Day in Engineering History Archive - January 31

January 31

1950: Development of the hydrogen fusion bomb (H-bomb) was publicly announced by U.S. President Truman. 1954: American electrical engineer Edwin Armstrong, a pioneer in radio communications and electronic theory and inventor of the CW transmitter, regenerative & superheterodyne circuits, and frequency modulation, died. 1958: The U.S. entered the space age by launching the first successful orbiting satellite, Explorer 1, almost four months after the launch of Sputnik by the USSR. 1958: James Van Allen's theory of the presence of what became known as the Van Allen Radiation Belt was confirmed by Explorer 1. 1961: Ham the chimpanzee became the first primate in space when launched aboard a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket. 1971: Apollo 14 blasted off for the moon. 1983: British drivers were first required to "buckle-up." 2000: McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Moscow. 2005: SBC Communications on announced plans to acquire AT&T for $16 billion. 2011: Helicopter and guitar pioneer Charles Kaman died.

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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.