August 16
Today is Joe Miller's
Jest Day. 1845:
Gabriel Lippmann, who produced the first color photographic plate,
was born. 1858: A telegraphed message from Britain's Queen Victoria to U.S. President
Buchanan was transmitted over the recently laid
trans-Atlantic cable. 1884:
Hugo Gernsback,
electronics inventor, futurist, marketer, author, and publisher, was born. 1888:
John
Pemberton, the pharmacist who invented Coca-Cola, died. 1896: The
Yukon Gold Rush began when gold was discovered in Bonanza Creek. 1898: The loop-the-loop
roller coaster was patented by
Edwin Prescott. 1899:
Robert Bunsen,
of laboratory burner fame, died. 1920:
Sir Joseph Lockyer, who co-discovered the element helium in the
sun's spectrum, died. 1948: Baseball legend
Babe Ruth died in New York at age 53. 1954: "Sports Illustrated"
magazine first published. 1960: Free-fall world record set by
Joseph Kittinger when he fell more than 16 miles (about 84,000
feet) before opening his parachute over NM. 1977:
Elvis Presley
died - or so they say ;-). 2011: U.S. patent
#8,000,000
was awarded for a Visual Prosthesis.
| 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.
|