Day in Engineering History Archive - October 21

October 21

1833: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and who began the Nobel Peace Prize system, was born. 1879: Thomas Edison demonstrated an electric light bulb that lasted for 13.5 hours. 1884: Thomas Edison received a patent for his "electrical indicator" that resembles a d'Arsonval movement. 1914: Samuel Alderson, inventor of the crash test dummy, was born. 1915: The first trans-Atlantic radiotelephone call was placed between Arlington, VA, and Paris, France. 1923: The first Carl Zeiss projector planetarium opened at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. 1925: The first U.S.-made photocell was demonstrated by Westinghouse. 1959: Dr. Wernher Von Braun began work at NASA after a transfer from ABMA. 1960: The first British nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, was launched. 1967: Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung, who co-developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram relating star temperatures with brightness, died. 1976: The United States made a clean sweep of the Nobel Prizes, winning or sharing awards in chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, and literature (no peace prize awarded). 2015: This is the "Back to the Future Part II" date that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travelled to help save the family honor.

| 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.