August 11
The
Dog Days of Summer
end. 1896: The first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off pull chain
was patented by
Harvey Hubbell. 1909: The liner Arapahoe was the first ship to
use the radio distress call,
SOS (save our ship,
Morse Code
···---···). 1919: Industrialist
Andrew
Carnegie died. 1921:
Tom Kilburn,
who was the first to succeed in storing and then retrieving a bit of data via software,
was born. 1934: A load of America's most dangerous prisoners became the first inmates
on Alcatraz Island. 1942: Actress
Hedy
Markey (Lamarr) received a patent for a secret communication system (spread
spectrum). 1951:
WCBS-TV in New York City televised the first baseball doubleheader
(in color) between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves. 1962: The Soviet
Union launched cosmonaut
Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight. 1977:
Sir Frederic Williams, co-inventor of the CRT (the "Williams tube"),
died. 1984: President Ronald Reagan joked during a voice test for a
radio address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw
Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." 1992: The
Mall of America
opened in Minneapolis as the largest shopping mall in the United States. 1997: President
Clinton made the first the use of the
line-item veto approved by Congress. 1999: The last
total solar eclipse of the millennium occurred.
| 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.
|