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  August 13
Today is
International Lefthanders Day (yours truly is a south paw). Tonight
is the peak of the
Perseid meteors. 1642:
Christiaan Huygens discovered the Martian south polar cap. 1814:
Anders
Ångström, after whom the unit of wavelength is named, was born. 1819:
Sir George Gabriel Stokes, who developed the
Stokes'
Theorem, was born. 1866:
Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the
Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili
Torino) automobile company, was born. 1888: Television inventor
John Logie
Baird was born. 1889:William
Gray received a patent for a coin-operated telephone. 1902:
Felix Wankel, inventor of the pistonless internal combustion engine,
was born. 1912: The Radio Act of 1912, the first federal radio regulation law, was
signed. 1912: The first experimental radio license was issued to
St. Joseph's
College in Philadelphia, PA. 1960: Echo One, placed in orbit a day earlier,
allowed the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite to take place. 1961:
Troops in East Germany sealed off the border between East and West Berlin, and construction
of the
Berlin Wall began. 1990: Iraq transferred between $3 billion and
$4 billion in gold bullion, foreign currencies and goods seized from
Kuwait to Baghdad. 1991:
Jack
Ryan, inventor with more than 1,000 patents including the Barbie Doll and Hot
Wheels cars, died. 1996: Microsoft released
IE 3.0.
| 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.
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