Day in Engineering History Archive - December 31

December 31

1719: English astronomer John Flamsteed, who established the Greenwich Observatory, died. 1857: Britain's Queen Victoria decided to make Ottawa the capital of Canada. 1879: Thomas Edison first publicly demonstrated his electric incandescent light in Menlo Park, NJ. 1905: Aleksandr Popov, considered in Russia to be the inventor of radio, died. 1935: A patent was issued for the game of Monopoly, assigned to Parker Brothers. 1940: French biophysicist Jacques-Arsène d' Arsonval, who invented the reflecting moving-coil galvanometers used to measure weak electric currents, died. 1974: Private U.S. citizens were allowed to buy and own gold in bullion for the first time in more than 40 years (high of $875/oz. in 1980, currently around $600/oz.). 1991: The USSR was officially dissolved. 1995: The final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip was published - reruns are not allowed. 1997: Intel cut price of Pentium II-233 MHz from $401 to $268. 2004: Taipei 101, the world's tallest skyscraper, was fully opened.

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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.