Day in Engineering History Archive - January 4

January 4

1642: Sir Isaac Newton was born (per the Julian calendar used then). 1809: Blind French educator Louis Braille, inventor of the tactile reading system bearing his name, was born. 1895: Leroy Grumman, founder of Grumman Aircraft, was born. 1940: British Nobel physicist Brian Josephson, who discovered the Josephson effect, was born. 1958: The first man-made object to orbit the earth, the Russian Sputnik I satellite, fell back into the atmosphere and disintegrated after 92 days in space. 1961: Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist with the dead cat (maybe), died. 1983: Time Magazine published its 1982 "Man of the Year" edition, having selected the Personal Computer. 1994: The 104th Congress convened as the first entirely under Republican control since the Eisenhower era. 2004: Afghanistan approved a new, democratic, constitution. 2004: NASA's Spirit Rover, the first of two Mars exploratory landers, landed on Mars.

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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.