Day in Engineering History Archive - January 21

January 21

1901: Elisha Gray, who missed being labeled as the inventor of the telephone by mere hours when Alexander Graham Bell beat him to the patent office, died. 1901: American engineer Allen Du Mont, who invented the first commercial cathode ray tube, was born. 1954: The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, was launched. 1970: The first wide body jet was put into service as the PanAm Boeing 747 made its first flight between from New York's JFK Airport and Heathrow Airport in London. 1976: The supersonic Concorde jet (SST) was put into service by Britain and France. 1979: Neptune became the outermost planet as Pluto's highly elliptical orbit brought it inside Neptune's. 1981: Iranian terrorists released embassy hostages after 444 days captivity.

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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.