Day in Engineering History Archive - November 29

November 29

1803: Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, of Doppler effect fame, was born. 1849: Sir John Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the diode tube, was born. 1877: Thomas Edison demonstrated his hand-cranked phonograph that recorded sound on grooved metal cylinders. 1915: Eugene Polley, inventor of the TV remote, was born. 1929: Navy Lt. Commander Richard Byrd radioed that he had made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. 1944: The first open heart surgery was performed at Johns Hopkins hospital. 1951: The first U.S. underground atom bomb test - designed "Uncle" (a mnemonic for underground) was detonated. 1961: "Enos" the chimp was launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft, which orbited earth twice before returning. 1972: The original PONG arcade unit was released by Atari.

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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.