Day in Engineering History Archive - April 6

Day in Engineering History April 6 Archive - RF CafeApril 6

April 6, 1965, Intelsat 1 "Early Bird" Launched - RF CafeAlles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Fokker! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.648 B.C.: Earliest total solar eclipse recorded by Greeks was observed. 1889: The Kodak Camera was offered for sale by George Eastman. 1890: German aircraft designer Anthony Fokker, creator of the Red Baron's famous DR-1 triplane, was born. 1892: Donald Wills Douglas, of aircraft design fame, was born. 1912: An electric starter first appeared in cars to replace the hand crank. 1914: Hiram Maxim, with $50 in backing by the Radio Club of Hartford, proposed the formation of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). 1917: America formally entered World War I. 1927: William P. MacCracken, Jr. earned license number '1' when the Department of Commerce issued the first pilot's license.1938: DuPont researchers accidentally discovered polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) and was marketed as Teflon. 1954: The TV Dinner was first sold by Swanson & Sons. 1965: The first U.S. commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, "Early Bird" Intelsat 1, was launched. 1973: Pioneer 11 was launched to Jupiter and Saturn. 1992: Prolific science fact and fiction writer Isaac Asimov died. 1998: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 9,000 for the first time.

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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.