Day in Engineering History Archive - May 15

Day in Engineering History May 15 Archive - RF CafeMay 15

Peace Officers Memorial Day - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.Today is Peace Officers Memorial Day. 1618: Johannes Kepler discovered his harmonics law. 1836: Francis Baily observed "Baily's Beads" during an annular solar eclipse. 1863: Frank Hornby, English toy manufacturer who patented the Meccano construction set, was born. 1859: Nobel laureate Pierre Curie, who along with his wife, Marie, discovered spontaneous radioactivity in radium and polonium, was born. 1930: Ellen Church became the first airline stewardess. 1941: Britain's first jet-propelled aircraft, the Gloster-Whittle E.28/39, made its first flight. 1948: Israel was attacked by Transjordan (now Jordan), Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon only hours after declaring its independence. 1957: Great Britain became the 3rd nation to detonate a nuclear bomb. 1970: President Nixon appointed America's first two female generals: Colonels Elizabeth Hoisington and Anna Mae Mays. 1992: Robert Morris Page, inventor of pulse radar, died. 2008: Physics Nobel laureate Willis Lamb, who determined fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum, 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.