February 13, 1910, physicist William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and co-recipient of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics, was born in London.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.