Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/March 4

March 4:

• 1493 - Explorer Christopher Columbus arrives back in Lisbon, Portugal aboard his ship Niña from his discovery voyage to America. He returned to Spain on March 15

• 1774 - First sighting of Orion Nebula by William Herschel

• 1792 - Birth of Samuel Slocum, American inventor (d. 1861)

• 1822 - Birth of Jules Antoine Lissajous, French mathematician (d. 1880)

• 1835 - Birth of John Hughlings Jackson, English neurologist (d. 1911)

• 1847 - Birth of Karl Bayer, Austrian chemist (d. 1904)

• 1853 - Death of Christian Leopold von Buch, German geologist (b. 1774)

• 1854 - Birth of Sir Napier Shaw, British meteorologist (d. 1945)

• 1859 - Birth of Alexander Stepanovich Popov, Russian physicist (d. 1905)

• 1862 - Birth of Jacob Robert Emden, Swiss astrophysicist and meteorologist (d. 1940)

• 1863 - Birth of Reginald Innes Pocock, British zoologist (d. 1947)

• 1871 - Birth of Boris Galerkin, Russian mathematician (d. 1945)

• 1881 - Birth of Richard C. Tolman, American mathematical physicist (d. 1948)

• 1887 - Gottlieb Daimler unveils his first automobile which he test runs in Esslingen and Cannstatt, Germany

• 1889 - Birth of Oscar Chisini, Italian mathematician (d. 1967)

• 1903 - Birth of William C. Boyd, American immunochemist (d. 1983)

• 1904 - Birth of George Gamow, Ukrainian-born physicist (d. 1968)

• 1910 - Death of Knut Ångström, Swedish physicist (b. 1857)

• 1914 - Birth of Robert R. Wilson, American physicist, sculptor and architect (d. 2000)

• 1923 - Birth of Sir Patrick Moore, British astronomer

• 1927 - Death of Ira Remsen American chemist (b. 1846)

• 1934 - Birth of Janez Strnad, Slovenian physicist

• 1952 - Death of Charles Scott Sherrington, English scientist, Nobel laureate (b. 1857)

• 1962 - United States Atomic Energy Commission announces that the first atomic power plant at McMurdo Station in Antarctica is in operation

• 1967 - Death of Michel Plancherel, Swiss mathematician (b. 1885)

• 1973 - Death of Samuel Tolansky, British scientist and expert on spectroscopy (b. 1907)

• 1976 - Death of Walter H. Schottky, German physicist (b. 1886)

• 1977 - The first Cray-1 supercomputer is shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico

• 1997 - Death of Robert H. Dicke, American physicist (b. 1916)

• 2004 - Death of George Pake, American physicist (b. 1924)

• 2006 - Final contact attempt with Pioneer 10 by the Deep Space Network. No response was received