Day in Engineering History Archive - April 24

April 24

1889: The Edison General Electric Company was organized. 1898: Spain declared war on the United States. 1928: The fathometer, which measures underwater depths by using a series of electrical sounds signals and their echoes, was patented by Herbert Dorsey. 1953: Winston Churchill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. 1960: Nobel Prize winner Max Von Laue, who discovered the diffraction of x-rays in crystals, died. 1967: Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first human to die during a space mission when the parachute failed to open on Soyuz 1. 1970: The People's Republic of China launched its first satellite, the Mao 1 (Dong Fang Hong I). 1990: Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying visually impaired the $1.5B Hubble Space Telescope. 1993: An IRA terrorist bomb devastated London.

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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.