July 31
1790: The
first U.S. patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins for his process
for making potash and pearl ashes. 1792: The
foundation stone of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia was laid. 1918:
Francis Stanley (not his twin brother Freelan), famous for their
Stanley
Steamer automobile, died. 1923:
Stephanie
Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar,
was born. 1937: Charles Hires of root beer fame died. 1965: The last
cigarette commercial appeared on British television. 1964: Space
probe Ranger 7
transmitted the first close-up images of the moon's surface ever taken by a U.S.
spacecraft. 1969: A Moscow police chief reported that thousands of Moscow telephone
booths had been made inoperable by thieves who had stolen phone parts in order to
convert their acoustic guitars to electric. 1971: Astronauts rode in a vehicle on
the moon for the first time in a
lunar rover vehicle (LRV). 1998:
IBM's Russian subsidiary agreed to pay $8.5 million in fines for
selling powerful computers ultimately destined for a Russian nuclear weapons laboratory.
2003:
Felix Baumgartner was the first to cross the English Channel by
unpowered flight when he jumped from 30,000-ft and glided 22 miles wearing a
birdman suit.
| Jan
| Feb | Mar |
Apr | May |
Jun | Jul |
Aug | Sep |
Oct | Nov |
Dec |
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.
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