Day in Engineering History Archive - December 6

December 6

1830: U.S. Naval Observatory opened (VP's residence located there). 1877: The Washington Post newspaper was first published. 1877: The first sound recording was made by Thomas Edison. 1892: Werner von Siemens, German electrical engineer who helped develop telegraph industry (and for whom the unit of conductance is named after), died. 1893: Astronomer Rudolf Wolf, who discovered the 11-year sunspot cycle, died. 1923: A presidential address was broadcast on radio for the first time as President Coolidge spoke to a joint session of Congress. 1955: The Federal government standardized the size of license plates throughout the U.S. 1957: French aircraft designer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who developed the concept of ailerons, died. 1957: America's first attempt at putting a satellite (the TV-3) into orbit failed when the Vanguard launch vehicle malfunctioned on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, FL. 1993: German physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons long enough to study them, died.

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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.