February 11
1650: French mathematician
René
Descartes, after whom the Cartesian coordinate system was named, died. 1809:
Robert Fulton patented the steamboat. 1812: Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed
a re-districting law that favored his party (the map looked like a salamander) -
giving rise to the term "gerrymandering." 1813: Swedish physicist
Anders
Ekeberg, discoverer of the element
tantalum (Ta),
died. 1847: American inventor
Thomas Alva
Edison was born in Milan, OH. 1868:
Jean Foucault,
inventor of the
Foucault pendulum, died. 1915:
Richard Hamming,
of error correction code fame, was born. 1970:
Osumi, the first
Japanese satellite, was launched and made Japan the fourth country to put a satellite
into earth orbit. 1973: The National
Inventor's Hall of Fame was founded by the USPTO, and new inductees are added on this founding date. 1975:
The Tories choose
Margaret Thatcher as its first woman leader. 2005:
Samuel
Alderson, inventor of the crash test dummy, died.
| 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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