Day in Engineering History Archive - December 12

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.

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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.