Day in Engineering History Archive - December 26

December 26

1791: English mathematician Charles Babbage, whose difference engine is considered the first programmable calculator, was born. 1838: Clemens Winkler (no relation to The Fonz), discoverer of the element germanium, was born. 1898: Polish-French scientist Marie Curie discovered the radioactive element radium while experimenting with pitchblende. 1967: A patent was issued to the Wham-O company for their improvement of the Frisbee. 1975: The Soviet Union inaugurated the world's first supersonic transport service with a flight of its Tupolev-144 airliner from Moscow to Alma-Ata. 1982: The Man of the Year in Time magazine was a computer (first ever non-human), honored as 1982's "greatest influence for good or evil." 2018: Founding father of the ARPANET Lawrence Roberts died.

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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.