Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/February 11

February 11:

 * 1380 - Birth of Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini, Italian humanist (d. 1459)


 * 1626 - Death of Pietro Cataldi, Italian mathematician (b. 1552


 * 1657 - Birth of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, French scientist and man of letters (d. 1757)


 * 1800 - Birth of William Henry Fox Talbot, English photographer and inventor (d. 1877)


 * 1808 - Anthracite coal is first burned as fuel, experimentally


 * 1809 - Robert Fulton took out a patent for improvements to steamboat navigation


 * 1839 - Birth of Josiah Willard Gibbs, American physicist (d. 1903)


 * 1868 - Death of Léon Foucault, French astronomer (b. 1819)


 * 1898 - Birth of Leó Szilárd, Hungarian-born physicist (d. 1964)


 * 1923 - Death of Wilhelm Killing, German mathematician (b. 1847)


 * 1931 - Death of Charles Algernon Parsons, British inventor (b. 1854)


 * 1938 - BBC Television produces the world's first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Capek play R.U.R., which coined the term "robot"


 * 1973 - Death of Hans D Jensen, German physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1907)


 * 1976 - Death of Alexander Lippisch, German scientist (b. 1894)


 * 1978 - Death of James B Conant, American chemist and university president (b. 1893)


 * 1991 - Death of Robert W. Holley, American biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate (b. 1922)