Day in Engineering History Archive - November 12

Day in Engineering History November 12 Archive - RF CafeNovember 12

1802: John Dalton announced the first example of the law of multiple proportions. 1916: Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who helped discover Pluto and believed that there was life on Mars, died. 1923: Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company announced it had purchased all patents and rights to manufacture Zeppelin dirigibles (bad decision). 1926: Jack Ryan, inventor with more than 1,000 patents including the Barbie Doll and Hot Wheels cars, was born. 1936: The Oakland Bay Bridge opened. 1942: The naval battle of Guadalcanal began between Japanese and American forces. 1970: A 240 km/h cyclone hit East Pakistan (Bangladesh). 1979: William Friedman, the cryptologist who broke the Japanese "Purple" code, permitting the reading of many critical Japanese messages during WWII, died. 1980: The U.S. space probe "Voyager One" came within 77,000 miles of Saturn. 1981: The shuttle Columbia became the first spacecraft ever launched twice from Earth.

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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.