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Beginning of the Civil War
On April 12, 1861, Confederate soldiers under command of General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. On April 13th, the Union surrendered the fort. Within two days Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 soldiers to deal with the south. -
Gettysburg Address
On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the official dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery of Gettysburg. Lincoln’s 273 word address was not the featured speech that but is remembered as one of the most important speeches in American history. -
Law of Octaves
English chemist J.A.R. Newlands made a generalization, “that, if the chemical elements are arranged according to increasing atomic weight, those with similar physical and chemical properties will occur after each interval of seven elements.” He was the first to find a periodic pattern using three properties of elements, which led to the development of the periodic law. -
Lincoln Assassinated
The evening of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. This occurred only 5 days after the official surrender of the Confederate army. -
Andrew Johnson Impeached
After Lincoln was assassinated Andrew Johnson was sworn into office. After a long time in office and having Congress overrule him in everything, Johnson decided to fire Stanton, the radical republican Secretary of War, and replaced him with General Lorenzo Thomas as a replacement. This caused the House of Representatives to impeach Johnson, sending him to trial in the senate. The trial ended one vote short of the two thirds majority needed to remove Johnson from office. -
Mendeleev’s Periodic Table
Dmitri Mendeleev, published a periodic table in 1869. Mendeleev ordered the elements in order of relative atomic mass. He also arranged them so groups of elements with similar properties were in vertical columns in the table. There were some gaps in the table, but Mendeleev believed the elements belonging in the gaps just weren’t discovered yet. -
Discovery of the Electron
J.J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897. While observing electric discharges at Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge, England. Thomson performed a series of experiments studying the rays. Thomson’s experiments resulted in the formula e/m = 1.8 10-11 coulombs/kg. In 1906 Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery. -
Beginning of Spanish American War
On April 25th, the US declared war on Spain. Spain was unprepared for war. The war started because of a disagreement about Cuba, and ended July 17th, 1898. -
Plum Pudding Model
The Plum Pudding Model was the “earliest theoretical description of the inner structure of atoms.” It was proposed in 1903 by J.J. Thomson who discovered the electron around six years prior. In 1911 it was abandoned on both theoretical and experimental grounds because of the more popular Rutherford atomic model. -
Rutherford’s Gold Foil Experiment
Rutherford established the nuclear theory of the atom after shooting a beam of alpha light through gold foil and noticing that the light was reflected by the nucleus of the atom, disproving the plum pudding model. -
Discovery of Proton
Ernest Rutherford was experimenting on radioactivity when he discovered that the atom had to have a positively charged core containing most of its mass. He named it the proton from the Greek work protos meaning first. -
Sinking of the Titanic
The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage sailing to New York. It took a few hours to sink, and left 1,503 people dead in the freezing Atlantic waters. -
Neils Bohr’s Planetary Model of the Atom
The Bohr model depicts an atom as a positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that orbit the nucleus in a circular fashion. It closely resembles the solar system, and how the planets orbit the sun. -
World War 1
European conflict broke out after the Serbian assassination or Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand. The United States was forced to join after receiving word of an attack from Mexico that was requested by the Germans. Over 20 million deaths and the fall of the Ottoman Empire were 2 results of the war. -
Moseley’s Atomic Numbers
Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley, an English physicist, contributed to the sciences by developing a justification process from physical laws of the previous empirical concepts of the atomic number. -
San Francisco Earthquake
It was a magnitude 2.9 Earthquake that covered over 296 miles. It led to Reid’s elastic rebound theory in 1917. -
Schrodinger’s Equation
It is an equation that allows for the prediction of subatomic particles based on their current position. It helps support Newton’s 2nd Law. -
The Great Depression
After the stock market was booming and the money coming in from exports during world war 1, the stock market crashed, leading to hundreds of thousands of unemployed citizens starving and living in poverty. -
Discovery of the Neutron
James Chadwick, and English physicist, worked under the supervision of Rutherford. He discovered the neutron in 1932, he determined that a neutron is devoid of an electric charge. -
World War 2
The threat that the National German Socialist Workers Party purposed on Europe along with their mass genocide of minorities and the flawed treaty of Versailles led to World War 2. The Allied powers defeated the Axis powers and restored order to the European Union. The first Atomic bombs were dropped and major technological breakthroughs were made.
