Day in Engineering History Archive - October 4

Day in Engineering History October 4 Archive - RF CafeOctober 4

Sputnik. Click here to return to the RF Cafe homepage1821: John Rennie, designer of the London Bridge, died. 1895: The first U.S. Open golf tournament took place in Newport, RI, with Horace Rawlins, 21 years old, as the winner. 1903: John Atanasoff, who was belatedly credited as the builder of the first electronic digital computer (the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, ABC), was born. 1906: Lothar Rohde, of the Rohde & Schwarz test equipment company, was born. 1947: Max Planck, who introduced quantum theory to the world, died. 1957: The Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit. 1958: Oliver R. Smoot, as a pledge for the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at MIT, was used as a standard to measured the length of the Harvard Bridge; he later served as chairman of ANSI. 1958: The first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was begun by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with Comet 4 flights between Heathrow airport and Idlewild (now JFK). 1976: British Rail began its new 125 mph High Speed Train (HST) service. 1983: The first Hooters restaurant opened, in Clearwater, FL. 1995: Edward Lowe, inventor of kitty litter, 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.