Day in Engineering History Archive - February 23

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.