Day in Engineering History Archive February 11

February 11

1650: French mathematician René Descartes, after whom the Cartesian coordinate system was named, died. 1809: Robert Fulton patented the steamboat. 1812: Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a re-districting law that favored his party (the map looked like a salamander) - giving rise to the term "gerrymandering." 1813: Swedish physicist Anders Ekeberg, discoverer of the element tantalum (Ta), was born. 1847: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison was born in Milan, OH. 1868: Jean Foucault, inventor of the Foucault pendulum, died. 1915: Richard Hamming, of error correction code fame, was born. 1970: Osumi, the first Japanese satellite, was launched and made Japan the fourth country to put a satellite into earth orbit. 1973: The National Inventor's Hall of Fame was founded by the USPTO, and new inductees are added on this founding date. 1975: The Tories choose Margaret Thatcher as its first woman leader. 2005: Samuel Alderson, inventor of the crash test dummy, died.

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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.