February 23
 1836: The siege
of the Alamo
began in San Antonio, TX. 1855: German mathematician and experimenter in magnetism
Carl Friedrich
Gauss died. 1886: Charles Hall separated
aluminum
from ore using an electrolytic process. 1893:
Rudolf Diesel (I kid
you not) received a German patent for the diesel engine. 1927: The
Federal Radio Commission (FRC, later became the FCC) began assigning
frequencies, hours of operation and power allocations for radio broadcasters. 1936: The
first (and last) rocket-powered air mail flight was made from Greenwood Lake, NY to NJ
in the rocketplane Gloria.
1944: Leo Baekeland, inventor of Bakelite, which played a large role as an insulator in early electronics,
died. 1945: U.S. Marines raised the American flag on
Iwo Jima, creating
the subject for the infamous photo & statue. 1954: The first mass inoculation of
children against polio with the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh, PA. 1987: At 10:42 am, the
Minister for Communications
for Australia received his country's first official call via an analogue mobile phone.
1995: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 4,000 for the first time. 1997: A fire erupted on
the Mir space station. 2006: The 1 billionth tune was downloaded from the
iTunes
music store website.
| 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.
|