Day in Engineering History Archive - January 30

January 30

1925: Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, was born. 1933: The first episode of the ''Lone Ranger'' radio program was broadcast on station WXYZ in Detroit. 1948: Airplane pioneer Orville Wright died. 1951: Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the Volkswagen along with his sport scars, died. 1958: Ernst Heinkel, designer of the first jet-powered aircraft, died. 1964: The United States launched Ranger 6, an unmanned spacecraft carrying television cameras that was to crash-land on the moon. 1987: The U.S. Department of Energy announced its intention to build the world's largest particle accelerator, called the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which was cancelled in 1995 after $2B had been spent. 1991: Nobel physicist John Bardeen, co-inventor of the transistor along with William Shockley and Walter Brattain, died. 2001: The Ultra Low Voltage Mobile Intel Pentium III processor was released. 2002: Japan's last coal mine was closed due to high production costs and cheap imports. 2005: Iraqis voted in their country's first free election in a half-century.

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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.