Day in Engineering History Archive - August 27

Day in Engineering History August 27 Archive - RF CafeAugust 27

Click here to return to the RF Cafe homepage.Today is Tarzan's birthday (1912). 413 B.C.: An eclipse of the moon caused panic on Athens fleet. 1850: Augusto Righi, who first showed that radio waves displayed characteristics of light wave behavior in the manner of reflection, refraction, polarization and interference, was born. 1858: The first cabled news dispatch was sent and was published by "The New York Sun" newspaper. 1958: Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, and after whom the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was named, died. 1859: The first oil well was successfully drilled in the U.S. by Colonel Edwin Drake near Titusville, PA. 1875: The element gallium (Ga, 31) was discovered by P.E. Lecoq de Boisbaudran. 1877: Charles Rolls, half of Rolls-Royce, was born. 1898: John Hopkinson, who developed Hopkinson's Law of magnetism and invented the 3-phase AC generator, died. 1950: The BBC transmitted the first ever live television pictures across the Channel. 1962: The Mariner 2 space probe was launched to fly to Venus. 1989: The first U.S. commercial satellite rocket was launched with a British communications satellite was onboard. 2003: The world's largest battery, made from 13,760 NiCad cells, was connected to provide emergency power to Fairbanks, AK.

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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.