Day in Engineering History Archive - October 8

October 8

1860: A telegraph line between Los Angeles and San Francisco was placed in operation. 1871: The Great Fire of Chicago broke out destroying about 17,450 buildings, killing 250 people and leaving 90,000 homeless. 1873: Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung, who co-developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram relating star temperatures with brightness, was born. 1904: Clemens Winkler (no relation to The Fonz), discoverer of the element germanium, died. 1913: Robert Gilruth, developer of the Bell X-1 supersonic airplane, was born. 1958: Dr. Ake Senning implanted the first internal heart pacemaker. 1973: Britain's first independent radio station, London Broadcasting Company (LBC) began broadcasting today on VHF and medium wave. 2001: Two Russian cosmonauts made the first spacewalk to be conducted outside of the International Space Station (ISS) without a shuttle present. 2011: Dennis Richie, developer of the "C" programming language, 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.