Day in Engineering History Archive - September 20

September 20

1819: Patent leather was manufactured for the first time by Seth Boyden. 1842: James Dewar, inventor of the flask that bears his name, was born. 1850: The United States Congress abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia. 1853: Elisha Otis opened his safety elevator company in Yonkers, NY. 1921: KDKA in Pittsburgh, PA, started the world's first daily radio newscast. 1938: A patent was granted for "synthetic fiber" (nylon) to Wallace Carothers. 1962: The Queen Elizabeth II was launched.

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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.