The Discovery of Nuclear Fission
In the late afternoon of December 17, 1938, in a chemistry laboratory on the outskirts of Berlin, two chemists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute…
23 min read
Category
History
Essays on past societies, institutions and turning points, from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad to the founding of the Royal Society. Many essays in the science sections also carry History as a second section.
The Discovery of HIV and the Long Search for the AIDS Virus
In the late spring of 1981, the United States Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, the federal agency responsible for tracking the public…
23 min read
The First Flight at Kitty Hawk
On the morning of Thursday, 17 December 1903, at a quarter past ten, on a stretch of soft sand at the base of the…
25 min read
The Transistor and the Birth of Solid State Electronics
In December 1947, in a sixth-floor laboratory at 463 West Street in Manhattan, two physicists at Bell Telephone Laboratories built a small device out…
22 min read
The Intel 4004 and the Birth of the Microprocessor
On 15 November 1971 a small company in Santa Clara, California, took out a two-page advertisement in Electronic News…
23 min read
The Discovery of Penicillin
In September 1928 a mould that had drifted in through an open window killed the bacteria on a forgotten Petri dish; turning that observation…
19 min read
The Discovery of the Structure of DNA
On the morning of Saturday 28 February 1953, two young men walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced, over a beer at…
24 min read
The Apollo Program and the Lunar Landing
On the morning of July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket the height of a thirty-six-storey building lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at…
22 min read
The Transistor
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, the active element of every electronic circuit was a glass-and-metal vacuum tube: a heated…
25 min read
The First Artificial Satellite
The Rocket Race That Was Never Just a Rocket Race On the evening of 4 October 1957, a polished aluminium sphere the size…
23 min read
The Discovery of Insulin
At a glance Discovery: Insulin isolated by Frederick Banting and Charles Best at the University of Toronto, summer of 1921. First clinical use: January…
23 min read
Admiral Hugh Sinclair and the Case for Putting Him Back
Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair ran MI6 from 1923 to 1939, the longest tenure in the service's history. He built the signals intelligence apparatus that…
28 min read
The ENIAC
The Moore School had been one of the leading electrical engineering schools in the United States since the 1920s.…
22 min read
The Adapter They Built on Apollo 13
At 7:30 in the evening of 15 April 1970, in a back room of the Grumman Aerospace plant in Bethpage, Long Island, a 41-year-old…
22 min read
The Lab That Measured Time
On a bend of the Thames between Teddington and Hampton Court, a quiet stretch of Bushy Park has held the United Kingdom’s primary standards…
20 min read
How Philips Built the Chip Industry
Two of the most strategically important companies in the world — ASML, the Dutch monopoly on the lithography machines that pattern every advanced chip,…
16 min read
The Channel Tunnel Story
On 6 May 1994, Queen Elizabeth II and President François Mitterrand took a short ceremonial trip through the Channel Tunnel, slicing through the chalk…
19 min read
The Polish STEM Story
It was a Polish canon who first moved the Earth. When Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, the kingdom he served…
23 min read