Day in Engineering History Archive February 27

February 27

1891: American communications pioneer and RCA's first general manager, David Sarnoff, was born. 1900: Felix Hoffman was awarded a patent for acetyl salicylic acid (Aspirin). 1906: Aeronautical pioneer Samuel Langley died. 1910: American aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson, who founded the Lockheed Skunk Works, was born. 1932: The neutron was discovered by Dr. James Chadwick. 1936: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, of salivating dog fame, died. 1942: J.S. Hey discovered radio emissions from the Sun. 1962: Astronaut Wally Schirra, the only man to fly in America's first three space programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard the "Sigma 7" on a nine-hour flight. 1999: Colin Prescot and Andy Elson set a new hot air balloon endurance record by staying aloft for 233 hours and 55 minutes.

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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.