Chemical elements may also be categorized by their origin on Earth, with the first 98 considered to be naturally occurring, while those with atomic numbers beyond 98 have only been produced artificially as the synthetic products of man-made nuclear reactions.

The first man-made canal in North America, Mother Brook, was created in Dedham in 1639.

* Mother Brook ( first man-made waterway in the United States )

One of the first to discover and publish a link between man-made electric current and magnetism was Romagnosi, who in 1802 noticed that connecting a wire across a voltaic pile deflected a nearby compass needle.

* 1886 – Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work.

The first use of the word was for the limbs of fish, but has been extended to include other animal limbs and man-made devices.

) Additional inspiration for GPS came when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik in 1957.

After releasing its atmospheric probe on 13 July 1995, the Galileo orbiter became the first man-made satellite of Jupiter at 00: 27 UT on 8 December 1995 when it fired its main engine to enter a 198-day parking orbit.

The first important man-made inorganic compound was ammonium nitrate for soil fertilization through the Haber process.

* 1983 – Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the central Solar System when it passes beyond the orbit of Neptune ( the furthest planet from the Sun at the time ).

The transmutation of lithium atoms to helium in 1932 was the first fully man-made nuclear reaction, and lithium deuteride serves as a fusion fuel in staged thermonuclear weapons.

It malfunctions and crashes, but it is the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars.

* Reactors Designed by Argonne National Laboratory The “ firsts ” among these reactors were many, but they include the first man-made self-sustaining neutron chain reaction, and the first generation of electricity from nuclear energy.

It is the first man-made object to reach space.

* 1959 – The Soviet probe Luna 2 crashes onto the Moon, becoming the first man-made object to reach it.

The early era of space exploration was driven by a " Space Race " between the Soviet Union and the United States, the launch of the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, the USSR's Sputnik 1, on 4 October 1957, and the first Moon landing by the American Apollo 11 craft on 20 July 1969 are often taken as the boundaries for this initial period.

The first steps of putting a man-made object into space were taken by German scientists during World War II while testing the V-2 rocket, which became the first human-made object in space on 3 October 1942 with the launching of V-4.

Around 2 million years ago, Homo habilis is believed to have constructed the first man-made structure in East Africa, consisting of simple arrangements of stones to hold branches of trees in position.

Giambattista Vico was among the first to claim that history and culture were man-made.

* June – German V-2 rockets on test from Peenemünde become the first man-made objects to enter space.

The rocket flies 147 kilometres wide and reaches a height of 84. 5 kilometres, becoming the first man-made object to reach space.

* May 19 – Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus ( however, the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and does not send back any data ).

Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi coined the word " diffraction " and was the first to record accurate observations of the phenomenon in 1665.

The effects of diffraction of light were first carefully observed and characterized by Francesco Maria Grimaldi, who also coined the term diffraction, from the Latin diffringere, ' to break into pieces ', referring to light breaking up into different directions.

James Gregory ( 1638 – 1675 ) observed the diffraction patterns caused by a bird feather, which was effectively the first diffraction grating to be discovered.

This is illustrated in the figure above, where the first pattern is the diffraction pattern of a single slit, given by the function in this equation, and the second figure shows the combined intensity of the light diffracted from the two slits, where the function represent the fine structure, and the coarser structure represents diffraction by the individual slits as described by the function.

After the first crude X-ray diffraction images of DNA were collected in the 1930s, William Astbury had talked about stacks of nucleotides spaced at 3. 4 angström ( 0. 34 nanometre ) intervals in DNA.

A citation to Astbury's earlier X-ray diffraction work was one of only eight references in Franklin's first paper on DNA.

The first is to utilize the shorter wavelength of ultraviolet electromagnetic energy to improve the image resolution beyond that of the diffraction limit of standard optical microscopes.

File: Joseph von Fraunhofer. jpg | Joseph von Fraunhofer, ( 1787-1826 ): first to studied the dark lines of the Sun ’ s spectrum, now known as Fraunhofer lines, first to use extensively the diffraction grating ( a device that disperses light more effectively than a prism does ), set the stage for the development of spectroscopy, making optical glass and achromatic telescope objectives.

The first atomic-resolution structures of proteins were solved by X-ray diffraction analysis in the 1960s ( Perutz and Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for these discoveries ) and by NMR in the 1980s.

Shechtman first observed tenfold electron diffraction patterns in 1982, as described in his notebook.

For a circular aperture, the diffraction-limited image spot is known as an Airy disk ; the distance x in the single-slit diffraction formula is replaced by radial distance r and the sine is replaced by 2J < sub > 1 </ sub >, where J < sub > 1 </ sub > is a first order Bessel function.

When first discovered, particle diffraction was a source of great puzzlement.

In principle, any wave impinging on a regular array of scatterers produces diffraction, as predicted first by Francesco Maria Grimaldi in 1665.

For illustration, the diffraction of sunlight through a bird's feather was first reported by James Gregory in the later 17th century.

The first artificial diffraction gratings for visible light were constructed by David Rittenhouse in 1787, and Joseph von Fraunhofer in 1821.

Prior to the first X-ray diffraction experiments, the spacings between lattice planes in a crystal were not known with certainty.

For example, if the pinhole diameter is set to 1 Airy unit then only the first order of the diffraction pattern makes it through the aperture to the detector while the higher orders are blocked, thus improving resolution at the cost of a slight decrease in brightness.

This is caused by diffraction effects: for the best propagation, a volume known as the first Fresnel zone should be kept free of obstructions.

Fraunhofer also developed a diffraction grating in 1821, which occurred after James Gregory discovered the principles of diffraction grating and after American astronomer David Rittenhouse invented the first man-made diffraction grating in 1785.