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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. 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.
August 10
1602: French mathematician
Gilles de Roberval, who invented the
Roberval balance weighing scale, was born. 1846: Act of Congress signed by President James K. Polk established the
Smithsonian Institution. 1856:
William Willett, who invented the concept of
Daylight Saving Time, was born. 1886: A patent for welding by using electricity was awarded to
Elihu Thomson. 1896:
Otto Lilienthal, who accomplished some of the first controlled glider flights, died. 1909:
Leo Fender, inventor of the first solid body electric guitar, was born. 1909:
Ford trademarked "
Explosive-engines and their parts." 1913: German physicist
Wolfgang Paul, who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons long enough to study them, was born. 1928: The
Federal Radio Commission issued first U.S. television license to Charles Jenkins Labs in Washington, D.C. 1945:
Robert Goddard, "the father of modern rocketry," died. 1948: WABC TV channel 7 in New York, (
ABC) began broadcasting. 1949: The
National Military Establishment was renamed the Department of Defense. 1966: "Daylight Meteor," seen from Utah to Canada, was the only known case of a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere & leaving it again. 1990:
Magellan spacecraft went into orbit around Venus. 1996: Cascading
power outages hit parts of nine western states.