September 12

1818: Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling machine gun, was born. 1869: British physician Peter Roget, best known for his thesaurus but also the inventor of a log-log slide rule and early investigator of sampling phenomena, died. 1888: Richard Proctor, who first proposed that lunar crates are caused by meteors rather than volcanic actions, died. 1923: Jules-Louis-Gabriel Violle, who made the first high altitude measurement of the solar constant and after whom the Violle standard of luminous intensity was named, died. 1956: The first commercial coal pipeline was completed. 1958: Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit. 1959: The Soviet Union launched Luna 2, which on September 13 it became the first space probe to reach the moon. 1962: President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous speech declaring, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone..." 1992: Dr. Mae Carol Jemison became the first black woman in space as the payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Endeavor. 1994: A stolen, single-engine Cessna crashed into the South Lawn of the White House. 1995: Two Americans were killed when their hydrogen balloon was shot down by the Belarusian military during an international race.