January 18:

• 1878 - Death of Antoine César Becquerel, French physicist (b. 1788)

• 1896 - The X-ray machine is exhibited for the first time

• 1901 - Birth of Ivan Petrovsky, Russian mathematician (d. 1973)

• 1908 - Birth of Jacob Bronowski, Polish-born mathematician, poet, and physicist (d. 1974)

• 1916 - A 611 gram chondrite type meteorite strikes a house near the village of Baxter in Stone County, Missouri

• 1977 - Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires' disease

• 1995 - Death of Adolf Butenandt, German chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1903)

• 2000 - The Tagish Lake meteorite impacts the Earth