Day in Engineering History Archive - September 24

September 24

1852: The dirigible was demonstrated in a flight from Paris to Trappe. 1870: Georges Claude, inventor of the neon light, was born. 1877: Fire destroyed many patent models in the "fire-proof" U.S. Patent Office, but the important illustrations records were saved. 1891: William Friedman, the cryptologist who broke the Japanese "Purple" code, permitting the reading of many critical Japanese messages during WWII, was born. 1929: The first all-instrument flight took place in New York when Lt. James H. Doolittle guided a Consolidated NY2 Biplane over Mitchell Field. 1930: John Young, who commanded of the first Space Shuttle mission (STS-1, 1981), walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission, and made the first manned flight of the Gemini III spacecraft with Virgil Grissom, was born. 1945: Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter alpha particle detector, died. 1960: The first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, was launched from Newport News, VA. 1975: Dougal Haston and Doug Scott became the first Britons to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. 1986: The U.S. Congress the rose as the national flower. 1991: Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka "Dr. Seuss," 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.