Day in Engineering History Archive - January 3

January 3

1825: Rensselaer School (now RPI), in Troy, New York, opened its doors as the country's first engineering college. 1870: Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began. 1892: English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, author of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings," was born. 1898: American aviator Claude Ryan, designer of the Spirit of St. Louis and founder of Ryan Aircraft, was born. 1906: First two-way wireless transmission across the Atlantic Ocean between Brant Rock, MA, and Machrihanish, Scotland. 1952: "Dragnet" was first aired on NBC TV. 1957: The Hamilton Watch Company announced the world's first electric watch for sale, the Ventura. 1959: President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state. 1977: Apple Computer was incorporated. 2000: The last new daily "Peanuts" strip by Charles Schulz ran in 2,600 newspapers - he died 5 weeks later.

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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.