Day in Engineering History Archive - April 14

Day in Engineering History April 14 Archive - RF CafeApril 14

The Sinking of the RMS Titanic - RF Cafe1629: Christiaan Huygens, discoverer of the wave theory of light and of Saturn's moon Titan, was born. 1807: German chemist Jeremias Richter, who discovered law of equivalent proportions, died. 1869: The airbrake was patented by George Westinghouse. 1894: The first public showing of Thomas Edison's kinetoscope took place. 1898: Harold Black, who developed the negative-feedback principle for amplifier design, was born. 1912: Distress call of the Titanic picked up at Marconi station at Cape Race. 1918: U.S. First Aero Squadron engaged in America's first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft over Toul, France. 1956: Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture. 1961: Manmade element Lawrencium (Lw, #103), was first produced. 2000: The Dow industrials plummeted 617 points and the Nasdaq composite index fell 355 points.

| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

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.