Today in History - December 17, 1903 - Orville and Wilbur Wright completed the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright Flyer stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Over the next few years, the Wright brothers developed more capable airplanes and grabbed the world’s attention in their European […]

Today in History - November 15, 1939 - First commercial manufacture of nylon yarn. Wallace Hume Carothers led a team of researchers at DuPont to develop the world’s first totally synthetic fiber. Dupont turned their experimental laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware into a full-fledged industrial process and industry. Before the invention of nylon became a […]

Today in History - November 7, 1988 - 6.9 earthquake destroys Armenia, Spitak and kills over 60,000. It is reported that the entire population of Spitak died in this devastating earthquake, making it one of the most deadly earthquakes in human history. Partial blame was placed on the substandard infrastructure in Soviet-era buildings. The Soviet […]

Today in History - December 6, 1989 - Fourteen women, mostly engineering students, were killed by an anti-feminist gunman at the Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal. The university, located on the north slope of Mont Royal in Montreal,  was the largest engineering school in Canada, with about 5,000 students enrolled at that time. The suicidal gunman […]

Today in History - December 3, 1984 - over 2,000 die and many more injured from Union Carbide’s (now owned by Dow Chemical) poison gas emission (methyl isocyanate) at their agricultural plant in Bhopal, India. Prior to the catastrophe, the Bhopal plant had drastically reduced personnel, particularly in regard to production and maintenance, as it […]