Day in Engineering History Archive - March 31

March 31

1596: French mathematician René Descartes, after whom the Cartesian coordinate system was named, was born. 1727: Sir Isaac Newton died.  1811: Robert Bunsen, of laboratory burner fame, was born. 1851: Leon Foucault demonstrated his pendulum experiment at the Pantheon of Paris. 1889: The Eiffel Tower officially opened in Paris. 1890: Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg, developer of the Bragg law of x-ray diffraction, was born. 1918: For the first time in the U.S. Daylight Savings Time went into effect. 1933: The Civilian Conservation Corps was enacted by Congress. 1966: The Soviet Union launched Luna 10, which became the first spacecraft to enter a lunar 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.