February 7

February 7 ---------- My Birthday

On This Day In Science - February 7

1824 - William Huggins was born. Huggins was an English astronomer who first determined the chemical components of stars via spectroscopy.
1863 - John Newlands published his "Law of Octaves" where he organized the known elements by increasing atomic weights and noticing chemical properties repeated themselves every eight elements. The English Chemical Society did not recognize his work and did not publish his work. Mendeleev would independently create his own periodic table following the same ideas four years later.

1897 - Galileo Ferraris died. Ferraris is known for his work on rotary magnetic fields and published the design for his alternating current motor the same year Tesla gained a US patent for a AC motor.

1905 - Ulf von Euler was born. Euler would share the 1970 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Bernard Katz and Julius Axelrod for their work with neural transmitters.

1918 - Ruth Sager was born. Sager was a pioneer in cytoplasmic genetics. Her later career was with the genetics of cancer tumors and suppressor genes.

1926 - Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov was born. Feoktistov was a Soviet cosmonaut/engineer who worked part of the team who designed Sputnik, Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz spacecraft. He would go on to head the design team which designed the Salyut and Mir space stations.

1960 - Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov died. Kurchatov would lead in Soviet nuclear research producing among many firsts as the first Soviet atomic weapon and the first atomic power plant.

1984 - Astronaut Bruce McCandless II became the first person to spacewalk untethered to a ship.

2007 - Alan MacDiarmid died. MacDiarmid, Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa were awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of conductive polymers.