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Hopi Indians use coal for cooking, heating, and firing pottery
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French explorers discovered Native Americans burning gases that were seeping into and around Lake Erie.
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Stephen Gray (England) distinguished between conductors and nonconductors of electrical charges.
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Commercial coal mining starts.
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Alessandro Volta (Italy) invented the first electric battery. The term volt is named in his honor.
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The Union Congress put a $2 per gallon excise tax on ethanol to help pay for the Civil War. Before the Civil War, ethanol was a major illuminating oil in the United States. After the tax was imposed, the cost of ethanol increased too much to be used this way.
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Nikola Tesla invented the electric alternator for producing alternating current (AC). Until this time, electricity had been generated using direct current (DC) from batteries.
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Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays
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Henry Ford built his first automobile, the quadricycle, to run on pure ethanol.
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The process of splitting uranium atoms, called nuclear fission, was demonstrated by scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman (Germany).
