Day in Engineering History Archive - September 7

September 7

1813: "Uncle Sam" was first used by Troy Post to refer to the U.S. 1912: Electrical engineer and entrepreneur David Packard, who co-founded the Hewlett-Packard Company, was born. 1914: American physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts, was born. 1915: Kiyoshi Ito, a mathematician whose innovative models of random motion are used today in fields as diverse as finance and biology, was born. 1927: American television pioneer Philo Farnsworth, at age 21, transmitted the first image through purely electronic means by his "image dissector" invention. 1936: The Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) began operation. 1940: German Luftwaffe began a 57-night blitz on London. 1948: Louis Parker was issued a patent for his "intercarrier sound system" TV receiver, used still in modern TVs. 1963: The National Professional Football Hall of Fame was dedicated in Canton, Ohio. 1977: Jimmy Carter signed a treaty transferring control of Panama Canal on 12/31/1999. 1980: American chemist Willard Libby, who won the Nobel Prize for his development of carbon-14 dating, died. 1987: An agreement was signed in Copenhagen by 15 telecommunications operators from 13 countries that led to the development of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). 1991: Edwin McMillan, who discovered neptunium and plutonium, died.

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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.