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.