Day in Engineering History Archive - January 8

Day in Engineering History January 8 Archive - RF CafeJanuary 8

1642: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei died. 1783: Connecticut became the first state to pass a copyright statute. 1825: American inventor Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin revolutionized the textile industry, died. 1881: William T. Piper, producer of the iconic J-3 Cub, was born. 1889: The tabulating machine was patented by Dr. Herman Hollerith, who later founded IBM. 1935: A.C. Hardy received a patent for the first spectrophotometer. 1942: British theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking was born. 1956: American radio pioneer Greenleaf Pickard, who invented the crystal detector, died. 1964: President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" - now there's a quagmire if there ever was one. 1980: John Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC computer, died. 1982: American Telephone & Telegraph settled the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against it by agreeing to divest itself of the 22 Bell System companies (Baby Bells). 1987: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time. 1998: al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced in New York to life in prison.

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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.