Day in Engineering History Archive - April 1

Day in Engineering History April 1 Archive - RF CafeApril 1

April Fool's Day. Click here to return to the RF Cafe homepage.Today is April Fool's Day. 1826: Samuel Mory patented the internal combustion engine. 1875: Sir Francis Galton published the first newspaper weather map in The Times of London. 1918: England's Royal Flying Corps was replaced by the Royal Air Force. 1931: Norman Abramson, who developed the ALOHANET, the forerunner to the Ethernet, was born. 1932: After five years of research, professor C.G. King, of the University of Pittsburgh, isolated vitamin C. 1938: The first commercially successful fluorescent lamps were introduced. 1938: NesCafé instant coffee was commercially introduced in Switzerland by the Nestlé company. 1957: The BBC broadcasted a spoof documentary about spaghetti crops in Switzerland. 1960: TIROS-1, the first weather satellite, was launched from Cape Canaveral. 1976: Apple Computer began operations. 1981: Russia adopted Daylight Savings Time. 1986 World oil prices dipped below $10 a barrel. 1999: Britain introduced a minimum wage.

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Note: These historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet. As detailed in this article, there is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago, I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with special RF Cafe logos. Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where the person or event occurred. Images used in the logos are often from open source websites like Wikipedia, and are specifically credited with a hyperlink back to the source where possible. Fair Use laws permit small samples of copyrighted content.