Day in Engineering History Archive February 10

February 10

1863: The fire extinguisher was patented by Alanson Crane. 1865: Heinrich Lenz, Russian physicist who framed Lenz's Law to describe the direction of flow of electric current generated by a wire moving through a magnetic field, died. 1868: Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster, who developed Brewster's Law, which relates the refractive index of a material to its polarizing angle, died. 1879: The electric arc light was used for the first time. 1883: Edith Clarke, the first woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering at MIT, was born. 1902: Nobel Prize winner Walter Brattain, co-inventor of the transistor, was born. 1923: Wilhelm Röntgen, discoverer of x-rays, died. 1933: The singing telegram was introduced by the Postal Telegraph Company of New York City. 1961: The Niagara Falls hydroelectric project began producing power amid a public ceremony. 1996: IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Garry Kasparov for the first time.

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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.