Day in Engineering History Archive - April 13

April 13

Today is Tax Freedom Day 2009 in the U.S. 1888: John Hammond, Jr., developer of radio remote control, was born. 1892: Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, "Father of Radar," was born. 1909: Stanislaw Ulam, who determined the way to initiate fusion in a nuclear bomb was to use a fission reaction to create the necessary compression, was born. 1912: Royal Flying Corps was formed (later became the RAF). 1954: Nuclear bomb designer Robert Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist. 1960: The first U.S. navigational satellite, Transit-1B, was launched into Earth orbit. 1970: Apollo 13 announced "Houston, we've had a problem here" after an oxygen tank exploded en route to Moon. 1997: Tiger Woods, 21, became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament. 2008: John Wheeler, who coined the term "Black Hole," 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.