Day in Engineering History Archive - April 16

April 16

1867: Wilbur Wright, of airplane fame, was born. 1912: Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel. 1921: Marie Daly, America's first woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, was born. 1935: Fibber McGee and Molly premiered on NBC radio. 1946: The U.S. launched its first captured German V2 rocket at White Sands, NM. 1956: The first solar powered radios went on sale. 1958: English chemist Rosalind Franklin, who made the image of the DNA helix structure, died. 1972: Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon. 1976: The Helios-B probe made what was then the closest ever approach to the sun at 27 million miles. 1987: The U.S. Patent Office began allowing the patenting of new animals created by genetic engineering. 1999: President Clinton defended NATO air strikes against Serbian targets, saying U.S. involvement in Kosovo was a moral imperative.

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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.