Day in Engineering History Archive - December 8

December 8

Today is Coaxial Cable Day. 1765: American inventor Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin revolutionized the textile industry, was born. 1846: English mathematician George Boole, of Boolean algebra fame, was born. 1865: French mathematician Jacques-Salomon Hadamard, who proved the prime number theorem, was born. 1894: Russian mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev, after whom the Chebyshev filter transfer function is named, died. 1931: A patent was granted to Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel for the invention of coaxial cable, described as a "concentric conducting system." 1941: President Roosevelt delivered his "Day of Infamy" speech on the radio, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. 1980: Beatles member John Lennon was assassinated. 1993: The U.S. Secretary of Defense declared that the Global Positioning System had 24 satellites operating in their assigned orbits. 1993: NAFTA was signed into law. 1994 :A team of German scientists at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) facility in Germany, created element 111 named unununium, symbol Uuu.

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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.