August 10
1602: French mathematician
Gilles
de Roberval, who invented the
Roberval
balance weighing scale, was born. 1846: Act of Congress signed by President
James K. Polk established the Smithsonian Institution. 1856:
William Willett, who invented the concept of
Daylight Saving
Time, was born. 1886: A patent for welding by using electricity was awarded
to Elihu Thomson. 1896:
Otto
Lilienthal, who accomplished some of the first controlled glider flights, died.
1909: Leo Fender,
inventor of the first solid body electric guitar, was born. 1913: German physicist
Wolfgang Paul, who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons
long enough to study them, was born. 1928: The Federal Radio Commission issued first
U.S. television license to Charles Jenkins Labs in Washington, D.C. 1945:
Robert Goddard, "the father of modern rocketry," died. 1948: WABC
TV channel 7 in New York, (ABC) began broadcasting. 1949: The
National Military Establishment was renamed the Department of
Defense. 1966: "Daylight Meteor," seen from Utah to Canada, was the only known case
of a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere & leaving it again. 1990:
Magellan
spacecraft went into orbit around Venus. 1996: Cascading
power outages hit parts of nine western states.
| 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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