Day in Engineering History Archive - January 12

January 12

1716: Antonio de Ulloa, who discovered the element Platinum (Pt), was born. 1866: The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded in London. 1896: Dr. Henry Smith took the first X-ray photograph - a hand with a bullet in it (he shot a corpse to get the pic). 1906: The DOW closed above 100 for the first time. 1908: A wireless message was sent long-distance for the first time from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. 1951: Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was born. 1966: The Batman television series debuted on ABC. 1968: AT&T adopted "9-1-1" as the emergency telephone number. 1970: The Boeing 747 made its maiden voyage. 1971: "All in the Family" debuted on CBS. 1997: HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) of "2001: A Space Odyssey" fame, became operational. 2001: Hewlett-Packard co-founder William (Bill) Hewlett died in Palo Alto, CA, at age 87.

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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.