Day in Engineering History Archive - August 16

Day in Engineering History August 16 Archive - RF CafeAugust 16

Hugo Gernsback, Born August 16, 1884 - RF Cafe    Go to RF Cafe homepage

Today is Joe Miller's Jest Day. 1845: Gabriel Lippmann, who produced the first color photographic plate, was born. 1858: A telegraphed message from Britain's Queen Victoria to U.S. President Buchanan was transmitted over the recently laid trans-Atlantic cable. 1884: Hugo Gernsback, electronics inventor, futurist, marketer, author, and publisher, was born. 1888: John Pemberton, the pharmacist who invented Coca-Cola, died. 1896: The Yukon Gold Rush began when gold was discovered in Bonanza Creek. 1898: The loop-the-loop roller coaster was patented by Edwin Prescott. 1899: Robert Bunsen, of laboratory burner fame, died. 1920: Sir Joseph Lockyer, who co-discovered the element helium in the sun's spectrum, died. 1948: Baseball legend Babe Ruth died in New York at age 53. 1954: "Sports Illustrated" magazine first published. 1960: Free-fall world record set by Joseph Kittinger when he fell more than 16 miles (about 84,000 feet) before opening his parachute over NM. 1977: Elvis Presley died - or so they say ;-). 2011: U.S. patent #8,000,000 was awarded for a Visual Prosthesis.

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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.