By Richard T. Cartwright, PE, CHMM, (IHMM, AHMP and APICS) Fellow.
Richard died April 21, 2025; honoring the work he did with hazmat history is one small way to keep his memory alive.
The saying, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” is more than a cliché. It is a reminder that we must constantly be learning from the past. Here’s a look back at major historical events that happened today in the world of hazardous materials.
February 13, 2011
An Ecuadorian court fined Chevron, parent company of Texaco, $8 billion to compensate for ecological problems that the Lago Agrio oil field development had created including water pollution, soil contamination, deforestation and cultural upheaval.
February 13, 1981
A series of sewer explosions destroyed over two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky. The blasts were caused by ignition of hexane vapors, which had been discharged from a soybean processing plant. Hexane was used as a solvent to extract oil from soybeans. The Ralston-Purina plant employed a containment system designed to recycle used hexane from the process back to the plant. However, the containment system was not functioning that night. Several thousand gallons of hexane were released into the sewers. Hexane vapors slowly seeped out of manholes in the streets. The cause of the explosions was eventually traced to a spark from a car.
February 13, 1946
The world’s first electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was first demonstrated at the University of Pennsylvania. It occupied a room 30 x 50 feet. ENIAC’s birth lay in World War II as a classified military project. Its development is historic because it laid the foundation for the modern electronic computing industry. ENIAC demonstrated that high-speed digital computing was possible using the vacuum tube technology then available. Built out of some 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, it was in its time the largest single electronic apparatus in the world.
February 13, 1912
Robert Millikan, the American Nobel Prize winning experimental physicist, began collecting data from his famous oil drop experiment. Millikan used his measurements of the motion of oil drops within an electric field to estimate the fundamental unit of charge carried by a single electron. He began by measuring the course of charged water droplets in an electrical field. His results suggested that the charge on the droplets is a multiple of the elementary electric charge. Later, he experimentally verified the equation introduced by Albert Einstein to describe the photoelectric effect. He used this same research to obtain an exact value of Planck’s constant.
February 13, 1766
Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer, was born. As a pioneer sociologist, he was one of the first to systematically analyze human society when he published his theories in “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” Malthus predicted the population would always outrun food supply and that would result in famine, disease or war to reduce the number of people. As Malthus observed, the Industrial Revolution was causing a rapid increase in population. He indicated that keeping improved social conditions would require imposing strict limits on reproduction. Reading the book inspired Charles Darwin to reflect upon the survival of fittest individuals in the process of natural selection in evolving populations of any organism.
February 13, 1633
Galileo Galilei, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating the Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the sun. During his inquisition, Galileo agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence. He was put under house arrest where he remained until dying in 1642. Today, Galileo is recognized for making important contributions to the study of motion and astronomy. His work influenced later scientists such as Isaac Newton, who developed the law of universal gravitation. In 1992, the Vatican formally acknowledged its mistake in condemning Galileo.
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