USA

Imagine a world without batteries. It would be a much different world, in which the automobile and the telephone would have developed differently and probably later, a world without many of the conveniences of modern life and without some of the necessities. The battery, ever smaller and more…

By the 1950s, synthetic fabrics - often wrinkle resistant and flame retardant - began to overtake cotton as the dominant U.S. textile fiber. To reverse this trend chemists and chemical engineers at the Southern Regional Research Center initiated research to modify cotton chemically. Their…

DayGlo fluorescent pigments, a new class of pigments based on fluorescent dyes and polymeric materials, were developed between the 1930s and 1950s by scientists at Switzer Brothers, Inc. (now Day-Glo Color Corp.). These pigments absorb various light frequencies (visible and invisible to the…

Long before Texas gushers and offshore drilling, and a century before oil wells dotted Arabian sands and rose out of Venezuelan waters, the center of petroleum production was western Pennsylvania. In the middle of the 19thcentury two developments occurred that guaranteed Pennsylvania’s dominance…

The story is so improbable it defies belief: a soil sample from Japan stops suffering in Africa. It starts when a scientist discovers a lowly bacterium near a golf course outside Tokyo. A team of scientists in the United States finds that the bacterium produces compounds that impede the activity…

Flavor—encompassing both aroma and taste—provides the defining characteristic of how we experience food. Flavor has long been an enigma to scientists: Aristotle described two categories of taste, sweet and bitter. Today we recognize five basic tastes in food: sweetness, saltiness, sourness,…

The first commercial circulating fluid bed reactor, PCLA #1 (Powdered Catalyst Louisiana), went on stream on May 25, 1942, in the Baton Rouge Refinery of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil Corporation). This first use of powdered catalysts in continuous operation allowed the…

Instant mashed potatoes are commonplace on grocery shelves and have found wide use institutionally and in domestic and international food aid programs. The most successful form of instant mashed potatoes resulted from the flake process developed in the 1950s and 1960s at the Eastern Regional…

Frozen foods have become a staple of the modern diet. Freezing allows consumers to have access to foods previously unavailable or available only seasonally, and it provides convenience for many families. But frozen foods became commonplace only after World War II, in part due to research…

Charles David Keeling of Scripps Institution of Oceanography was the leading authority in establishing the global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) record. In 1958, Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO2 con­centrations from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory. Using rigorous analytical procedures,…

As much as we know today about the planets of the solar system, it’s almost incomprehensible that a mere 50 years ago we knew almost nothing about them. Observations of even Mars and Venus, Earth’s closest planetary neighbors, through Earth-based telescopes had provided only the most rudimentary…

Izaak Maurits Kolthoff (1894–1993) has been described as the father of modern analytical chemistry for his research and teaching that transformed the ways by which scientists separate, identify, and quantify chemical substances. Once a collection of empirical recipes and prescriptions, the field…

The American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2001. Founded in 1876 in New York City, the Society now has 186 local sections in all 50 states, international chapters, and 32 technical divisions that bring together scientists with…

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, was a landmark in the development of the modern environmental movement. Carson’s scientific perspective and rigor created a work of substantial depth and credibility that sparked widespread debate within the scientific community and the…

Prior to its merger with the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967 to form Carnegie Mellon University, the nonprofit Mellon Institute for Industrial Research was a major, independent research corporation dedicated to promoting applied research for industry and educating scientific researchers…

The federal government’s first physical science research laboratory was chartered by Congress on March 3, 1901, as the National Bureau of Standards, which became the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1988. Recognizing the critical importance of chemical measures and standards,…

 On 19 August, the AIAA Historic Aerospace Sites Committee dedicated Kitty Hawk, NC, as a historic aerospace site, following a decades-long negotiation with the U.S Park Service. A historic marker was unveiled at a 0930 hrs ceremony as part of the First Flight Society’s National Aviation Day at…

On December 18, 1928, Arthur Rawson, a factory pilot for the Cierva Autogiro Company, and then Harold F. Pitcairn, flew a Cierva C.8W Autogiro from…

Bell Aircraft, founded in 1935 by Lawrence Dale “Larry” Bell, based its primary manufacturing facility in Wheatfield, New York, where several important aircraft were designed and produced. During the World War II era, the plant produced the P-39 Airacobra and the P-63 Kingcobra fighters. The P-…

Pearson Field, named for U.S. Army Lt. Alexander Pearson Jr., a prominent early aviator who died in an airplane crash in 1925, is the oldest continuously operating airfield in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the oldest in the United States. In 1905, the field, then known as the Fort Vancouver…