Earth Day

The Air Pollution Control Act passes Congress, becoming the first piece of legislation to address air pollution. Despite its declaration to combat air contamination, the act puts regulation largely in the hands of individual states and gives no means of enforcement to the federal government

The crew of Apollo 8 takes the first photograph of the Earth from space. The photograph, named “Earthrise,” will become the iconic image of the environmental movement.

In recognition of the growing media attention given to the approaching Earth Day, President Richard Nixon stresses the importance of environmental issues in his State of the Union Address

The first national Earth Day. Co-chaired by Congressman Pete McCloskey and coordinated by Denis Hayes, the first Earth Day takes the form of a nationwide protest against environmental ignorance. An estimated 20 million people participate across the country, in what will ultimately be the largest demonstration ever in American history.

Dennis Meadows co-authors The Limits to Growth, a study of the interaction between population, industrial growth, food production and ecosystem limits. In the book, Meadows demonstrates with clear diagrams and linear models that Earth’s resources are being steadily used up, and as these resources drop, human population is expanding exponentially. The Limits to Growth predicts that by the middle of the 21st century, Earth’s population will no longer be sustainable and the ecosystem will completely collapse

 During the Arab Oil Embargo, energy demands exceed supplies in the United States for first time. The fuel shortage results from the suspension of oil shipments to the U.S., with gas prices skyrocketing and the price of a barrel increasing 400% from $3 to $12 a barrel. The energy crisis fuels immediate research into alternative energy and creates a new dialogue about energy security for the United States.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_movement

Reporter Michael H. Brown raises questions that lead to the discovery of long-term dioxin contamination at Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, NY. Up to 21,000 tons of toxic waste had been dumped in the canal by the Hooker Chemical Company from 1942-1952 and caused significant numbers of birth defects, abnormalities in children, and miscarriages.
The national media fallout from the Love Canal disaster leads to the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, more commonly known as the “Superfund” legislation, which mandates clean up of abandoned hazardous waste sites by the parties responsible. Superfund will be signed into law on December 11, 1980.

Book Report Tesla My Inventions

     "My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla" is a brief account in Tesla's own words of his early life and education and his career as an important and prolific inventor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

     "My Inventions" is an assemblage of six magazine articles Tesla is asked to provide to the periodical "Electrical Engineering." Originally published in 1919, each article focuses on a certain period of Tesla's life, beginning with his early childhood in Croatia and spanning his education in Gospic and Prague, the beginning of his career in Budapest and Paris, and his moving to New York to work for Thomas Edison before founding a successful laboratory of his own.

      Aimed at a readership with a particular interest in electrical engineering, Tesla's articles focus on two of his best known inventions, the induction motor and the oscillating transformer, also called the Tesla coil. He describes his development of the concepts for these devices and explains the theory behind them with the use of illustrative diagrams.

     Tesla devotes a good portion of his work to explaining a recent project of his that involves transmitting power through the air. He envisions a worldwide network of transmitting towers that will allow for the transmission of information around the globe as well as make possible the remote control of electrical devices from anyplace on the planet. Tesla is optimistic that his "World Wireless System," as he calls it, will someday be built and recognized as a revolutionary advance.
Throughout the articles, Tesla expounds on his unique theory of mind which holds that human thoughts and actions are all responses to some kind of external stimulus. He comes to this conclusion based on his own unusual experiences from an early age where he frequently has vivid hallucinations where he sees scenes from his own memory played out again before his eyes. He realizes they are always triggered by certain things, and devotes much of his thought to identifying the causes of these visions. From his own experience, he begins to think of humans as a kind of extremely complex automaton and from this premise theorizes that it is possible to build machines that might approximate independent behavior and judgment.

     Tesla is writing at the end of the First World War, and in his concluding article he muses over the role his technological discoveries might play in the establishment of a peaceful world. He proposes that his latest inventions that have the potential to control devices from remote distances might be used in the future to elevate warfare to even more horrific levels. Or, he suggests, his inventions might be used instead to create a worldwide network of shared information and culture that will bring the world closer together, eliminating the root cause of war.