Day in Engineering History Archive - December 2

December 2

1594: Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, developer of the map projection that bears his name, died. 1877: Louis-Paul Cailletet became the first to liquefy oxygen. 1881: German physicist Heinrich Barkhausen, who discovered the effect named after him regarding changes in the magnetic properties of metal, was born. 1895: James Dewar exhibited his new apparatus for the production of liquefied air. 1906: Peter Goldmark, who developed the first color commercial television system as well as the 33-1/3 LP phonograph record, was born. 1927: The first Model A Fords sold for $385. 1941: Admiral Yamamoto ordered his fleet to Pearl Harbor. 1942: A self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated by Dr. Enrico Fermi and his staff at the University of Chicago. 1952: The first human birth was televised to public on KOA-TV. 1965: American physicist Hugh Dryden, who headed NACA (now NASA) for seven years and after whom the Dryden Flight Research Center is named, died. 1990: The first parliamentary election was held in newly reunified Germany. 2001: Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

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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.