Day in Engineering History Archive - January 24

January 24

1848: James Marshall discovered a gold nugget at Sutter's Mill in northern CA, which led to the gold rush of '49. 1888: Ernst Heinkel, inventor of the first jet-powered aircraft, was born. 1916: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that income tax was unconstitutional. 1935: Beer was first sold in cans, by Krueger Brewing Co. 1948: IBM dedicated its "SSEC," the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, that handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. 1950: The microwave oven was patented by Percy Spencer. 1961: Albert Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, died. 1965: Sir Winston Churchill died in London at age 90. 1978: Cosmos 954, a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged through Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated scattering radioactive debris over parts of Canada's Northwest Territory. 1984: Apple Computer released the first model of the Macintosh. 1986: The Voyager 2 space probe swept past Uranus, coming within 50,679 miles of the seventh planet of the solar system. 2003: The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was formally activated.

| 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.