October 21

1833: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and who began the Nobel Prize system, was born. 1879: Thomas Edison demonstrated an electric light bulb that lasted for 13.5 hours. 1884: Thomas Edison received a patent for his "electrical indicator" that resembles a d'Arsonval movement. 1914: Samuel Alderson, inventor of the crash test dummy, was born. 1915: The first trans-Atlantic radiotelephone call was placed between Arlington, VA, and Paris, France. 1923: The first Carl Zeiss projector planetarium opened at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany.  1959: Dr. Wernher Von Braun began work at NASA after a transfer from ABMA. 1960: The first British nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, was launched. 1967: Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung, who co-developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram relating star temperatures with brightness, died. 1976: The United States made a clean sweep of the Nobel Prizes, winning or sharing awards in chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, and literature (no peace prize awarded).