January 18
 1779: British
physician Peter Roget,
best known for his thesaurus but also the inventor of a log-log slide rule and early
investigator of sampling phenomena, was born. 1813: Joseph Glidden, inventor of
barbed wire, was born. 1854:
Thomas
Watson, assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, was born. 1878:
Antoine-César
Becquerel, who was the first to use electrolysis to recover metals from ores, died.
1888: Sir Thomas
Sopwith, of Camel biplane and triplane fame, was born. 1908: Dutch ophthalmologist
Herman Snellen, developer of the visual acuity
Snellen Chart
seen in all opticians' offices, died. 1911: The first landing of an aircraft on a ship
took place as pilot Eugene
Ely flew onto the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbor. 1933: American
physicist Ray Dolby,
of noise reduction fame, was born. 1991: Iraq launched
SCUD missiles against Israel. 1994: The U.S. Department of Energy announced
production of thin film solar panels giving nearly twice the efficiency
of existing panels.
| 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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