Day in Engineering History Archive February 3

February 3

1690: The first paper money in America was issued by the Massachusetts colony. 1859: German aircraft designer Hugo Junkers was born, and died on this date in 1935. 1862: Jean-Baptiste Biot, who is half of the Biot-Savart Law of magnetism, died. 1894: Classic American painter Norman Rockwell was born. 1925: Oliver Heaviside, developer of the Heaviside step function, died. 1959: "The Day the Music Died," Buddy Holley and three others killed in airplane crash. 1966: The first rocket-assisted controlled landing on the Moon was made by the Soviet space vehicle Luna 9. 1975: William Coolidge, whose x-ray tube design is the model of today's tubes, died. 1984: STS-41B (Challenger) blasted off on a mission that would test the Buck Rogers-style Manned Maneuvering Unit.

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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.