Day in Engineering History Archive February 13

February 13

1633: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition for his belief that the earth revolves around the sun. 1884: Albert Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, was born. 1910: William Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for work on transistors (transfer/resistor) with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, was born. 1912: Robert Millikan began collecting data from his famous oil drop experiment for determining the fundamental unit of charge. 1946: The world's first programmable electronic digital computer, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was demonstrated at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of PA. 1956: Jan Łukasiewicz, who invented Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), died. 1960: France detonated its first plutonium bomb. 1990: Space probe Voyager 1, at the edge of the solar system, photographed the sun and six planets in one image, the first record of the solar system from space. 1997: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 7,000 for the first time. 2000: The last original Peanuts comic strip (my personal favorite comic) was published, following Charles M. Schulz's death.

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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.