Day in Engineering History Archive - April 12
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. All will eventually be either verified or removed.
Please submit significant
historical events and dates for inclusion in these lists. I will be glad to include your name and
birthday. Please do not submit your death date ;-)
A couple 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.
April 12
1852: Ferdinand von Lindemann, who first proved that π is transcendental, was born. 1892: George Blickensderfer was awarded the first U.S. patent for a portable typewriter (first laptop?). 1955: The Salk vaccine against polio was announced to work. 1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to fly in space, orbiting the Earth once before making a safe landing. 1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral, FL, on its first flight (STS-1). 1984: The Telecommunications Act of 1984 received the Royal Assent, confirming the intention of the British government to privatize British Telecom. 1988: The first U.S. patent was issued for an animal life form to Harvard scientists for a genetically engineered mouse. 1994: Attorney Laurence Canter [allegedly] wrote a Perl script to flood Usenet message board readers with a notice for the "Green Card Lottery," thus creating the first incident of spamming. 2004: Barry Bonds hit his 660th home run to tie Willie Mays for third on baseball's career list.
Webmaster: Kirt Blattenberger, BSEE, UVM 1989