Day in Engineering History Archive - August 17 |
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Cat Nights begin today. 1807: Robert Fulton's steamboat Clermont made its first trip up NY's Hudson River. 1859: The first U.S. air mail delivery was made in a balloon from Lafayette, IN. 1891: The automobile electric self-starter was patented. 1893: Walter Noddack, discoverer of the element rhenium (Re, 75), was born. 1960: Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy trial opened in Moscow. 1969: Hurricane Camille slammed into the Gulf Coast at Biloxi, MS. 1978: The first trans-Atlantic balloon flight was completed, from Maine to France. 1982: The CD-ROM made its debut from Philips, featuring the group ABBA. 1998: Bill Clinton admitted to Lewinsky affair after a previous public denial. 2000: Robert Gilruth, developer of the Bell X-1 supersonic airplane, died. | 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. |
