Day in Engineering History Archive February 2

February 2

Today is Groundhog Day. 1863: Samuel Clemens first used his "Mark Twain" pseudonym. 1887: Groundhog Day was first observed in Punxsutawney, PA. 1902: Russian Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev, who developed the Periodic Table and left places for undiscovered elements, died. 1923: World's first leaded gasoline (Ethyl) went on sale at Willard Talbott's service station in Dayton, OH. 1931: A rocket was used for the first time to deliver mail in Austria by Friedrich Schmiemdl. 1949: The first 45 RPM record was released. 1996: Ray McIntire, inventor of Styrofoam, 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.