Day in Engineering History Archive - May 31

May 31

1790: The U.S. Copyright Law was passed. 1852: German physician Richard Petri, inventor of the Petri Dish, was born. 1879: Madison Square Garden opened, and the first electric railway opened at the Berlin Trades Exposition. 1889: More than 2,000 people perished when a dam break sent water rushing through Johnstown, PA. 1915: A German zeppelin made an air raid on London. 1977: The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed after three years of work. 2005: "Deep Throat," of Watergate fame, finally identified himself after 30 years.

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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.