Day in Engineering History Archive - August 13

Day in Engineering History August 13 Archive - RF CafeHappy Birthday Anders Ångström! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.August 13

Today is International Lefthanders Day (yours truly is a south paw). Tonight is the peak of the Perseid meteors. 1642: Christiaan Huygens discovered the Martian south polar cap. 1814: Anders Ångström, after whom the unit of wavelength is named, was born. 1819: Sir George Gabriel Stokes, who developed the Stokes' Theorem, was born. 1866: Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) automobile company, was born. 1888: Television inventor John Logie Baird was born. 1889:William Gray received a patent for a coin-operated telephone. 1902: Felix Wankel, inventor of the pistonless internal combustion engine, was born. 1912: The Radio Act of 1912, the first federal radio regulation law, was signed. 1912: The first experimental radio license was issued to St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, PA. 1960: Echo One, placed in orbit a day earlier, allowed the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite to take place. 1961: Troops in East Germany sealed off the border between East and West Berlin, and construction of the Berlin Wall began. 1990: Iraq transferred between $3 billion and $4 billion in gold bullion, foreign currencies and goods seized from Kuwait to Baghdad. 1991: Jack Ryan, inventor with more than 1,000 patents including the Barbie Doll and Hot Wheels cars, died.  1996: Microsoft released IE 3.0.

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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.