Template:Selected anniversaries/August 17: Difference between revisions
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||1978: The first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon was completed when three Americans, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, landed their Double Eagle II in France. Their 3,100-mile flight began on 11 Aug 1978 from Presque Isle, Maine and ended 137-hr 6-min later. The helium balloon Double Eagle II was 112- ft high, 65-ft diam., capacity 160,000 cu.ft. with a 15x7x4½-ft passenger gondola named The Spirit of Albuquerque. The underside of the gondola was a twin-hulled catamaran to provide emergency flotation for any unplanned water landing. Double Eagle II was built by Ed Yost. The history of transatlantic balloon crossing included seventeen prior unsuccessful attempts and seven lives lost. | ||1978: The first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by balloon was completed when three Americans, Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, landed their Double Eagle II in France. Their 3,100-mile flight began on 11 Aug 1978 from Presque Isle, Maine and ended 137-hr 6-min later. The helium balloon Double Eagle II was 112- ft high, 65-ft diam., capacity 160,000 cu.ft. with a 15x7x4½-ft passenger gondola named The Spirit of Albuquerque. The underside of the gondola was a twin-hulled catamaran to provide emergency flotation for any unplanned water landing. Double Eagle II was built by Ed Yost. The history of transatlantic balloon crossing included seventeen prior unsuccessful attempts and seven lives lost. | ||
||1987: Harold R. McCluskey dies ... a chemical operations technician at the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant located in Washington State who is known for having survived, on August 30, 1976, exposure to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded. He became known as the 'Atomic Man'. Pic: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/four-decades-later-workers-enter-site-of-atomic-man-accident/ | |||
||1993: Feng Kang dies ... mathematician. | ||1993: Feng Kang dies ... mathematician. | ||
Revision as of 13:40, 29 August 2018
1807: Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1904: Physicist, chemist, and crime-fighter Marie Curie condemns Extract of Radium as "a terrible hazard to health and sanity."
1927: Mathematician Erik Ivar Fredholm dies. He introduced and analyzed a class of integral equations now called Fredholm equations. Fredholm's work on integral equations and operator theory anticipated the theory of Hilbert spaces.
1929: Captain and pilot Francis Gary Powers born.
1930: Film director and arms dealer Egon Rhodomunde begins shooting his film Spy Pilot.
1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 launched from Earth. It will become the first successful soft landing on another planet (Venus).
1996: Lorenz system develops self-awareness, spontaneous seeks out and fights crimes against mathematical constants.
2017: The GW170817 gravitational wave signal is observed by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. It is the first gravitational wave event observed to have a simultaneous electromagnetic signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy.