August 12

1865: Joseph Lister (thence Listerine mouthwash) became the first surgeon to use disinfectant during an operation. 1877: Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and made the first sound recording. 1882: Vincent Bendix, who manufactured aircraft and automobile systems, was born. 1887: Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist with the dead cat (maybe), was born. 1896: Gold was discovered in the Klondike River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. 1948: Harry Brearley, inventor of stainless steel, died. 1957: My sister, Gayle, was born - Happy Birthday! 1953: The Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb. 1957: Lt. Cmdr. Don Walker landed a Skyknight on USS Antietam in first test of an Automatic Carrier Landing System. 1960: Echo One, the first balloon satellite, was launched by the U.S. from Cape Canaveral, FL. 1962: Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 astronauts were the first two humans in space at the same time. 1946: President Harry Truman signed a bill  establishing the National Air Museum, which eventually became the National Air and Space Museum - the most visited museum in the world. 1977: The first test glide of the Space Shuttle Enterprise occurred. 1981: IBM introduced the IBM PC personal computer and PC-DOS 1.0. 1989: William Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for work on transistors (transfer/resistor) with with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, died. 2004: Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, electrical engineer and co-inventor of the CAT scan machine, died.