Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
This Day in Tech - 1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
Inversion occurs when the air near the ground is cooler than the air above it, a reversal of normal atmospheric conditions. When that happens, manmade pollutants are trapped, resulting in smog. The physical conditions around Los Angeles, for example, lead to frequent inversion layers over the basin. That, combined with heavy automobile pollution, consistently gives L.A. the worst air quality in the country.
But L.A. has never seen anything quite like that one week in Pennsylvania, in what became known as the Donora air inversion or, more dramatically, the “Donora Death Fog.”
In Donora, an industrial town situated about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, pollution from the nearby U.S. Steel smelting plants and Donora Zinc Works was the main culprit. Trapped in a temperature inversion, the pollutants blanketed the town during the night of Oct. 26.
The companies connived with the U.S. Public Health Service to cover up the facts of the incident and succeeded in doing so for half a century. Whistle-blowers were silenced; records disappeared. It wasn’t until 1994 that a full accounting of what happened in Donora was finally published.
To Philip Sadtler, an industry consultant sent to evaluate the disaster and who tried without success to expose the corporate cover-up, U.S. Steel was guilty of murder:
“The directors of U.S. Steel should have gone to jail for killing people,” Sadtler said shortly before his death in 1996.
In the end, 40 percent of Donora’s population of 14,000 became ill as a result of the “death fog” and the town joined a growing list of other places hit hard — and harder — by human pollution.
Johannes Kepler Goes Dancing With a Star
This Day in Tech - 1604: Johannes Kepler first lays eyes on the star that will eventually bear his name. It is the last confirmed supernova to be observed in our galaxy.
The German astronomer was not the first to see the star — several others had identified it a week earlier and one, John Brunowski, actually alerted him to its presence — but Kepler’s systematic observations were so detailed that the body became known as Kepler’s star (or Kepler’s supernova).
Kepler’s star was located in the constellation Ophiuchus, at a distance of anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000 light-years from Earth.
At the time that Kepler began watching it, the star was visible to the naked eye and eventually became the brightest object in the night sky other than the moon and Venus. It would remain visible for nearly a year before disappearing.
It was also the second supernova to be recorded within a generation: Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s predecessor as imperial mathematician in Prague, identified a supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia in 1572.
The Milky Way has remained quiet on the supernova front since the early 17th century although plenty of intergalactic supernovas have been observed.
In 1941, astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California identified the gaseous remnants of Kepler’s star and the Hubble telescope has since returned some strikingly beautiful photographs.
Kepler’s observations of what was subsequently classified as a type Ia supernova appeared in his De Stella Nova, published in 1606.
China Joins the Fraternity of Space Travelers
This Day in Tech - 2003: China becomes the third nation to launch an astronaut into space.
Yang Liwei, a former People’s Liberation Army air force fighter pilot, spends 21 hours aloft and completes 14 orbits in Shenzhou 5.
Four Shenzhou (”divine vessel”) capsules, all unmanned, had previously been in orbit but Yang’s presence on board represented a great leap forward for China’s space program.
Yang, 38, logged 1,350 hours flying time as a fighter pilot before entering astronaut training in 1998. He was selected from among 14 candidates for the historic flight.
Yang shot skyward atop a Long March CZ-2F rocket booster, riding in a capsule that was based roughly on the Soviet Soyuz design.
It was larger than the Russian capsule, though, and — being newer — possessed more sophisticated technology.
Yang landed in the Russian manner as well, parachuting to earth rather than splashing down in the ocean, the preferred American method from Mercury to Apollo.
China’s achievement was widely applauded, even by two of its traditional adversaries, Japan and the United States.
NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe sent his congratulations and best wishes for continued success.
Pac-Man Brings Gaming Into Pleistocene Era
This Day in Tech - 1979: Before Halo, before World of Warcraft, before Myst, there was Pac-Man. On this day, Pac-Man makes its debut in Japan.
While it wasn’t the first videogame — arcade games, including video ones, had existed for years — Pac-Man turned video gaming into a phenomenon by burning it into the collective consciousness in a way that previous games did not.
The brainchild of Toru Iwatani, a designer for Namco, a Japanese software company, Pac-Man is a model of complex simplicity.
The concept: the player controls a blob with a mouth that navigates a two-dimensional maze, eating dots and ghosts while trying to avoid being eaten itself — could have been dreamed up by a 10 year old. But try racking up big points; ah, there’s the rub.
The game received a lukewarm reception in Japan (where it was originally sold under the name Puck-Man), but became an instant hit when it arrived in the United States.
The name was supposedly changed to Pac-Man for the U.S. market for fear that some bright wit might alter the spelling into an obscenity.
Regardless of the name, Pac-Man quickly left every existing arcade game in its wake. Versions were made to accommodate virtually every platform out there and spinoffs of the game itself, such as Ms. Pac-Man, were marketed to feed off the popularity of the original.
Nearly three decades after its appearance, Pac-Man is still being sold and remains one of the most popular video games of all time.
Takes a Licking, but Keeps On Ticking
This Day in Tech - 1958: Surgeons place the first fully implantable heart pacemaker into a human patient.
The history of using electricity to stimulate and regulate heartbeat was more than half-a-century old when Ake Senning, a cardiac surgeon at Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital, implanted the pacemaker in heart patient Arne Larsson.
The pacemaker failed after three hours. A second pacemaker was implanted, and this one worked for two days before giving out.
The pacemaker was developed, under Senning’s direction, by physician and inventor Rune Elmqvist. Employing two transistors, the device — roughly the size of a hockey puck — was implanted in a subcutaneous pouch, then rigged to send the desired electrical pulses to the cardiac muscle.
This basic principle had been used successfully in external pacemakers for some time. The first known use of electrical impulses to stimulate heartbeat was reported by British physician J.A. McWilliam in 1889.
Battery life is the great limiting factor for pacemakers. Modern devices use lithium-iodide as the standard, encased in titanium to help insulate the circuitry from bodily fluids.
As for Larsson, he survived the replacement of the faulty pacemakers. In fact, he survived another 24 pacemakers and lived until 2001, dying at age 86.
Russ Puts Man-Made Moon in Orbit
This Day in Tech - 1957: The Space Age dawns a little sooner than expected with the successful launch of Sputnik 1 by the Soviet Union.
It’s a pivotal moment, the kind of event that, five decades later, still has people asking, “Do you remember where you were when …?”
But Sputnik may not have been quite the world-beater it seemed at the time.
In recent interviews leading up to the 50th anniversary of the launch, Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program, admitted that Sputnik was something of a lash-up, a hastily put-together gamble using a spare rocket and a satellite assembled from what was on hand.
Nevertheless, as it had been with the sudden emergence of the USSR as a nuclear power eight years earlier, the American public was caught off guard by Sputnik and frightened by the implications of a successful Soviet rocket launch.
If the Soviets could put a basketball-sized artificial satellite into orbit, they could certainly put a nuclear-tipped missile into a target in the United States.
American unease was only heightened when Sputnik 1 was followed a month later by the successful launching of Sputnik 2, which carried the dog Laika, the first living passenger, into space.
With Sputnik 1’s successful deployment, the political, military and technological relationship between the Soviet Union and United States changed dramatically.
The Americans immediately abandoned their Vanguard satellite project, because its intended payload was smaller than Sputnik’s, and started afresh with Explorer.
Not only did Sputnik herald the beginning of the Space Age, it also constituted the opening salvo in the U.S.-Soviet space race.
NASA was established as a direct result of Sputnik’s success, and the fledgling U.S. space program which was going through plenty of growing pains responded. Within four months, the United States had placed Explorer 1 into orbit.
Since Sputnik, an entire generation has come of age that can’t remember when space flight was only the province of dreamers and science-fiction authors.