Day in Engineering History Archive - October 15

October 15

1608: Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, who invented the barometer, was born. 1783: French school teacher Jean Pilâtre de Rozier made a tethered, captive-balloon ascent, 250 feet above the gardens of La Muette, Fance, thereby becoming the first man ever to fly. 1829: American astronomer Asaph Hall, who discovered named the two moons of Mars Phobos and Deimos, was born. 1928: The German airship Graf Zeppelin completed its journey across the Atlantic from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst, NJ. 1930: American industrialist Herbert Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Company, died. 1939: NY mayor Fiorello La Guardia dedicated the airport bearing his name. 1950: Telanserphone (later Aircall) of New York City, the first American radio paging service, sent its first page to a doctor who was on a golf course 25 miles away. 1997: NASA's plutonium-powered "Cassini" spacecraft launched toward Saturn. 2003: China became the third nation to launch a man into space.

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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.