December 12
1685:
John Pell, who introduced the division sign (the
obelus, ÷)
to England, died. 1894: American engineer
Philip Drinker,
who invented the
iron lung, was born. 1899: The first U.S. patent for a
golf tee was issued to George Grant. 1901: Guglielmo Marconi transmitted
first
long distance communication, dit-dit-dit ("s"), using "Hertzian"
waves. 1921: Astronomer
Henrietta
Swan Leavitt, who discovered the relationship between period and luminosity
in Cepheid variables, died. 1927:
Robert Noyce,
co-inventor of the integrated circuit and nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley",
was born. 1961: The first satellite put in orbit built by private citizens, the
10-lb Oscar I ("Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio") was launched.
1971: American communications pioneer and RCA's first general manager,
David Sarnoff,
died. 1980: Computer
Software Act of 1980 defined computer programs and clarified extent of protection
afforded software. 1994: IBM said it would halt shipments of Pentium computers because
of the "floating point" bug in the Pentium chip. 2005: RFMD was recognized
as 'Electronics Company of the Year' by the NCTA. 2005: Panasonic
announced that it would withdraw from the GSM handset market. 2006: Computer hard
drive pioneer Alan Shugart died.
| 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.
|