December 3
1838:
Cleveland Abbe,
known as "the father of the U.S. Weather Bureau," was born. 1888: German optician
Carl Zeiss, of precision optics fame, died. 1924: American computer
scientist John Backus,
inventor of the FORTRAN
language (FORmula TRANslation), was born. 1942: American physicist
Peter
Schultz, who is credited for inventing the first commercially viable optical fiber,
was born. 1956: The USS Gyatt was recommissioned as the first guided missile destroyer.
1967: Dr. Christiaan
Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived
18 days with the new heart. 1973:
Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter in the first fly-by of an outer planet.
1983: Over 40 tons of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of the Union
Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, killing thousands of souls. 1992: British engineer
Neil Papworth sent the world's
first text message (SMS). 1999: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) lost communications
with the Mars Polar Lander moments before impact.
| 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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