Day in Engineering History Archive - August 3

Day in Engineering History August 3 Archive - RF CafeAugust 3

Radio Shack's TRS-80 Computer Announced - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.1492: Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain with a convoy of three small ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. 1811: Elisha Otis, inventor of the automatic safety brake for elevators, was born. 1869: Isaac Adams received a patent on nickel plating. 1888: Benjamin Franklin (BF) Goodrich, founder of America's rubber industry, died. 1900: Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. was founded. 1921: The first crop dusting from an airplane occurred over a six acre grove in Troy, OH. 1926: The first traffic lights in Britain were installed at Piccadilly Circus. 1958: The Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. 1949: The National Basketball Association was formed. 1963: The Beatles made their final appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England. 1967: Morgan Chu and six others  rode the entire New York City subway in 22 hours 11 1/2 minutes. 1977: Radio Shack issued a press release introducing TRS-80 computer. 1981: 13,000 air traffic controllers (PATCO) began their strike, and were ultimately fired by President Reagan. 1994: Tokyo, Japan recorded a temperature of 102.4 °F (39.1 °C). 2003: London police used the Taser electric stun gun on a suspect for the first time in England.

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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.