Day in Engineering History Archive - December 18

December 18

1856: Sir J.J. Thomson, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on cathode rays, was born. 1890: American electrical engineer Edwin Armstrong, a pioneer in radio communications and electronic theory and inventor of the CW transmitter, regenerative & superheterodyne circuits, and frequency modulation, was born. 1926: G.N. Lewis coined the word "photon." 1957: The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in PA, the first civilian nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went online. 1958: Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), the first American communication satellite, was launched on an Atlas booster. 1977: Voyager 1 took the first photograph of the Earth and the moon together. 1997: The 9.3-mile toll expressway, Tokyo Bay Aqualine bridge and tunnel that spans the narrowest gap of Tokyo Bay, opened to traffic after 31 years of studies. 1998: ICANN, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers, was formed.

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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.