Day in Engineering History Archive February 1

February 1

1838: A U.S. patent was issued to John Ericsson for the screw propeller. 1884: The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was printed. 1903: Sir George Gabriel Stokes, who developed the Stokes' Theorem, died. 1911: Thomas Jennings was found guilty with the first use of fingerprint evidence. 1959: Texas Instruments was issued a patent for the integrated circuit. 1968: Canada's army, air force, and navy were combined into a single Canadian Forces. 1972: The first hand-held scientific calculator (HP-35) hit the market for $395. 1976: German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, famous for his Heisenberg Principle, died. 1981: Donald Wills Douglas, of aircraft design fame, died. 1982: Late Night With David Letterman first aired. 2003: The Columbia Space Shuttle disintegrated over Texas during re-entry.

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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.