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 October 20
 1818: The U.S. and Great Britain established
the boundary between the
U.S.
and Canada to be the 49th parallel. 1891: English Nobel Prize winner
James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, was born. 1944: General
Douglas
MacArthur stepped ashore at Leyte in the Philippines, 2 1/2 years after he had
said, ''I shall return.'' 1956: American aircraft designer
Lawrence
Bell, founder of Bell Aircraft (maker of the Bell X-1
the first broke the sound barrier), died. 1960: The length of the
meter was redefined to be equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in
vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the 2p10 and 5d5
quantum levels of the krypton-86 atom. 1960: The first fully mechanized
post office opened in Providence, RI.
1972: American astronomer Harlow Shapley, who discovered the sun's position in the Milky
Way galaxy, died. 1983: IBM-PC
DOS Version 2.1 was released. 1984: English physicist
Paul Dirac, who shared a Nobel Prize with
Erwin Schrödinger, and after whom the
Dirac delta
function is named, died.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) 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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