A Century of Science

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1938 After analyzing decades of temperature readings, British engineer George Callendar describes what is later known as the greenhouse effect

1939 First flight by a jet aircraft, built by Germany's Ernst Heinkel

1939 Swiss chemist Paul Muller determines that ddt is a powerful insecticide

1940

1940 French boys searching for their dog stumble onto the Lascaux cave, whose walls are covered with spectacular paintings and engravings dating from the Ice Age

1940 American surgeon Charles Drew devises a method for long-term storage of blood plasma, which can then be used for transfusions

1941 U.S. researchers Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan adapt an earlier idea for dispersing liquids and powders in a spray. Result: the aerosol can

1942 A team headed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi produces the first nuclear chain reaction

1942 Frenchmen Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan perfect the Aqua-Lung, a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, or scuba

1942 Germany successfully launches the V-2, a surface-to-surface missile developed with the help of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun

1943 British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing helps build an electronic computer, the Colossus, that will be used by the Allies to crack German codes

1943 Dutch physician Willem Kolff invents the dialysis machine, used to cleanse the blood when a patient's kidneys malfunction

1943 After accidentally swallowing synthetic lsd, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovers the drug's hallucinogenic effects

1943 Publication of Being and Nothingness establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as the leading French existentialist

1944 In Mexico, American plant pathologist Norman Borlaug starts developing high-yield grains that, two decades later, will fuel the green revolution

1945 U.S. pilots cruising at high altitudes discover powerful west-to-east wind systems, later called jet streams

1945 U.S. planes drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

1945 The U.S. Public Health Service begins adding fluoride to the water supply in order to reduce the incidence of tooth decay

1945 Raytheon technician Percy Spencer accidentally discovers microwave cooking when microwave signals melt a candy bar in his pocket

1946 John Mauchly and John Eckert unveil ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer

1946 American pediatrician Benjamin Spock publishes The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care

1947 Bedouin shepherds find Dead Sea Scrolls hidden in clay jars in Israel's Qumran Cave, overlooking the Dead Sea

1947 American Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid camera he invented

1947 Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl sails from Peru to Polynesia on the wooden raft Kon-Tiki to support his theory that pre-Incan peoples reached South Pacific islands by sea and colonized them

1947 U.S. Air Force test pilot Charles (Chuck) Yeager breaks the sound barrier

1947 A research team at Bell Laboratories led by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invents the transistor

1947 U.S. chemist Willard Libby develops radiocarbon dating, which can determine the age of objects made of organic materials, such as wood and bone

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