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.
| 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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