Gday...

1519  -             Ferdinand Magellan leaves Seville on his first leg of the journey to circumnavigate the world.

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese sea explorer. He was born in 1480, and at age 12 he became a page to King John II and Queen Eleonora at the royal court at Lisbon. Here he was able to pursue his academic interest in astronomy and geography. He first went to sea when he was 20, and gained much seafaring experience over the next 10 years. He was the first to sail from Europe westwards to Asia, and the first European to sail the Pacific Ocean.

On 10 August 1519, five ships under Magellan's command left Seville to commence their journey to circumnavigate the world. Magellan waited in Spain for five weeks whilst the Spanish authorities switched his crew of mostly Portugese men with a Spanish crew. On 20 September 1519, Magellan set sail to circumnavigate the world. His fleet reached the Philippines a year and a half later. Whilst Magellan was well received by many of the people, he died on 27 April 1521 during a battle with an indigenous group. 18 members of his crew and one ship of the fleet returned to Spain in 1522, having completed Magellan's aspirations of circumnavigating the globe.

1844  -             Charles Sturt sets out on his final expedition to search for an inland sea in Australia.

For decades after New South Wales was first settled, the people of Australia believed the rivers in the east emptied into an inland sea as the great majority of waterways flowed away from the coast. When Sturt filled in the gaps in knowledge of the network of rivers in NSW, and determined that the Murray River emptied out at the southern coast, he seemed to solve the mystery of the inland rivers. That is, he solved it to the satisfaction of everyone but himself.

Dissatisfied with Eyre's reports of salt lakes and arid desert in central Australia, Sturt determined to settle the question and find out for himself. He was given permission to explore as far north as latitude 28 degrees. On 10 August 1844, Sturt departed Adelaide with 16 men, 11 horses, 30 bullocks, a boat and carriage, a spring cart and several drays, 200 sheep, two sheep dogs and four kangaroo dogs. Rather than heading directly northward, Sturts party first travelled to the Murray River and up the Darling, in an attempt to avoid the horseshoe lakes which Eyre had reported.

During the arduous journey, Sturts men suffered terribly from scurvy, heat and lack or water. Remarkably, only one man was lost James Poole. Sturt discovered no inland sea; he did, however, find much forbidding countryside and desert, and he added greatly to the understanding of Australias arid interior. Today, his name lives on in Sturt's Stony Desert. 

1874  -             American President Herbert Hoover, who worked for some time in Australia as a mining engineer, is born.

Herbert Clark Hoover was born on 10 August 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, USA, into a Quaker family. Hoover went on to become the 31st President of the United States. However, as a young man, he spent a year working for Bewick Moreing Company as a mining inspector, overseeing its Western Australian gold mines. In 1897, he arrived at Coolgardie, a remote town in Western Australia, on the tail end of the WA goldrush. As a mining engineer, his job was to select the mines which had the best prospects. A manager's house was built for him at Leonora, about 830km east of Perth. He was promoted before it was finished, however, and shipped off to China to oversee the coal mines.

In 1902, Hoover returned to Australia with his young bride, as Director of Bewick Moreing, and Manager of their Western Australian operations. He did not stay in Australia, but continued to travel, using his mining expertise around the world. In 1907, he finally inhabited the house built for him at Leonora, but it was not long before he returned permanently to the US.

1893  -             Today is International Biodiesel Day, in remembrance of when Rudolf Diesel's engine, powered by a biofuel, ran on its own power for the first time.

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was born on 18 March 1858 in Paris, although his parents were German. Diesel was a German inventor, most famous for his invention of the Diesel engine. He designed a single 3 m iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base which ran on its own power for the first time in Augsburg, Germany on 10 August 1893. August 10 has thus been declared International Biodiesel Day, to commemorate this event. The diesel engine was originally intended to run on bio-fuel such as vegetable oil, rather than the petroleum-based diesel fuels predominantly used today.

1990  -             The Magellan spacecraft arrives at Venus to begin mapping the planet's surface.

The Magellan spacecraft was named after the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan was the first planetary spacecraft to be launched by a space shuttle when, on 4 May 1989, it was conveyed by the shuttle Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle took Magellan into low Earth orbit, where it was released from the shuttle's cargo bay. After its launch, it arrived at Venus over a year later.

The Magellan carried an advanced imaging radar to enable it to map the surface of Venus in detail. Portions of other space projects were salvaged to produce the Magellan spacecraft: its radio dish came from Voyager and the central control system came from the Galileo project. Magellan remained in orbit around Venus for four years before it lost altitude and crashed on the planet's surface in October 1994.

Cheers - John