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  December 19
1852: Nobel physicist
Albert Michelson, who first accurately measured the speed of light,
was born. 1915: Alois Alzheimer, who discovered the disease named after him, died.
1930: Amelia Earhart became the first autogyro pilot to carry a passenger - in the
PCA-2 Pitcairn Autogyro. 1936:
Juan de la Ciervra, inventor of the autogiro, died in an airplane
accident. 1953:
Robert Millikan of charged oil drop experiment fame and Nobel
laureate, died. 1958: The first known radio broadcast from outer space was made
from a pre-recorded tape aboard the
SCORE satellite for President Eisenhower's Christmas message.
1961: The first Canada-to-Europe call was place via the
CANTAT-1 transatlantic cable. 1972:
Apollo 17 splashed
down in the Pacific, winding up the Apollo program of manned lunar landings. 1974:
The
Altair 8800 microcomputer was first put on sale as a do-it-yourself
computer kit, and cost $397. 1982:
Frederick
Emmons, considered along with Shockley, to be the founder of Silicon Valley,
died. 1984: Great Britain agreed to hand over
Hong Kong to China in 1997. 1997:
Masaru Ibuka,
who founded the company that became Sony Corporation, died.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) 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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