Day in Engineering History Archive - April 7

April 7

1827: Englishman John Walker sold his first friction matches. 1860: W(ill) K(eith) Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg cereal company, was born. 1913: The first electrically propelled ship of the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Jupiter, was commissioned. 1927: The first long-distance TV transmission was sent from Washington, DC, to New York City. 1928: The Detroit Police Department commenced regular one-way radio communication with its patrol cars. 1945: Japan's largest battleship of WWII, the Yamato, was sunk by Allied forces. 1947: Automobile magnate Henry Ford died. 1953: IBM unveiled the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine - their first commercially available scientific computer. 1957: The last of New York City's electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan. 1959: The first atomic generated electricity was produced at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, NM. 1959: The first radar signal was bounced off the sun from Stanford, CA. 1981: Willem Klein mentally extracted the 13th root of a 100-digit number in 29 seconds. 1983: Story Musgrave and Don Peterson made the first Space Shuttle spacewalk.

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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.