Day in Engineering History Archive - October 11

October 11

1844: Henry John Heinz, founder of the J.H. Heinz Company and originator of the "57 Varieties" slogan, was born. 1887: A patent for the first keypad adding machine, the "Macaroni box" Comptometer, was granted to Dorr Felt. 1889: James Joule, discoverer of the current / resistance / heat relationship and after whom the unit of energy is named, died. 1950: The FCC adopted CBS's field-sequential mechanical color TV broadcast standard. 1958: Lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched; it failed to go as far out as planned, fell back to Earth, and burned up in the atmosphere. 1974: U.S. Energy Reorganizing Act abolished the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and created both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA - now the DoE). 1983: The last hand-cranked (magneto) telephones in the U.S. went out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, ME, were switched to direct-dial service. 1984: Space Shuttle "Challenger" astronaut Kathy Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space. 1994: NASA's Magellan spacecraft made a dramatic conclusion to its highly successful mission at Venus when it is commanded to plunge into the planet's dense atmosphere.

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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.