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  December 7
Today is
Pearl
Harbor Day. "December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy." - President
Franklin
D. Roosevelt. 1905: Gerard Kuiper, who discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid,
a moon of Neptune, and after whom the
Kuiper Belt
is named, was born. 1909: Leo Baekeland was awarded a patent for
Bakelite, which was the forerunner to today's synthetic plastics.
1934: Wiley Post was credited with discovering the
jet stream
when he flew into the stratosphere over Bartlesville, OK. On December 7th, 1941,
Japanese forces attacked American and British territories and possessions in the
Pacific, including the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at
Pearl Harbor
in Hawaii, thus launching America into World War II. Today, America and Japan are
the staunchest of allies. 1960:
Walter
Noddack, discoverer of the element rhenium (Re, 75), died. 1970:
Rube Goldberg,
engineer famous for his drawings of Mouse Trap-like contraptions, died. 1972: The
Apollo 17 crew blasted off on the last manned mission to the moon, and
Eugene Cernan
became the last human to step foot on the moon. 1977:
Peter
Goldmark, who developed the first color commercial television system as well
as the 33-1/3 LP phonograph record, died. 1993: German physicist
Wolfgang Paul,
who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons long enough to study them, died.
1999: U.S. patent
#6,000,000
was issued for a method of synchronizing files on two different computers. 2003:
Japan abandoned its first Martian probe after a five year journey.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in my
It Happened When? Factoid 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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