August 6
1766:
William
Wollaston, discoverer of palladium and rhodium, was born. 1806: The
Holy Roman
Empire went out of existence as Emperor Francis I abdicated. 1881:
Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, was born. 1890:
The electric
chair was used for the first time to execute murderer William Kemmler, in NY.
1935: William Coolidge obtained a patent for his
cathode ray tube. 1945: The American
B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" dropped the first atomic bomb (nicknamed "Little Boy") over
the center of Hiroshima,
Japan, marking the beginning of the end of the war begun four years earlier with
the massacre at Pearl Harbor. 1961: Russian cosmonaut
Gherman Titov
orbited the earth 20 times, just four months after
Yuri Gagarin
made his historic venture. 1991:
Tim Berners-Lee
published the first website on the
WWW while
at CERN; it described how to use the world wide web. 1997:
Apple Computer and
Microsoft agreed to share
technology in a deal giving Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival.
| 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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