Day in Engineering History Archive December 5

December 5

1848: President Polk triggered the Gold Rush of '49 by confirming in an address to Congress that gold had been discovered in California. 1879: American aviation pioneer Clyde Cessna was born. 1901: German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg, famous for his Heisenberg Principle, was born. 1955: American aircraft designer Glen L(uther) Martin died. 1958: The first stretch of Britain's M6 Motorway, officially opened. 1973: Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, "Father of Radar," died. 1995: Englishman Stanley Runcorn, discoverer of earth's magnetic core reversals, 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.