Articles about inventions & science across every continent and era, oldest first.
India's first passenger train left Bori Bunder at 3.30 pm on April 16, 1853. Behind it stood a 5 per cent guarantee of 1849 and a pass finished in 1868.
· 1853Andrew Waugh's 1856 letter to the Royal Geographical Society named Peak XV "Mont Everest" at 29,002 feet and thanked one assistant, J. Hennessey.
· 1856MPs asked in June 1858 how to protect Parliament from the Thames; on July 15 Disraeli called the river a Stygian pool and named a 3,000,000 pound plan.
· 1858Carrington and Hodgson each saw a white-light flare on September 1, 1859, as Kew's magnetographs jumped. Auroras and telegraph failures followed.
· 1859Darwin's diary says the 1,250 copies of the Origin sold on publication day, November 24, 1859; Murray's trade sale had already taken orders for 1,500.
· 1859Egypt granted the Suez concession, bought 44 percent of the shares and supplied the labor. In November 1875 a bankrupt khedive sold that stake to Britain.
· 1869The Act of July 1, 1862, paid two railroads in bonds and land by the mile. On May 10, 1869, the rails met at Promontory Summit and a telegraph sent "DONE."
· 1869Historic Environment Scotland records the Tay Bridge high girders falling on December 28, 1879. The 1880 inquiry split into a joint report and Rothery's own.
· 1879Waldemar Haffkine injected himself with 10 cc of plague vaccine on January 10, 1897, in Bombay. A 1902 accident at Mulkowal cost him his post until 1907.
· 1897William Knox D'Arcy signed a 60-year Persian oil concession on May 28, 1901. Seven years later, a well at Masjed Soleyman struck oil on May 26, 1908.
· 1908The Hejaz Railway reached Medina on September 1, 1908, funded by subscription under Sultan Abdulhamid II, a 2010 study of Ottoman newspapers shows.
· 1908A sea-level plan, yellow fever and bankruptcy stopped the French in 1889. The United States finished a lock canal in 1914 on a treaty signed for Panama by a Frenchman.
· 1914Groves's top-secret memorandum of July 18, 1945 put the Trinity blast at 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT; Los Alamos remeasured it as 22.1 kilotons in 2016.
· 1945The Enola Gay released Little Boy at 8:15:15 on August 6, 1945. The US Strategic Bombing Survey counted 70,000 dead; the City of Hiroshima counts 237,000.
· 1945At 22:28:34 Moscow time on October 4, 1957, an R-7 rocket from Tyuratam put an 83.6-kilogram sphere into orbit. Its beeps lasted three weeks.
· 1957The World Bank lent Japanese National Railways $80 million on May 2, 1961 for the New Tokaido Line. It opened October 1, 1964 at nearly double the budget.
· 1964At 102:45:58 on July 20, 1969, Armstrong radioed that the Eagle had landed. The transcript, the 1202 alarms, the fuel calls and quarantine to August 10.
· 1969At 01:23:04 on April 26, 1986, a turbine rundown test began at Chernobyl Unit 4; 45 seconds later a fuel channel ruptured. INSAG-7, Pripyat and the counts.
· 1986On August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released stored carbon dioxide, killing at least 1,700 people. A degassing pipe began pumping the lake in 2001.
· 1986A NASA oral history records how a four-person team advised Chile on re-feeding, urine tests and the Fénix capsule during the 2010 San José mine rescue.
· 2010
