Day in Engineering History Archive - January 18

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.

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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.