Day in Engineering History Archive - June 11

Day in Engineering History June 11 Archive - RF CafeJune 11

Happy Birthday Charles Fabry! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.Today is King Kamehameha Day (Hawaii). 1644: Evangelista Torricelli described in a letter to Michelangelo Ricci the invention of a barometer, which he termed the "torricellian tube." 1770: Capt. James Cook, commander of the British ship Endeavour, discovered the Great Barrier Reef off Australia by running onto it. 1867: Charles Fabry, co-discoverer of the ozone layer, was born. 1895: The first patent for a gasoline-powered automobile was issued to Charles Duryea. 1910: Oceanographer Jacques Cousteau was born. 1915: Nicholas Constantine Metropolis, designer of the MANIAC computer used to develop the atom bomb, was born. 1927: Charles Lindberg was presented the first Distinguished Flying Cross. 1937: Reginald Mitchell, designer of the famous Spitfire airplane that beat back the German Luftwaffe in WWII, died. 1963: The Mercury space capsule was patented by 7 civilians and assigned to NASA. 1985: The USSR's Vega 1 deposited a lander on surface of Venus. 1987: Margaret Thatcher became the first British prime minister in 160 years to win a third consecutive term of office.

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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.