Day in Engineering History Archive - January 16

January 16

1767: Swedish physicist Anders Ekeberg, discoverer of the element tantalum (Ta), was born. 1853: André Michelin, founder of the Michelin Tyre Company, was born. 1881: Radar pioneer Sir Arthur Percy Morris Fleming was born. 1909: British explorer Ernest Shackleton found Earth's magnetic south pole. 1919: Prohibition took effect in America. 1957: Three B-52s took off from Castle AFB, CA, on the first nonstop, around-the-world flight by jet planes - 45 hours and 19 minutes. 1967: American physicist and high voltage experimenter Robert Van de Graaff died. 1969: Two manned Soviet "Soyuz" spaceships became the first vehicles to dock in space and transfer personnel. 1986: The Internet Engineering Task Force held its first meeting. 1991: The White House announced the start of Operation Desert Storm to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. 2006: The Stardust capsule successfully returned to Earth, carrying dust from comet Wild 2.

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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.