 July 16
 Today is the
Day of Trinity. 1739: Charles de Cisternay DuFay, discoverer of positive and negative electricity
and repulsion between like charges, died. 1867: Reinforced concrete was patented by
Joseph Monier of France. 1926: The first underwater color photographs
appeared in National Geographic
magazine. 1945: The U.S. detonated the first atomic bomb in a test at the
Trinity test site in Alamogordo, NM. 1948: The world's first production
turboprop aircraft, the Vickers
Viscount, made its maiden flight. 1951: Dan Bricklin, co-writer of,
VisiCalc, the first
spreadsheet computer program, was born. 1957: Marine Maj.
John Glenn
set a transcontinental speed record when he flew a jet from CA to NY in 3 hours, 23 minutes
and 8 seconds. 1969:
Apollo
11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, FL, and began the first manned mission to land
on the moon. 1979: Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. 1994: The first of 21 fragments
of the comet Shoemaker-Levy
hit Jupiter, creating a 1200-mile wide fireball 600 miles high. 1997: The Dow Jones Industrial
Average (DJIA) closed above 8,000 for the first time. 1999:
John F. Kennedy,
Jr., his wife and her sister, died when their plane that Kennedy was piloting crashed
into the Atlantic Ocean. 2002: John Cocke, who invented the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC),
died.
| Jan |
Feb | Mar |
Apr | May |
Jun | Jul |
Aug | Sep |
Oct | Nov |
Dec |
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.
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