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 of nematode worms. It is developed into a drug that wards off parasites in countless pets and farm animals, averting billions of dollars in losses worldwide.
USA
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Wikicommons/현태웅 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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A young man affected by onchocerciasis - river blindness
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2016
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 construction, in Pittsburgh, of the first still to refine crude oil into kerosene for use in lighting, and the drilling of the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
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A retouched photograph showing Edwin L. Drake, to the right, and the Drake Well in the background, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, where the first commercial well was drilled in 1859 to find oil
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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 human eye) and reemit them, producing intense visible colors that appear to glow, even in daylight.
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Signs are one common use for DayGlo fluorescent pigments.
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2012
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 efforts in developing agents that crosslinked the cellulose fibers and in establishing crosslinking mechanisms led to improved durable press fabrics. SRRC studies also developed new agents that improved the durability of flame retardant cotton to laundering.
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Image Credit:
Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration. (CC BY 2.0)
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The Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana in August 1985.
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2004
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 powerful, defines much of our modern comforts and advances. There were many scientific and technological advances on the way to those smaller and more powerful batteries.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Duke University
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Columbia Batteries: The World's Standard
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2005
Recent archaeological evidence reveals early Virginia, which included both the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies, as the birthplace of the American chemical enterprise. Chemical processes first applied experimentally at Roanoke were re-introduced at Jamestown twenty years later.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/bootbearwdc (CC BY 2.0)
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Housing within James Fort at Jamestown settlement, Virginia
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2007
The Chemical Abstracts Service, a division of the American Chemical Society, has provided the most comprehensive repository of research in chemistry and related sciences for over 100 years. CAS innovations have fueled chemical research through development of the CAS RegistrySM and CAS databases which contain invaluable information for chemical scientists, including SciFinder® and STN®.
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Courtesy CAS
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Chemical Abstracts volume 100, 1984.
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2007
When Georgia chemist Charles Holmes Herty found a way to make quality paper from pine trees in 1932, he also founded an industry that brought much-needed jobs to the depression-crippled south. Paper producers had deemed the plentiful pine too gummy—until Herty's Savannah Pulp and Paper Laboratory wrote a new chapter in the ancient craft inspired by insects who built paper nests while dinosaurs roamed the earth. At its root, however, the papermaking process remained the same: the bonding of cellulose, a polymer whose long chains support plant cell walls.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.
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Portrait of Charles Holmes Herty in 1925.
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2001
In 1897, Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) came to Hull-House, a social settlement founded to address the needs of immigrants living on Chicago’s Near West Side. Through living and working in the Hull-House neighborhood, she identified occupational diseases plaguing those who worked in the “dangerous trades”: rubber, dyes, lead, enamelware, copper and mercury production, and explosives and munitions. Collaborating with the U.S. Department of Labor, Hamilton documented the occupational diseases from which these workers suffered.
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Developed by Rohm and Haas in the 1940s, water-based acrylic emulsion technology filled a need for easy-to-use household paints for a growing suburban population in the United States following World War II. This aqueous technology required less preparation to use, was easier to clean up, had less odor, and performed better than or equal to paints made with solvents. It was also a leap forward in acrylic chemistry.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/United Soybean Board (CC BY 2.0)
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From plastics to paints it changed our world
2008
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"The State [of California] agreed to construct the dam using convict labor for which consideration the State received a grant of land for the construction of a prison and water power rights from the impounded water ...; The work progressed slowly during the dry season by disinterested convict…
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The historic Folsom Power House #1 marks one of the first successful uses of hydroelectric power in the world and the first successful transmission of power long distance (twenty-two miles to Sacramento). The old Folsom Power House still shelters the machinery generated to drive streetcars and…
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The Fort Peck Dam was a cornerstone project of the Works Progress Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. It required the largest construction plant and workforce since the construction of the Panama Canal and peaked at 11,000 workers. It was the largest dam of any type in the world…
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"For 273 years, the little stone bridge that carries Frankford Ave. across Pennypack Creek has been doing its humble job with a minimum of attention..."
- Gerald McKelvey, The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 1970
Built more than a century before the reign of Napoleon,…
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The Fresno scraper established the basis for the modern earthmoving scraper, being able to scrape and move a load of soil, then discharge it at a controlled depth. It quadrupled the productivity of manual labor, replacing hand shoveling of earth into horse carts.
James Porteous, a…
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In 1907, John Fritz, known as the "Father of the Steel Industry in the United States," rejoined the Lehigh University Board of Trustees after an absence of a decade. He began the development of what would prove to be his greatest gift to Lehigh: a modern engineering laboratory and funding for…
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In early September 1985, a team of scientists discovered a previously unknown pure carbon molecule, C60, which they dubbed buckminsterfullerene. The name was chosen because the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller provided a clue that the molecule’s atoms might be arranged in the form of a…
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This fusion-welded drum, tested during 1930, was the first in a series tested at Combustion Engineering Inc. that led to the industrial acceptance of welding for the fabrication of boiler drums. Replacing riveting for steam power plants, electric arc fusion welding permitted increased efficiencies… Read More
Galveston Island is a barrier island located two miles off the Texas coast. The island is about 3 miles wide at its widest and about 28 miles long. The Galveston Seawall extends over 10 miles along Galveston's oceanfront, protecting life and property against hurricanes and tropical storms. …
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The Garfield Thomas Water Tunnel is a unique experimental facility for hydrodynamic research and testing. The 48-inch (1.2-meter) diameter water tunnel enables the research staff to conduct basic and applied investigations in the fields of cavitation, hydroacoustics, turbulence, transition,…
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From 1956 to 1993, the GE Re-entry Systems facility was home to thousands of engineers and technicians who solved the problem of vehicles successfully reentering the Earth’s atmosphere. As described by aerospace pioneer Theodore Von Karman, “ Reentry… is perhaps the most difficult problem one…
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In 1961, in the National Institutes of Health Headquarters (Bethesda, MD), Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei discovered the key to breaking the genetic code when they conducted an experiment using a synthetic RNA chain of multiple units of uracil to instruct a chain of amino acids to add…
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Between its opening in 1888 and the mid-1920s, Georgia Tech took a leading role in transforming mechanical engineering education from a shop-based, vocational program to a professional one built on rigorous academic and analytical methods.
Led by John Saylor Coon (1854-1938), a founding member of… Read More
The Georgetown Steam Plant, a surprisingly complete and operable steam power plant after a career of nearly seventy-five years, was built in the early 1900s when Seattle's inexpensive hydroelectric power attracted manufacturers. Much of the power produced at this plant operated the streetcars. It… Read More
The Georgetown Steam Plant, a surprisingly complete and operable steam power plant after a career of nearly seventy-five years, was built in the early 1900s when Seattle's inexpensive hydroelectric power attracted manufacturers. Much of the power produced at this plant operated the streetcars.…
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Gilman Hall, built in 1916-1917, accommodated a growing College of Chemistry by providing expanded research and teaching facilities for faculty and students specializing in physical, inorganic and nuclear chemistry. Work performed at Gilman Hall helped advance the fields of chemical…
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Commercial pineapple production began in Hawaii about 1890. Fruit was hand-peeled and sliced to match can sizes for export. In 1911 James D. Dole hired Henry G. Ginaca to design a machine to automate the process. As fruit dropped through the Ginaca machine, a cylinder was cut to proper diameter,… Read More
Considered one of the world's most scenic mountain drives, the two-lane Going-To-The-Sun Road through Glacier National Park was the first major road to be constructed directly over high mountain terrain, proving that roads did not need to be limited to mountain passes.
Glacier National…
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Put in service in 1937, this world-renowned bridge, conceived by Joseph Strauss and designed largely by Charles Ellis, was the longest single span (4,200 feet) in the world for a quarter century.
As with many civil engineering projects in their conceptual stages, naysayers scoffed at the…
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Wind dynamics were a major consideration in building such a huge structure. When winds blow against the building, they are deflected up over the roof, creating a partial vacuum that can draw the roof up with a force several times greater than the direct force of the wind. Wind tunnel testing on…
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