December 7
Today is
Pearl
Harbor Day. "December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy." - President
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1905: Gerard Kuiper,
who discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of Neptune, and after whom
the Kuiper Belt
is named, was born. 1909: Leo Baekeland was awarded a patent for
Bakelite, which was the forerunner to today's synthetic plastics. 1934:
Wiley Post was credited with discovering the
jet stream
when he flew into the stratosphere over Bartlesville, OK. On December 7th, 1941, Japanese
forces attacked American and British territories and possessions in the Pacific, including
the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at
Pearl Harbor in
Hawaii, thus launching America into World War II. Today, America and Japan are the staunchest
of allies. 1960:
Walter Noddack, discoverer of the element rhenium (Re, 75), died.
1970: Rube Goldberg, engineer
famous for his drawings of Mouse Trap-like contraptions, died. 1972: The Apollo 17 crew
blasted off on the last manned mission to the moon, and
Eugene
Cernan became the last human to step foot on the moon. 1977:
Peter Goldmark,
who developed the first color commercial television system as well as the 33-1/3 LP phonograph
record, died. 2003: Japan abandoned its first
Martian
probe after a five year journey.
| 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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