August 2

Henry Steel Olcott, an American who took the Buddhist refuges and precepts and became a leading figure in the late-19th-century Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka, was born in Orange, New Jersey.

Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American chemist whose laser 'femtochemistry' let scientists watch atoms move during reactions, died near Pasadena, California.

Alexander Graham Bell, whose 1876 patent and demonstrations brought the telephone into practical use, died at his estate in Nova Scotia at the age of seventy-five.

Photographing cosmic-ray tracks in a cloud chamber, Carl Anderson recorded a particle that curved like an electron but carried the opposite charge, the first detected piece of antimatter.