19321776 Club

A track curves the wrong way in a cloud chamber, and Anderson finds a new kind of matter

The particle has an electron's mass and a positive charge nobody expected to see.

Cosmic rays raining down from space had puzzled physicists for two decades, and at Caltech, Carl David Anderson was tracking their paths through a cloud chamber wrapped in a magnet. On August 2, 1932, he caught a track that curved like an electron's but bent the wrong way, meaning it carried a positive charge. He called it the positive electron. Four years later, in 1936, Anderson won the Nobel Prize for the discovery…

1776 Club

This story is held for members.

Members read every story of the day — and tomorrow's, and the next.

Join the 1776 Club

$17.76 your first year · then $39.99/yr · cancel anytime

Sachs hands Roosevelt a letter about uranium; the president tells an aide, "this requires action"

Einstein's signature and a $6,000 grant were enough to start the Manhattan Project.

1790

Marshals finish counting the nation: 3,929,214 Americans, give or take

Washington and Jefferson both suspect the real number is higher.

1943

A destroyer cuts PT-109 in half; the young skipper swims for shore towing a burned man by his life vest

Two of the crew are dead in the water off the Solomons; the rest owe their lives to three miles of open sea.

18731776 Club

The Clay Street Hill Railroad opens a day late, but San Francisco's first cable line runs without incident.

Read this as a member →

Read the full August 2 edition →Everything that happened on August 2 →

Marines cross the Matanikau and the Japanese line breaks

Three days of fighting end with Japanese forces falling back from the river they had held since late September.

1943

Sixty B-17s go down over Schweinfurt; the Eighth Air Force loses the sky over Germany

Of 291 Flying Fortresses sent to hit the ball bearing works, 650 airmen did not come home.

1923

Walt and Roy Disney start a cartoon studio out of a Hollywood real-estate office

Roy signs on the morning after leaving a tuberculosis ward, betting on his brother's deal with a New York distributor.

1933

Einstein steps off the boat in America, a scientist with no country to go home to

Seven months after refusing to return to Germany, he lands to take up a post at a research institute that barely exists yet.

The Daily Record · free by email

Tomorrow's edition in your inbox — one featured story, one quote, and today's flag status. Free, every morning.