Gearfuse Almanac: January 17 in Science and Technology

In 1773, the Resolution and Adventure crossed the Antarctic Circle under the command of James Cook. Cook’s account of the event in his book A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777):

As the wind remained invariably fixed at E. and E. by S., I continued to stand to the south; and on the 17th, between eleven and twelve o’clock, we crossed the Antarctic Circle in the longitude of 39� 35′ E., for at noon we were by observation in the latitude of 66� 36′ 30″ S. The weather was now become tolerably clear, so that we could see several leagues round us; and yet we had only seen one island of ice since the morning. But about four p.m. as we were steering to the south, we observed the whole sea in a manner covered with ice, from the direction of S.E., round by the S. to W.

 
 
In 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole with four companions, only to find the Norwegian flag; Roald Amundsen’s party had become the first to reach the pole barely a month before.

139 years after Cook had first reached the Antarctic Circle, the British attempt to reach the pole came to a tragic end. Scott and his party died on the return journey; his diary entry for March 29 reads, “Last entry. For God’s sake look after our people.”
 
 

In 1997, discoverer of Pluto Clyde Tombaugh dies (b. 1906). Tombaugh worked at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Percival Lowell had long searched for a putative “Planet X” beyond the orbit of Neptune. Lowell, who popularized the notion that Mars was laced with the ruined canals of a dying civilization, searched for a large body that he believed was necessary to explain irregularities in the orbits of the outer planets. Lowell had died in 1916, but the search continued; the planet Tombaugh found was too small to explain the orbital discrepancies�which turned out to be an artifact of a miscalculation in the mass of Neptune. Tombaugh discovered some 800 asteroids in the course of his career, and aided in Cold War-era research into unidentified flying objects.