Day in Engineering History Archive - September 21

September 21

1853: Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered superconductivity, was born. 1866: H.G. Wells, of War of the Worlds fame, was born. 1895: The Duryea Motor Wagon Company became the first auto manufacturer in America. 1895: Juan de la Ciervra, inventor of the autogiro, was born. 1897: The New York Sun ran a famous editorial that answered a question from 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon: ''Is there a Santa Claus?'' 1913: The first aerobatic maneuvers were publicly performed by Adolphe Pégoud in his Blériot XI. 1921: Donald Glaser,, who won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the bubble chamber for observing subatomic particles, was born. 1931: Britain abandoned the gold standard. 1936: Frank Hornby, English toy manufacturer who patented the Meccano construction set, died. 1942: The B-29 Superfortress made its maiden flight. 1955: Britain annexed the islet of Rockall, 300 miles west of Scotland, to stop the Soviets spying on missile tests. 1961: Earle Dickson, inventor of the Band-aid, died. 1972: Texas Instruments announced the TI-2500, the TI-3000, and the TI-3500 DATAMATH calculators. 2003: The NASA Galileo space probe ended its eight-year mission to Jupiter as planned.

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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.