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  February 18
1745:
Alessandro
Volta, inventor of the storage battery and namesake of the "volt" unit, was
born. 1838: Ernst
Mach, of speed of sound unit defining fame, was born. 1851:
Karl
Gustav Jacob Jacobi, founder of elliptical functions, died. 1871:
Harry Brearley,
inventor of stainless steel, was born. 1875: Auguste Bartholdi was granted patent
for the Statue
of Liberty. 1898: Car manufacturer and racing star
Enzo Ferrari
was born. 1908: Lee de Forest received a patent on his
Audion amplification tube. 1885: Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was first published. 1930: The
ninth has-been planet of our solar system,
Pluto, was discovered. 1957: American astronomer
Henry
Russell, who showed the relationship between a star's brightness and its spectral
type, and co-created the
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, died. 1967: The "Father of the Atomic
Bomb," Robert Oppenheimer, died. 1977: The space shuttle
Enterprise, sitting atop a Boeing 747, went on its maiden "flight"
above the Mojave Desert. 1981: American aviation pioneer
Jack Northrop
died. 2001: Veteran NASCAR driver
Dale Earnhardt Sr., 49, died from injuries suffered in a crash
at the Daytona 500.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) 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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