On Dezember 7, 1888, Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop patented the pneumatic or inflatable tire. His invention is considered one of the basic building blocks of the automobile manufacturing industry. Today, over 1 billion tires are produced annually in over 400 tire factories.
On December 6, 1768, the first volume of the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published in London as , 'A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, compiled upon a New Plan'. The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still being produced today. The history of its 15 editions alone would be subject of an entire book. But although it might be the most popular encyclopaedia ever printed, it was not the first.
On December 1, 1981, the AIDS virus is officially recognized as a disease. Aids is a disease of the human immune system caused by infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
The complete origin of HIV are not really known to researchers on this day. Clear is however, that the human immunodeficiency virus is very similar to the Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a retrovirus that is able to infect over 40 species of African primates. It is assumed, that this virus exists for more than 32.000 years, which was measured at the African island Bioko and the African mainland....
On November 26, 1857, Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure was born. His ideas laid the foundation for many significant developments both in linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. Moreover, de Saussure is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics and together with Charles Sanders Peirce one of two major fathers of semiotics.
On November 17, 1790, German mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius was born. He is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space