1900s

Farnborough's aeronautical history began in 1905 with the arrival of HM Balloon Factory in 1905, headed by Lt Col J.L.B. Templer. In 1908, the first powered aeroplane flight in Great Britain took place here, piloted by Samuel Cody. In 1912, Lord Trenchard established the first headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps and in 1918 the Royal Aircraft Establishment was founded.

On this 84-acre meadow in 1904 and 1905, the Wright Brothers successfully mastered the mechanics of controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. The brothers also built the world’s first airport here, and in 1910 the Wright Company School of Aviation established a flying school on the site and trained many of the world’s first pilots, including some of the first military pilots, such as Thomas DeWitt Milling.

College Park Airport was founded in 1909 when the Wright Brothers came here to train the first military officers to fly in the givernment's first airplane. The airport is the oldest continuously operated airport in the world, and has come to be known as "The Field of Firsts" due to it being the location of a great number of groundbreaking achievements, such as:

1909: First woman passenger to fly in the United States

Pearson Field, named for U.S. Army Lt. Alexander Pearson Jr., a prominent early aviator who died in an airplane crash in 1925, is the oldest continuously operating airfield in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the oldest in the United States. In 1905, the field, then known as the Fort Vancouver Polo Grounds, was the landing site for a dirigible launched from the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exhibition in Portland, Ore. This marked the first crossing of the Columbia River by air, and the first time an airship was used to deliver a letter.

The federal government’s first physical science research laboratory was chartered by Congress on March 3, 1901, as the National Bureau of Standards, which became the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1988. Recognizing the critical importance of chemical measures and standards, NIST established the Chemistry Division as one of its first programs.

The Chemical Abstracts Service, a division of the American Chemical Society, has provided the most comprehensive repository of research in chemistry and related sciences for over 100 years. CAS innovations have fueled chemical research through development of the CAS RegistrySM and CAS databases which contain invaluable information for chemical scientists, including SciFinder® and STN®.

In 1897, Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) came to Hull-House, a social settlement founded to address the needs of immigrants living on Chicago’s Near West Side. Through living and working in the Hull-House neighborhood, she identified occupational diseases plaguing those who worked in the “dangerous trades”: rubber, dyes, lead, enamelware, copper and mercury production, and explosives and munitions. Collaborating with the U.S. Department of Labor, Hamilton documented the occupational diseases from which these workers suffered.

The Titan is a 200-ton electrically driven hammerhead cantilever crane, the earliest survivor of this type. It is now all that remains of the once great John Brown Shipyard in Clydebank near Glasgow where many of the world's great ships were built. Designed and constructed by Sir William Arrol and Co. Ltd., Glasgow, Scotland, in 1907 the Titan set the standard for many more similar cranes to be erected worldwide. It has been restored and opened as a tourist attraction in 2007.

Until 1900, the Chicago River drained into Lake Michigan, along with all the sewage from the city; and the Des Plaines River west of Chicago emptied into the Illinois River, which eventually flows to the Mississippi. Chicago residents drew their drinking water from polluted areas of the lake near the mouth of the Chicago River, leading to outbreaks of typhoid and other waterborne diseases.