A Washington doctor with an interesting name was among the first to suggest a link between mosquitos and malaria.  Meet Albert Freeman Africanus King. Dr. A.F.A. King was a professor of obstetrics at Columbian University, precursor to the present-day George Washington University.  The malaria-mosquito connection was his top scientific acheivement.  But history remembers his presence […]

This photo from 1912 shows a Weather Bureau kiosk at E Street and Pennsylvania Ave., NW.  It’s a high-resolution image, so feel free to click to see some extra details. Large cities around the country had similar small weather stations installed at street level – but Washington’s was the first. (Here’s a photo of a […]

Workers were digging a sewer trench beneath a Capitol Hill street in 1898.  They came upon a few fossil fragments — among them, a 6-inch bone that now represents the largest piece of the District’s controversial “official dinosaur,” the Capitalsaurus. The contractor on that sewer project, J. K. Murphy, presented his workers’ discovery to Smithsonian scientists on […]