May 11 
1811: Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who calculated the likely position of Neptune so closely that it took Johan Galle only an hour of search to find, was born. 1881: Theodore von Kármán, who designed the Bell X-1 supersonic airplane, was born. 1924: Nobel astronomer Antony Hewish, the discoverer of pulsars, was born. 1928: Radio station WGY, in Schenectady, NY, began America’s first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. 1934: The Dust Bowl began with strong winds stripping topsoil off of farm fields in the Great Plains. 1946: Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the first artificial heart intended as a permanent replacement (and married to super genius IQ Marilyn vos Savant), was born. 1951: Jay Forrester filed a patent application for the matrix core memory. 1979: The VisiCalc spreadsheet program was announced. 1997: IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player. 1998: A French mint produced the first coins of Europe's single currency: the Euro. |