Day in Engineering History Archive - November 13

November 13

1789: Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy in which he said, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." 1851: World's first undersea telegraph cable went into operation, between Dover, England, and Calais, France. 1927: The first underwater tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, between New York and New Jersey, opened. 1946: Artificial snow from a natural cloud was produced for the first time over Mount Greylock, MA. 1971: U.S. spacecraft Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet - Mars. 1979: Robert Jarvik was granted a patent in for an artificial heart. 1982: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. 1994: Sweden passed a referendum to join the European Union. 1999: Dr. John Stapp, who pioneered research in high acceleration effects on the human body, died.

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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.