Day in Engineering History Archive - November 3

November 3

1749: Scottish chemist Daniel Rutherford, who discovered nitrogen, was born. 1892: Almon Strowger commissioned the first automatic telephone in his hometown of LaPorte, IN. 1906: The SOS (••• −−− ••• in Morse Code) radio distress signal, chosen for its distinct signature, (not for Save Our Ship), was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin. 1926: Charles Lindbergh was forced to bail out of his DeHavilland DH4 biplane during a night airmail delivery flight. 1957: Sputnik II, with the second manmade satellite to be put into orbit and the first animal (a dog named Laika) put into space, was launched by the Soviet Union. 1971: The first edition of the UNIX Programmer's Manual, by Thompson and Ritchie, was published. 1973: The Mariner 10 spacecraft was launched and became the first manmade object to reach Mercury. 2004: The first felony prosecution of spammers resulted in the conviction of a brother/sister team.

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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.