Day in Engineering History Archive - January 28

January 28

1807: London's Pall Mall became the first street to be illuminated by gaslight. 1878: The first telephone switchboard was installed in New Haven, CT. 1884: Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard, who pioneered high altitude balloon and deep sea vehicle research, was born. 1886: Hidetsugu Yagi, inventor of the antenna bearing his name, was born. 1960: The first wire photograph bounced off the moon by the U.S. Navy was transmitted from Hawaii and received at Washington, D.C. 1986: The space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members: flight commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee; pilot Michael J. Smith; Ronald E. McNair; Ellison S. Onizuka; Judith A. Resnik; Gregory B. Jarvis; and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

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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.