April 12
1852:
Ferdinand
von Lindemann, who first proved that
π is transcendental, was born.
1892: George Blickensderfer was awarded the first U.S. patent for a
portable typewriter (first laptop?). 1955: The
Salk vaccine
against polio was announced to work. 1961: Soviet cosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space, orbiting the
Earth once before making a safe landing. 1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasted
off from Cape Canaveral, FL, on its first flight (STS-1). 1984: The Telecommunications Act of 1984 received the
Royal Assent, confirming the intention of the British government to privatize
British Telecom. 1988: The first U.S. patent was
issued for an animal life form to Harvard scientists for a
genetically engineered mouse. 1994: Attorney Laurence Canter [allegedly]
wrote a Perl script to flood Usenet message board readers with a notice for the
"Green Card Lottery," thus creating the first incident of
spamming. 2004:
Barry Bonds hit his 660th home run to tie Willie Mays for third
on baseball's career list.
| 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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