Day in Engineering History Archive - December 28

Day in Engineering History December 28 Archive - RF CafeDecember 28

1520: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean after passing through the South American strait that now bears his name. 1869: William Semple of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, patented chewing gum. 1882: English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington was born. 1895: The world's first movie theater opened in Paris, France. 1929: Dutch astronomer Maarten Schmidt, who discovered the distance vs. spectral shift paradox of quasars, was born. 1976: Patent #4,000,000 was issued to Robert Mendenhall for a process for recycling asphalt compositions. 2000: U.S. retail giant Montgomery Ward announced it is going out of business after 128 years. 2005: GIOVE-A, the first in a series of test-bed Galileo navigation satellites, was launched by the European Union.

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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.