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beaker |
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| February 11 in chemistry |
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 1800 - William Henry Fox Talbot born: photography pioneer.He improved on Thomas Wedgewood's discovery (1802) that brushing silver nitrate solution onto paper produces a light-sensitive medium able to record negative images, but Wedgewood was unable to control the darkening. In February 1835, Fox Talbot found that a strong solution of salt fixed the image. Using a camera obscura to focus an image onto his paper to produce a negative, then - by exposing a second sheet of paper to sunlight transmitted through the negative - he was the first to produce a positive picture of which he was able to make further copies at will. In 1844 he published Pencil of nature the first photographically illustrated book. |
| 1808 - Judge Jesse Fell of Wilkes-Barre, Penn experimented by burning anthracite coal to keep his house warm. He developed a method to burn the stone coal without the use of forced air and his fireplace grate opened up the home heating market. On the fly-leaf of one of his books he wrote: February 11, 1808, made the experiment of burning the common stone coal of the valley in a grate, in a common fireplace in my house, and found it will answer the purpose of fuel, making a clearer and better fire, at less expense, than burning wood in the common way. He had found a cheap, clean burning fuel. As a result, that area of northeast Pennsylvania became an important coal mining area for generations. |
| 1813 - Anders Gustav Ekeberg died (born 16 Jan 1767): Swedish chemist who in 1802 discovered the element tantalum. A graduate of the University of Uppsala (1788) he began teaching at Uppsala (1794), introducing the chemistry of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. He continued his experiments despite partial deafness from a childhood infection and one eye blinded by an exploding flask (1801). His most notable student was Jöns Jacob Berzelius. |
| 1839 - Josiah Willard Gibbs born: thermodynamics and the phase rule; the Gibbs free energy is named after him. |
| 1894 - Izaak Kolthoff born: analytical chemistry. |
| 1914 - Alwin Mittasch and Christian Schneider filed US patent application for catalytic production of methanol from carbon monoxide and hydrogen (U.S. patent 1,201,850). |
| 1939 - The journal Nature published a theoretical paper on nuclear fission. The term was coined by the authors Lise Meitner and Otto Fritsch, her nephew. They knew that when a uranium nucleus was struck by neutrons, barium was produced. Seeking an explanation, they used Bohr's "liquid drop" model of the nucleus to envision the neutron inducing oscillations in a uranium nucleus, which would occasionally stretch out into the shape of a dumbbell. Sometimes, the repulsive forces between the protons in the two bulbous ends would cause the narrow waist joining them to pinch off and leave two nuclei where before there had been one. They calculated the huge amounts of energy released. This was the basis for nuclear chain reaction. |
sources: http://webserver.lemoyne.edu/faculty/giunta/week.html, http://todayinsci.com
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