Day in Engineering History Archive February 4

February 4

1863: A patent for four-wheeled roller skates was awarded to James Plimpton of New York. 1890: Thomas Edison was issued a patent for a "Quadruplex Telegraph." 1902: Aviation pioneer Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born. 1906: Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the non-planet Pluto, was born. 1928: Hendrik Lorentz, after whom the Lorentz force in electromagnetism is named, died. 1936: Radium E. became the first radioactive substance to be produced synthetically. 1941: Roy Plunkett received a patent for "tetrafluoro-ethylene polymers" (TEFLON). 1974: Satyendra Bose, of the Bose-Einstein condensates fame, died. 1998: Bill Gates got a pie in his face in Brussels, Belgium. 1999: Ford completed the purchase of Volvo Car and incorporated Volvo it as part of the Premier Auto Group.

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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.