Day in Engineering History Archive - May 19

May 19

1795: Johns Hopkins, endower of the university named after him, was born. 1942: Sir Joseph Larmor, the first to calculate the rate at which energy is radiated by an accelerated electron, and the first to explain the splitting of spectrum lines by a magnetic field, died. 1961: The Venera 1 spacecraft became the first manmade object to fly past a planet (Venus). 1964: The State Department disclosed that 40 hidden microphones had been found in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. 1967: The Soviet Union ratified a treaty with the United States and Britain banning nuclear weapons from outer space.  1987: Chet Fleming was issued a patent for "keeping a head alive." 1998: Millions of pagers went silent when the Galaxy IV satellite began tumbling in its orbit. 1999: "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" was released in the U.S., setting a new record for opening day sales at 28.5 million. 2005: "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" debuted in theaters.

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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.