Day in Engineering History Archive - September 14

September 14

1698: Charles de Cisternay DuFay, discoverer of positive and negative electricity ("vitreous electricity" and "resinous electricity") and repulsion between like charges, was born. 1712: Gian Cassini, after whom the division between Saturn's A and B rings is named, died. 1716: The first lighthouse in America, Boston Light, was illuminated just before sunset. 1886: George Anderson patented typewriter ribbon. 1887: Karl Compton, who directed the development of radar during WWII, was born. 1940: The U.S. Congress passed the first peace-time conscription bill. 1944: Dr. Harry Wexler made the first successful flight into the eye of a hurricane was made by a 3-man American crew flying a Douglas A-20 Havoc. 1959: The Soviet Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the surface of the moon and the first man-made object to reach any celestial body. 1960: Radar pioneer Sir Arthur Percy Morris Fleming died. 2003: Sweden rejected adopting the euro.

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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.