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  December 20
1868: American industrialist
Harvey
Firestone, who founded the tire company that bears his name, was born. 1879:
Thomas Edison privately demonstrated his incandescent light at Menlo Park, NJ. 1880:
New York's Broadway was first lighted by electricity and became known as the "Great White Way." 1901: American physicist and high voltage experimenter
Robert
Van de Graaff was born. 1921: German physician
Richard
Petri, inventor of the Petri Dish, died. 1945: The Office of Price Administration announced
the end of tire rationing. 1946: Frank Capra's "It's a
Wonderful Life," premiered. 1951: At 1:50 p.m., the first electricity ever generated
by atomic power was produced by the
EBR-1 turbine generator at the Argonne National Laboratory. 1952:
Einsteinium (Es, 99) discovered. 1996: American astronomer and writer, producer
of the "Cosmos" series, Carl Sagan
died (see
Butthead Astronomer).
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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