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 distoreted 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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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 - 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 747s 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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1980 - Development of optical fiber communications.
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1981 - Introduction of the IBM PC.
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1982 - 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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