Day in Engineering History Archive - August 20

August 20

1896: The dial telephone was patented. 1911: The first cable message was sent around the world by the NY Time from the U.S. via 29,000 miles of commercial telegraph wires; it read "This message sent around the world." 1923: Vilfredo Pareto, the economist who created the Pareto chart, died. 1930: Philo Farnsworth patented his television system. 1936: Edward Weston, founder of the Weston Electrical Instrument Company, died. 1953: The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb. 1975: NASA launched the Viking 1 spacecraft to Mars. 1977: The United States launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature. 2001: Sir Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang," died.

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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.