Day in Engineering History Archive - June 4

June 4

1783: The first hot-air balloon was flown for ten minutes by brothers Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier of Annonay, France. 1896: Henry Ford made a successful pre-dawn test run of his horseless carriage, called a quadricycle, through the streets of Detroit. 1901: Guglielmo Marconi received a reissued patent RE011913) for "Wireless Telegraphy." 1910: Sir Christopher Cockerell, inventor of the hovercraft, was born. 1929: George Eastman demonstrated his first Technicolor movie. 1931: Hans Knoll and Ernst Ruska demonstrated their work on the first electron microscope. 1937: The first shopping cart was introduced by Sylvan Goldman in Oklahoma City, OK. 1940: Synthetic rubber tire unveiled. 1963: 6-year-old Robert Patch received a U.S. patent for a "Toy Truck." 1982: "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," was released. 1989: Chinese army troops stormed Tiananmen Square in Beijing to crush the pro-democracy movement; hundreds - possibly thousands - of people died. 1998: Americans aboard the shuttle Discovery arrived at the Russian space station Mir to pick up U.S. astronaut Andrew Thomas after four months in orbit.

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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.