1869
The first issue of the scientific journal Nature, edited by astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer, is first published. The first issue includes articles on astronomy, education, moths, plants, an obituary for chemist Thomas Graham, paleontology, and several meeting notices. Visit the journal’s official website.
1922
The entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamen is discovered in the Valley of the Kings where archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. One of Carter’s laborers stumbled upon a stone step, the first step in a sunken stairway that ran down into the rock. Carter will open the tomb of the largely unknown child-king later in the month. In 1907, Lord Carnarvon, a wealthy English aristocrat with a passion for archeology, hired Carter and financed his excavations.
1939
The first air conditioned automobile, a Packard, is exhibited in Chicago, Illinois. The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan has been known for producing luxury automobiles since 1899.
1943
The X-10 nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory goes “critical” with a self-sustaining fission reaction, becoming the world’s second reactor to achieve such a reaction. The reactor took just nine urgent months to build. Over the next year, the reactor performed flawlessly, irradiating thousands of fuel slugs, which were disassembled and dissolved so the plutonium could be extracted, bit by precious bit. It is an experimental reactor far larger and more advanced than Fermi’s Chicago pile.
1946
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) demonstrates all-electronic color television using three picture tubes.
1952
On election night, CBS News uses a UNIVersal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I) computer to predict the outcome of the 1952 presidential election after analyzing only five percent of the tallied votes. In the race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, the computer projects a victory for Eisenhower, but journalists Charles Collingwood and Walter Cronkite find the result so dubious in the face of opinion polls that have consistently predicted a landslide victory for Stevenson that they postpone announcing the UNIVAC results until it’s clear to everyone that Eisenhower will win. News of the prediction will vault the UNIVAC to national fame.
The United States government establishes the National Security Agency to collect and analyze foreign communications. Read more about the organization’s history. Visit the organization’s official website.
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