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Results for "History"

Found 149 results

How a Pink Stone Tamed Scattered Light in 1960
How a Pink Stone Tamed Scattered Light in 1960

In 1960, Theodore Maiman ignored the experts and built the first laser using a synthetic ruby cryst…

The Dots That Glued the Atoms
The Dots That Glued the Atoms

In 1916, Gilbert N. Lewis tossed broken atom models and used simple dots to explain electron sharin…

How Math and a Cocktail Tamed the Shifting Virus
How Math and a Cocktail Tamed the Shifting Virus

In the 1990s, David Ho used math to prove HIV wasn't dormant, leading to the cocktail therapy that …

How a 1960 Pill Rewrote Women's Fate
How a 1960 Pill Rewrote Women's Fate

Discover how Gregory Pincus and John Rock developed the first oral contraceptive, Enovid, and chang…

How a Wartime Blackout Doubled the Universe
How a Wartime Blackout Doubled the Universe

In 1944, a wartime blackout gave Walter Baade the dark skies needed to discover two star types, ins…

The 8-Pound Toaster That Ate Light
The 8-Pound Toaster That Ate Light

In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first digital camera using a Fairchild CCD sensor, c…

Taming the 2000-Atmosphere Bomb with a Glass Flask
Taming the 2000-Atmosphere Bomb with a Glass Flask

How Karl Ziegler and Erhard Holzkamp replaced dangerous 2000-atmosphere reactors with a simple glas…

Dorothy Hodgkin Decodes Penicillin's Secret Ring in 1945
Dorothy Hodgkin Decodes Penicillin's Secret Ring in 1945

Discover how Dorothy Hodgkin used X-rays and math to reveal penicillin's secret beta-lactam ring in…

A 5-Minute Sketch Proved the Sun Has a Violent Temper
A 5-Minute Sketch Proved the Sun Has a Violent Temper

In 1859, Richard Carrington sketched a solar flare that caused global auroras and fried telegraph l…

The Tweezers That Split the Mirror
The Tweezers That Split the Mirror

In 1848, Louis Pasteur used a microscope and tweezers to separate mirror-image crystals, proving mo…

The 8-Arcminute Flaw That Broke the Perfect Circle
The 8-Arcminute Flaw That Broke the Perfect Circle

How a tiny 8-arcminute error forced Johannes Kepler to abandon perfect circles and discover the ell…

The 'Empty' Steel Cylinder That Birthed Teflon
The 'Empty' Steel Cylinder That Birthed Teflon

In 1938, a confused chemist cut open an 'empty' gas cylinder and discovered a weird white powder. H…