Day in Engineering History Archive - July 23

July 23

1715: The first lighthouse in America, Boston Lighthouse, was authorized for construction at Little Brewster Island, MA. 1877: The first telephone and telegraph line in Hawaii was completed. 1880: The first commercial hydroelectric power planet began operation in Grand Rapids, MI. 1875: Isaac Singer, inventor of the continuous-stitch sewing machine, died. 1886: Walter Schottky, of diode fame, was born. 1903: Ford Motor Company sold its first Model A automobile. 1906: "America the Beautiful" was copyrighted by Katharine Lee Bates. 1916: Sir William Ramsay, who discovered chemist who discovered the inert gases - neon, krypton and xenon, and co-discovered argon, radon, calcium and barium, died. 1930: Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss died. 1962: The "Telstar" communications satellite sent the first live TV broadcast to Europe. 1968: The PLO hijacked its first Israeli El Al airplane. 1972: ERTS 1 (Earth Resources Technology Satellite), later called LANDSAT, was launched to start its multi-spectral scans of Earth. 1981: Harvey Fletcher, who first demonstrated stereophonic sound, died. 1995: Inventure Place, home of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, OH, opened to the public.

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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.