Day in Engineering History Archive - January 20

January 20

1775: André-Marie Ampère, after whom the unit of current is named, was born. 1901: Zénobe-Théophile Gramme, inventor of the Gramme dynamo, died. 1930: Apollo 11 lunar lander astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin was born. 1960: The U.S. Army promoted Elvis Presley to the rank of Sergeant. 1969: Astronomers at the University of Arizona documented the first optical identification of a pulsar. 1981: Iran released 52 Americans that had been held hostage for 444 days, just minutes after the U.S. presidency had transferred from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. 1986: Britain and France announced plans to build the Chunnel  - rail tunnels underneath the English Channel. 2004: The Salvation Army announced it had received a $1.5B donation from the estate of Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc.

| 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.