History
The term "interplanetary" appears to have been first used in print in 1691 by the scientist Robert Boyle: "The air is different from the æther (or vacuum) in the... interplanetary spaces" Boyle Hist. Air.
The notion that space is considered to be a vacuum filled with an "aether", or just a cold, dark vacuum continued up until the 1950s (see below).
In 1898, American astronomer Charles Augustus Young wrote: "Inter-planetary space is a vacuum, far more perfect than anything we can produce by artificial means..." (The Elements of Astronomy, Charles Augustus Young, 1898).
And Akasofu recounted that: "The view that interplanetary space is a vacuum into which the Sun intermittently emitted corpuscular streams was changed radically by Ludwig Biermann (1951, 1953) who proposed on the basis of comet tails, that the Sun continuously blows its atmosphere out in all directions at supersonic speed" (Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Exploring the Secrets of the Aurora, 2002)
Tufts University Professor of astronomy, Kenneth R. Lang, writing in 2000 noted, "Half a century ago, most people visualized our planet as a solitary sphere traveling in a cold, dark vacuum of space around the Sun".
Read more about this topic: Interplanetary Medium
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)