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Gerard K. O'Neill (1927–1992) was an American physicist and space activist. As a faculty member of Princeton University, he invented a device called the particle storage ring for high energy physics experiments. Later he invented a magnetic launcher called the mass driver. In the 1970s he developed a plan to build human settlements in outer space, including a space habitat design known as the O'Neill cylinder. He founded the Space Studies Institute, an organization devoted to funding research into space manufacturing and colonization. In 1965 at Stanford University he performed the first colliding beam physics experiment. While teaching physics at Princeton, O'Neill became interested in the possibility that humans could live in outer space. He researched and proposed a futuristic idea for human settlement in space, the O'Neill cylinder in "The Colonization of Space", his first paper on the subject. He held a conference on space manufacturing at Princeton in 1975. Many who became post-Apollo-era space activists attended. O'Neill built his first mass driver prototype with professor Henry Kolm in 1976. He considered mass drivers critical for extracting the mineral resources of the Moon and asteroids. (more...)

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April 19: Easter (Eastern Christianity, 2009); Feast of Saint Alphege (Western Christianity)

• 1713 – With no living male heirs, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI issued the Pragmatic Sanction to ensure one of his daughters would inherit the Habsburg lands.
• 1775 – The American Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the British colony of Massachusetts.
• 1943 – Nazi German troops entered the Warsaw Ghetto to round up the remaining Jews (pictured), sparking the first mass uprising in Poland against the Nazi occupation during the Holocaust.
• 1971 – The first space station, Salyut 1, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakh SSR, USSR.
• 1995 – A car bomb was detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, killing 168 people and injuring over 800 others.
• 2005 – Joseph Alois Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the papal conclave.

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