Day in Engineering History Archive - December 10

December 10

1804: Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, founder of elliptical functions, was born. 1831: Thomas Seebeck, who discovered that an electric current flows between different conductive materials that are kept at different temperatures (Seebeck Effect), died. 1845: Civil engineer Robert Thompson patented pneumatic tires in London. 1896: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and who began the Nobel Prize system, died. 1901: Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden, presented the first Nobel Prizes. 1910: Frank Conrad, owner of more than 200 patents, developer the first commercial radio station, and coiner of the term "broadcast," died. 1920: Automobile maker Horace Dodge died. 1954: Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp, a flight surgeon, rode a rocket sled to 632 mph to determine if a pilot could eject from an airplane at supersonic speed and live - he did. 1958: The first domestic passenger jet flight took place in the U.S. as a National Airlines Boeing 707 flew 111 passengers from NYC to Miami. 1993: The crew of the space shuttle "Endeavour" deployed the repaired Hubble Space Telescope into Earth orbit. 2004: EU transport ministers gave final approval to build and deploy the Galileo satellite navigation system.

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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.