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 March 30
 239 B.C.: The first recorded passage
of Halley's Comet was noted by Chinese astronomers. 1791: The French Académie des
sciences finally decided that a
metre
would be a 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator.
1811: Robert
Bunsen, of laboratory burner fame, was born. 1842: Dr. Crawford Long first used
ether as anesthetic
during minor operation. 1858: The first U.S. patent was issued for a combination
lead pencil and eraser. 1879 O.S.: German astronomer
Bernhard
Schmidt, who invented the type of reflecting telescope named after him (Schmidt telescope,
Schmidt-Cassegrain, etc.), was born. 1891: Arthur Herrington,
designer of the famous
Jeep, was born. 1914:
John Poynting,
who introduced a theorem that assigns a value to the rate of flow of electromagnetic
energy known as the Poynting vector, died. 1981:
President Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinkley. 1993:
Charlie Brown
of the Peanuts comic strip (my favorite), hit his first home run. 2006:
Marcos César
Pontes became the first Brazilian in space.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in my
It Happened When? Factoid 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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