I think once Thursday dodgeball finishes up, I may do these thrice weekly. * AP: “Every day, the economy is becoming more and more an Obama economy.” When the AP, which couldn’t be bothered to worry much about seriously examining Obama during the campaign, is starting to look at Ob...

105 A.D. In China, Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Han Dynasty Chinese Imperial Court, invents the world’s first paper from a mixture of bamboo, fish nets, mulberry, and rags. He will eventually become wealthy after he present his paper to the Emperor Han Ho Ti. 1702 The first regularly pr...

1797 Thomas Jefferson presents a paper on the Megalonyx to the American Philosophical Society. It will be published as “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society 4:255-256...

1497 Nicolaus Copernicus first begins to record his astronomical observations. 1611 Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricius becomes the first person to observe sunspots as he observes the rising sun through his telescope. Observing the Sun becomes painful, so Fabricius and his father will soon switch to...

1618 Johannes Kepler formulates the Third Law of Planetary Motion. The third law states that, “The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axis of the orbits.” In other words, the period of a planet’s orbit around the Sun i...

1876 Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for an “Improvement in Telegraphy,” which will later come to be known as the telephone. (US No. 174,465) The patent application was submitted on February 14, just hours ahead of Elisha Gray. This first telephone has only one transducer for bot...

1646 The very first patent in the the New World (America) is issued by the General Court of Massachusetts to Joseph Jenkes, to protect his scyth mill engine from competition. The patent is granted for fourteen years. The patent comes four years before the first US corporate charter, which will also ...

1590 Tycho Brahe discovers a comet in the constellation Pisces. 1616 Copernican theory is declared “false and erroneous” in a decree written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and issued by the Catholic Church in Rome. Further, no person was to be permitted to hold or teach the theory that t...

Today is Hinamatsuri, the Japanese Doll Festival, which is a holiday for girls. 1863 United States President Abraham Lincoln approves an Act of Congress (12 Stat. L. 806) which charters The National Academy of Sciences. The Act stipulates that the Academy will “whenever called upon by any depa...

1908 Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences. 1933 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. releases the great-granddaddy of all monster movies, King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bru...