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 August 19
 1646: English astronomer
John Flamsteed,
who established the Greenwich Observatory, was born. 1662: Child prodigy and mathematical
genius Blaise
Pascal died. 1785: Clock maker
Seth Thomas was born. 1848: The New York Herald reported the
discovery
of gold in California. 1856:
Gail Borden of Brooklyn, NY, patented his process for condensed
milk. 1871: Airplane pioneer
Orville Wright was born. 1906:
Philo Farnsworth,
credited with inventing the first successful television system, was born. 1950:
Italian physicist Giovanni Giorgi, who invented the Giorgi system of measurement
that introduced electrical resistance (MKS Ω, precursor to the SI), died. 1960:
A tribunal in Moscow convicted American U-2 pilot
Francis
Gary Powers of espionage. 1960:
Sputnik 5, carrying
two dogs, was launched into space and were later retrieved as the first living organisms
from space. 1967: Hugo Gernsback, electronics inventor, futurist, marketer, author,
and publisher, died. 1981: Two US Navy
F-14 jet
fighters
shot down two Soviet-built Libyan SU-22s. 1991: Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown in a
coup as Communist hardliners took over. 1994: Nobel Prize laureate
Linus Pauling, who who applied quantum mechanics to the study
of molecular structures, 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.
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