs.

 

1888 – Theophilus Van Kannel patented the revolving door, making it possible to both enter and leave a building at the same time and also giving Superman an alternative to phone booths that proved vital as cell-phones proliferated.

1888 – The adding machine was patented by William Burroughs. Thomas Edison immediately contested the claim and produced his own machine, but it didn’t add up.

1892 – Thomas Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph, an important victory after his one-way telegraph proved to be less than successful.

1899 – The refrigerator was patented by A.T. Marshall. Edison claimed that Marshall had simply reversed the connections on his invention, the electric cooker.

1889 – A patent for a coin-operated telephone was issued to William Gray. Thomas Edison contested the claim and produced a telephone-operated coin in evidence.

1906 – Philo Taylor Farnsworth was born. Farnsworth was a TV pioneer and invented the all-electronic television system. Thomas Edison naturally contested the claim.

1906 – Albert Sabin was born. Sabin invented the first polio vaccine. However Edison objected claiming to have been the inventor of polio.

1910 – A.J. Fisher patented the electric washing machine. Thomas Edison accused Fisher of stealing the idea from him and demonstrated an electric dirtying machine.

1914 – The electric traffic lights were installed in Cleveland, Ohio. Thomas Edison ran the first red light later that day.

1914– Bernard Lovell. English physicist and radio astronomer was borm. He was the first Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory which was built in an attempt to track the movements of the Strykkx.

1922 – AT&T and Bell Systems shut down all switchboards and switching stations in recognition of the death of Alexander Graham Bell, The shutdown affected 13 million phones. Now they do it just to piss people off.

1923 – The first American dirigible, the “Shenandoah,” was launched in Lakehurst, NJ. The airship was a failure, having missed the steampunk era by decades.

1930 – Neil A. Armstrong was born. Armstrong went on to become the first man to walk on the moon. His brother Stretch was also famous as a gifted contortionist.

1959 – The U.S. launched Explorer 6, which sent back pictures of Earth. Later, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 became the browser that wouldn’t leave the face of the Earth.

1960 – The satellite Echo One was launched by the U.S. It was the first communications satellite and allowed the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite to take place. The conversation took place between two dogs, Squirrel and Arrow, launched by the Soviet Union. The dogs were accompanied by a grey rabbit, 42 mice, 2 rats, flies and several plants and fungi, although only the dogs spoke on the phone.

1962 – Andrian Nikolayev, of the Soviet Union, was launched on a 94-hour flight. He was the third Russian to go into space. Nikolayev later became famous as the first person to make a television broadcast from space, in which he was accompanied by a black hamster, three gerbils, a Georgian male voice choir and a big yellow bird.

1962 – Mariner 2 was launched by the United States. In December of the same year the spacecraft flew past Venus. It was the first space probe to reach the vicinity of another planet, but detected no women.

1976 – Scientists announced that the Viking 1 spacecraft had detected strong indications of life on Mars. The Strykkx quickly destroyed it and contact was lost.

1977 – Voyager 2 was launched by the United States. The spacecraft was carrying a 12 inch (30 cm) copper disk containing greetings in many languages, samples of music and sounds of nature. The probe returned extensive data about Saturn and Neptune before leaving the Solar system completely. It returned 300 years later in search of The Creator; in this it failed, finding only Captain Kirk.

1978 – The Pioneer Venus II probe was launched carrying instruments to study the atmosphere of Venus. Still no women were detected and NASA concluded that they had all moved to Earth because of the frizzy hair problems caused by the heavy moist Venusian atmosphere.

1989 – The space shuttle Columbia took off from Cape Canaveral. The trip was said to be a secret five-day military mission, but actually covered an orbital rendezvous between President George Bush and the High Kglar of Strykkx to negotiate a trade agreement. Discussions failed when the Strykkx negotiators discovered Ronald MacDonald was no longer president.

1996 – NASA announced the discovery of evidence of primitive life on Mars. Men

2003 – Ekaterina Dmitriev and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko were married. It was the first-ever marriage in space, but quickly ran into problems when Malenchenko announced his intention to invite his mother to stay with them on the ISS.