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.
| 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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