Day in Engineering History Archive - December 29

December 29

1731: Brook Taylor, developer of the Taylor Series in mathematics, died. 1766: Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh, inventor of the rubberized raincoat that bears his name, was born. 1800: Charles Goodyear, who invented vulcanization of rubber, was born. 1848: President James Polk turned on the first gas light at the White House. 1891: Thomas Edison was issued a patent for "telegraphy without wires." 1905: Henri-Gaston Busignies, developer of HF (high frequency) direction finding equipment, was born. 1916: Cleveland Abbe, known as "the father of the U.S. Weather Bureau," died. : German engineer Wilhelm Maybach, who invented the fuel spray carburetor, died. 1940: During WWII, Germany began dropping incendiary bombs on London in what became known as "The Second Great Fire of London." 1949: KC2XAK of Bridgeport, CT, became the first UHF television station to begin operating on a regular daily schedule. 1987: Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko ended his record 326-day space flight. 1999: The NASDAQ closed above 4,000 for the first time, at 4,041.46, after having 60 record highs for the year.

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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.