Day in Engineering History Archive - May 4

May 4

1874: Frank Conrad, owner of more than 200 patents, developer the first commercial radio station, and coiner of the term "broadcast," was born. 1927: The first U.S. balloon flight to exceed an altitude of 40,000-ft was made by Capt. Hawthorne Gray. 1942: The Battle of the Coral Sea, the first sea battle to be fought entirely from the air, commenced between American and Japanese carriers. 1967: The Lunar Orbiter 4 was launched. 1977: Star Wars Day celebrates the beginning of an era - "May the 4th Be with You." 1979: Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher was chosen to become Britain's first female prime minister as the Tories ousted the incumbent Labor government in parliamentary elections. 2000: The "ILOVEYOU" e-mail virus began its attack on computers worldwide.

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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.