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  August 25
Today is 007 Day (Sean Connery born).
1609: Galileo demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1814: The British continue burning Washington, D.C., but the
Patent Office was saved by the British Superintendent of Patents,
Dr. William
Thornton. 1819:
James Watt, inventor of the steam engine and after whom the unit
of power is named, died. 1830: The first locomotive in the U.S. to carry passengers,
the "Tom Thumb," carried 26 passengers 13 miles over the tracks of
the B&O Railroad. 1867:
Michael Faraday, who discovered the principle of electromagnetic
induction (Faraday's Law), died. 1880:
Joshua Lionel Cowen,
founder of the Lionel model train company, was born. 1908:
Antoine Becquerel, who discovered radiation (Becquerel rays) from
uranium salts, died. 1910: Arnold Neustadter, inventor of the Rolodex (rolling index), was
born. 1921: Peter Hewitt, inventor of the mercury vapor lamp, died. 1944:
Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation (Freedom Tuesday). 1956:
George Pierce, inventor
of the quartz crystal based Peirce oscillator, died. 1965: The Society for the Investigation
of the Unexplained (SITU) was founded. 1981:
Voyager 2 flew past Saturn
and provided hundreds of close-up images. 1991: Linus Torvalds posted a message
to the comp.os.minix newsgroup stating his intention to create what would become
the
Linux operating system. 1992:
Hurricane
Andrew, the U.S.'s 2nd most destructive hurricane (Katrina #1) thrashed south
Florida and the Louisiana coast.
| 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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