Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/January 8

January 8:

• 1587 - Birth of Johannes Fabricius, German astronomer (d. 1616)

• 1642 - Death of Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and scientist (b. 1564)

• 1823 - Birth of Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and biologist (d. 1913)

• 1838 - Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code)

• 1888 - Birth of Richard Courant, German-American mathematician (d. 1972)

• 1891 - Birth of Walther Bothe, German physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics laureate (d. 1957)

• 1903 - Birth of Igor Kurchatov, Russian physicist (d. 1960)

• 1945 - Death of Karl Krafft, Swiss astrologer (b. 1900)

• 1980 - Death of John Mauchly, American physicist (b. 1907)