Day in Engineering History Archive - January 17

January 17

1706: Scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, Massachusetts. 1871: Andrew Hallidie received a patent for his cable car system. 1882: Leroy Firman received a patent for the telephone switchboard. 1886: American airplane designer Glenn L. Martin was born. 1955: The submarine Nautilus began the first nuclear-powered test voyage. 1977: Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the non-planet Pluto, died. 1994: A 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage. 1991: Operation Desert Shield became Operation Desert Storm as the air war phase began. 1995: 5,372 people were killed when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake devastated Kobe, Japan. 2001: Tom Kilburn, who was the first to succeed in storing and then retrieving a bit of data via software, died.

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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.