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On May 19, 1910, the Earth passed through the tail of Halley’s Comet. Prior to the date, using spectroscopy, astronomers detected cyanogen, a very deadly poison in the comet’s tail. This caused panic. French astronomer Camille Flammarion (26 February 1842 – 3 June 1925) even claimed that life on Earth would end because of this.
On May 17, 1991, the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee set up the first web server in history. This event marks the public release of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
On May 16, 1992, Space Shuttle Endeavour completed its maiden voyage and landed safely on runway 22 at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. It was the first use of a drag chute for a Space Shuttle landing.
On May 12, 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration capturing images of black holes, announced the first-ever image of the Sagittarius A*, the Supermassive Black Hole at the center of the Milky Way. After the image of the nearby elliptical galaxy Messier 87’s (M87’s) supermassive black hole, also revealed by the EHT in April 2019, this is the second confirmed image of a black hole.
On May 12, 1941 Z3, the world’s first fully functional and programmable digital computer was unveiled by its designer, the German pioneering computer scientist Konrad Zuse (22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995).
Zuse began to develop Z3 in 1935 and completed it in 1941. But, because of World War II, it was not considered “vital” and was never put into practical use.
Thanks to Z3 and its predecessors, Z1, and Z2, Konrad Zuse has often been suggested as the inventor of the computer.
On May 5, 1961, American astronaut Alan Shepard (November 18, 1923 – July 21, 1998) performed the first United States human spaceflight. It was also the first human-piloted spaceflight in the history of space exploration. Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly into space on April 12, 1961, wasn’t controlling the Vostok 1 spacecraft, it was controlled by a computer.
On May 2, 1800, English chemist William Nicholson (13 December 1753 – 21 May 1815), decomposed water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. This was the first electrolysis of water. The name “electrolysis” was given to this process in 1834 by another English scientist Michael Faraday (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867).
Nicholson had been working with Anthony Carlisle (15 February 1768 – 2 November 1840), a London surgeon, experimenting with the Italian scientist Allesandro Volta’s (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) voltaic pile (see notes 1).
On May 1, 1949, Neptune’s Moon Nereid was discovered by the Dutch astronomer and planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper, who is the eponymous namesake of the Kuiper belt. Nereid is also named Neptune II because it is the second moon of Neptune to be discovered. It is also the last satellite of Neptune to be discovered before Voyager 2‘s discoveries in 1989.
On April 30, 1897, British physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics, Sir Joseph John Thomson (commonly known as J. J. Thompson, 18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) announced the existence of electrons.
Thompson called the particles “corpuscles”, meaning “small bodies”, but later scientific community preferred the name electron which had been suggested by the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney in 1891 because these particles are the fundamental unit of electricity (see notes 1).
The word electron is a combination of the words electric and ion (a suffix, appearing in words of Latin origin, denoting action or condition). The suffix -on which is now used to designate other subatomic particles, such as a proton or neutron, is in turn derived from electron.