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.
| Jan |
Feb | Mar |
Apr | May |
Jun | Jul |
Aug | Sep |
Oct | Nov |
Dec |
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.
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