Day in Engineering History Archive - August 10

Day in Engineering History August 10 Archive - RF CafeAugust 10

Happy Birthday Leo Fender! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.1602: French mathematician Gilles de Roberval, who invented the Roberval balance weighing scale, was born. 1846: Act of Congress signed by President James K. Polk established the Smithsonian Institution. 1856: William Willett, who invented the concept of Daylight Saving Time, was born. 1886: A patent for welding by using electricity was awarded to Elihu Thomson. 1896: Otto Lilienthal, who accomplished some of the first controlled glider flights, died. 1909: Leo Fender, inventor of the first solid body electric guitar, was born. 1913: German physicist Wolfgang Paul, who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons long enough to study them, was born. 1928: The Federal Radio Commission issued first U.S. television license to Charles Jenkins Labs in Washington, D.C. 1945: Robert Goddard, "the father of modern rocketry," died. 1948: WABC TV channel 7 in New York, (ABC) began broadcasting. 1949: The National Military Establishment was renamed the Department of Defense. 1966: "Daylight Meteor," seen from Utah to Canada, was the only known case of a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere & leaving it again. 1990: Magellan spacecraft went into orbit around Venus. 1996: Cascading power outages hit parts of nine western states.

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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.