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Birth of Key People
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Significant Events
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1900 -
Wolfgang Pauli, made many
contributions to the development of the quantum theory.
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1901 - Enrico Fermi, coined the name
"neutrino".
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1901 - First electric typewriter.
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1903 - Wright brothers' first powered flight.
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1904 - Robert Oppenheimer, first director of
the Los Alamos Scientific Labortories, where the atomic bomb was
developed.
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1904 - Construction of the Panama Canal begins; completed in 1914.
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1905 - Einstein's special theory of relativity unites
space and time in one mathematical description.
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1906 - Great San Francisco Earthquake.
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1908 - First Model T Ford.
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1910 - Einstein proves that the sky is blue because light is
scattered by the molecules in the atmosphere.
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1911 - First escalators introduced, at Earl's
Court Station in London.
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1912 - The Titanic
sinks.
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1913 - Henry Ford uses an assembly line to speed up production of
his cars.
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1915 - Einstein's general theory of relativity describes
what happens when the combination of space and time is distorted by the
presence of matter.
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1917 - John F. Kennedy
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1917 - Clarence Birdseye invents frozen foods.
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1918 - Richard Phillips Feynman, Nobel Prize
winning physicist that reformulated quantum mechanics to put it on a
logical foundation with classical mechanics.
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1920 - First commercial radio broadcast.
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1922 - Tomb of Tutankhamun
discovered.
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1924 - First use of insecticides.
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1926 - Robert Goddard launches a liquid-fuelled
rocket to a height of 56 meters.
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1927 - Theodore Harald Maiman, developed the
laser in 1960.
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1927 - Charles Lindbergh flies across the
Atlantic.
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1928 - Penicillin discovered.
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1929 - Murray Gell-Mann, received the Nobel
Prize for Physics in 1969 for introducing quarks.
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1929 - First FM radio broadcasts.
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1935 - Charles Francis Richter invents his
earthquake scale.
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1939 - First flight of a jet airplane, the He 178, in Germany.
First cyclotron built in California.
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1940 - First use of freeze
drying to preserve foods.
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1941 - John Schwartz, developer of the "string" theory.
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1942 - First controlled nuclear chain reaction in a
uranium "pile" at the University of Chicago.
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1943 - First electronic computer. First practical
nuclear reactor becomes operational at Oak Ridge, TN.
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1945 - Atomic
bomb.
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1947 - Gerd Karl Binnig, developer of the
scanning tunnelling microscope.
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1947 - First supersonic flight. First practical
linear accelerator.
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1951 - Fusion bomb developed.
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1953 - Structure of DNA deciphered by Francis Crick and James Watson.
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1954 - CERN, the European particle physics
research center which will become home to the Large Electron-Positron
Collider (LEP), is founded.
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1956 - Video tape recorder developed.
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1957 - First artificial Earth satellite, Sputnick 1.
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1958 - NASA is created.
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1961 - First manned spaceflight, by Yuri Gagarin.
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1962 - Cuban missile crisis, man's closest
brush with nuclear war.
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1969 - First manned Moon landing.
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1970 - First Boeing 747 introduced. First use
of e-mail.
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1971 - First pocket electronic calculator put on sale
by Texas Instruments.
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1973 - First Skylab missions.
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1975 - The quark theory first becomes known as the
"standard model". Altair 8800 personal computer sold in
kit form.
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1977 - Two spaceprobes known as Voyager
launched by NASA.
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1979 - America's worst nuclear accident occured at Three Mile Island, PA.
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1980 - Development of optical fiber communications.
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1981 - Introduction of the IBM PC. First AIDS patients in Uunitd States. First
flight of the Space Shuttle.
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1986 - Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
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1987 - First direct evidence of planet-sized objects
orbiting other stars.
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1991 - Collapse of the Soviet Union.
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1992 - The satellite COBE
(Cosmic Background Explorer) finds ripples in the background radiation
that are exactly the right size to conform with the standard Big Bang
model.
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1996 - First mammal cloned from mature cell.
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2000 - Working draft of the Human Genome completed.
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2001 - World Trade Center Towers fall. First human embryo cloned from an egg cell.
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