April 1
Today is
April Fool's
Day. 1826: Samuel Mory patented the internal combustion engine. 1875:
Sir Francis Galton
published the first newspaper weather map in The Times of London. 1918: England's
Royal Flying Corps was replaced by the
Royal Air
Force. 1931: Norman
Abramson, who developed the ALOHANET, the forerunner to the Ethernet, was born.
1932: After five years of research, professor C.G. King, of the University of Pittsburgh,
isolated vitamin C. 1938: The first commercially successful fluorescent
lamps were introduced. 1938:
NesCafé instant coffee was commercially introduced in
Switzerland by the Nestlé company. 1957: The BBC broadcasted a spoof documentary about
spaghetti
crops in Switzerland. 1960:
TIROS-1, the first weather satellite, was launched from Cape Canaveral.
1976: Apple Computer
began operations. 1981: Russia adopted
Daylight Savings Time. 1986 World
oil prices dipped below $10 a barrel. 1999: Britain introduced
a
minimum wage.
| 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.
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