Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/September 28

September 28:

• 1605 - Birth of Ismaël Bullialdus, French astronomer (d. 1694)

• 1694 - Death of Gabriel Mouton, French scientist (b. 1618)

• 1852 - Birth of Henri Moissan, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1907)

• 1889 - The first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice

• 1895 - Death of Louis Pasteur, French scientist (b. 1822)

• 1928 - Sir Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin

• 1979 - Death of John Herbert Chapman, Canadian physicist (b. 1921)

• 2008 - SpaceX launches the first ever private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit