Day in Engineering History Archive - January 25

January 25

1627: Irish chemist Robert Boyle, of Boyle's gas law fame, was born. 1812: English mathematician William Shanks, who held the record for calculating π to the most places (707) until the digital computer was developed, was born. 1881: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and others signed an agreement to organize the Oriental Telephone Company. 1915: Alexander Graham Bell inaugurated U.S. Transcontinental Telephone Line. 1921: Samuel T. Cohen, designer of the neutron bomb, was born. 1939: The cyclotron at Columbia University in New York City split the uranium atom for the first time. 1945: Grand Rapids, MI, became the first U.S. city to begin fluoridating the drinking water. 1970: The movie M*A*S*H premiered in theaters. 1981: The 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days arrived in the United States. 2004: The Opportunity rover returned its first pictures from the Martian surface.

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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.