By Richard T. Cartwright, PE, CHMM, (IHMM, AHMP and APICS) Fellow
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.
September 6. 1978
Research team at Genentech in San Francisco and the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles produced a human-type insulin. This was achieved using a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria, which had been genetically engineered after months of creatively using gene-splicing techniques. A normal body’s production of insulin takes place within the cells of the pancreas, programmed by certain genes (segments of DNA). Research scientists synthesized copies of these genes and inserted them into a weakened lab strain of the intestinal microbe, Escherichia coli.
September 6, 1908
Louis Essen, the English physicist who invented the first practical atomic clock, was born. He built a cesium-beam atomic clock, a device that ultimately changed the way time is measured. Each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. Cesium’s natural frequency is now recognized as the international unit of time. A second is now defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations or cycles of the cesium atom’s resonant frequency. This replaced the second defined in terms of Earth’s motion.
September 6, 1869
Fire broke out at Avondale coal mine in Plymouth, Penn., where 179 miners died. The disaster started when a wooden coal breaker built over a shaft entrance to the underground mine caught fire. The bad news was that this shaft was the mine’s only entrance, and so the fire trapped and suffocated the workers. The good news is that soon afterwards, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass legislation establishing safety regulations in the coal mining industry. New safety regulations mandated that there must be at least two entrances to underground mines.
September 6, 1766
John Dalton, an English scientist, was born. He developed the fundamental atomic theory, whereby atoms of the same element are the same, but different from the atoms of any other element. He developed the chemical law of multiple proportions by which he related the ratios of weights of reactants to proportions of elements in compounds. He set the atomic weight of hydrogen to be identical to one and developed a table of atomic weights for other elements. Dalton measured the temperature change of air under compression and suggested that all gasses could be liquefied by high pressure and low temperature.
September 6, 1522
Ferdinand Magellan’s last remaining ship (1 of 5), the Vittoria, finally arrived back home in Spain. It was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe, which was completed three years after it departed.
Historical hazardous materials management events are posted 365 days a year at this LinkedIn discussion group.
