May 18
1850:
Oliver Heaviside,
developer of the Heaviside step function, was born. 1897:
Dow Chemical was incorporated. 1912: The U.K.'s first
automated telephone exchange
opened for business at Epsom. 1917: The U.S. Congress passed the
Selective Service Act, calling up soldiers to fight World War
I. 1950: The U.S. and Great Britain agreed to the terms of NATO. 1933: The
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was formed as "a corporation
clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative
of a private enterprise," to perform research on civil engineering challenges. 1953:
The first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound,
Jacqueline Cochran, piloted an F-86 Sabrejet over California at
an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour. 1969: Apollo 10 was launched. 1974:
India became the 6th nation to explode an
atomic
bomb. 1980:
Mount St. Helens blew its top. 1991:
Helen Sharman became first Briton in space.
2004: Arnold Beckman, founder of Beckman Instruments, died - at 104
years old!
| 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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