Day in Engineering History Archive - June 15

June 15

1752: Ben Franklin's kite-flying experiment proved lightning and electricity were related. 1785: Balloonists de Rozier and Romain died in world's first fatal aviation accident. 1844: Charles Goodyear was granted a patent for the process vulcanizing process that strengthens rubber. 1877: Henry O. Flipper became the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. 1919: Capt. John Alcock and Lt. Arthur W. Brown won $50,000 for successfully completing the first, non-stop trans-Atlantic plane flight. 1919: Helicopter and guitar pioneer Charles Kaman was born. 1924: Ford Motor Company manufactured its 10 millionth Model-T automobile. 1924: Radio Bloemendaal (Netherlands) began broadcasting. 1985: National Justice for Janitors Day was first celebrated.1992: The first Berlin Air Show in 60 years was held. 1995: John Atanasoff, who was belatedly credited as the builder of the first electronic digital computer (the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, ABC), died.

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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.