Day in Engineering History Archive - November 16

November 16

1841: Jules-Louis-Gabriel Violle, who made the first high altitude measurement of the solar constant and after whom the Violle standard of luminous intensity was named, was born. 1904: The first true electron tube, a diode thermionic valve, was patented in Great Britain by John Ambrose Fleming. 1914: The Federal Reserve Bank officially opened. 1915: A patent was issued for the first Coca-Cola bottle with the trademark curved shape. 1927: The USS Saratoga was commissioned as the Navy's second aircraft carrier. 1965: The Russian Venera 3 spacecraft, which became the first to reach the surface of another planet, was launched. 1973: President Nixon authorized construction of Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. 1974: The first signal was broadcast into space from the 1,000 foot radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. 1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind opened in theaters. 1984: The space shuttle Discovery, STS-51-A, returned to Earth with the first two satellites ever plucked from space. 2004 NASA's X-43A scramjet set a new record of Mach 9.6.

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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.