...was my parent's wedding anniversary in 1950. They married on a Saturday and, as most African American couples did back then, they proceeded on with their lives with little fanfare: i.e., no honeymoon (few places to go and not a lot of money to get there). They spent 49 years together -- an admirable record by today's standards -- until Pop's passage; mom 10 years later. It's also the anniversary of Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's 715 home run record as my father, the avid baseball fan, pointed out to me each year I bought a card for my parents later than the actual date.
It also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the discovery of superconductivity. As with their anniversary when they were alive, I'm a little behind the power curve...☺
Working in his cryogenics laboratory at Leiden University in April 1911, Heike Kammerlingh Onnes noted that the resistivity of the metal mercury appeared to drop to zero as the temperature in the cryostat was decreased to 4.2 K. He recognized that the effect was real and not due to a faulty electrical contact or some other experimental artifact, and found that other metals placed in the cryostat exhibited similar behavior. Superconductivity research was born.
Science Mag Link: Happy 100th, Superconductivity! Jelena Stajic, Robert Coontz, and Ian Osborne
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