Day in Engineering History Archive - January 15

January 15

1861: The safety elevator was patented as a "Hoisting Apparatus" by Elisha Otis, of Yonkers, NY. 1870: The Democratic party was first represented as a donkey in a cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly. 1907: The three-element vacuum tube (triode) patent was issued to its inventor, Dr. Lee de Forest as a "device for amplifying feeble electric currents - such, for example, as telephone currents." 1908: Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb," was born. 1943: The Pentagon, the world's highest capacity office building, was dedicated in Arlington, VA. 1967 :The first Super Bowl was played as the Green Bay Packers of the NFL defeated the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League, 35-10. 1970: William Piper, producer of the infamous J-3 aircraft, died. 1974: "Happy Days" first aired on ABC. 2001: Wikipedia, the source used for many of the events listed here, first went online.

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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.