Day in Engineering History Archive - October 30

October 30

1867: U.S. Bureau of Standards scientist Louis Austin, who pioneered long-range radio broadcasts, was born. 1888: The first U.S. patent for a ballpoint pen was issued to John Loud of Weymouth, MA. 1894: Daniel Cooper of Rochester, N.Y., received the first U.S. patent for a punch card time clock. 1937: The closest approach to the earth by an asteroid, Hermes, was measured to be 485,000 miles. 1938: The radio play "The War of the Worlds," starring Orson Welles, aired on CBS. 1961: The Soviet Union detonated a 58 megaton hydrogen bomb over Novaya Zemlya, and is still the largest nuclear device to ever be detonated. 1979: Sir Barnes Wallis, inventor of the WWII, 9 kilopound "dambuster" bombs, died.

| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

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.