Day in Engineering History Archive - August 31

August 31

1821: Hermann von Helmholtz, who experimented with physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology, and inventor of the Helmholtz coil, was born. 1842: The U.S. Naval Observatory was authorized by an act of Congress. 1887: Thomas Edison received a patent for his kinetoscope (movie projector). 1903: A Packard automobile become the first car to cross the U.S. under its own power by completing a 52-day journey from San Francisco to New York. 1956: The KC-135 Stratotanker made its first flight. 1962: President Kennedy signed the Communications Satellite Act which gave a monopoly on international communications via satellite to a new corporation called Comsat. 1988: A 5-day power blackout in downtown Seattle began. 1994: Russia officially ended its military presence in the former East Germany.

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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.