Day in Engineering History Archive - July 15

July 15

1868: William Morton, the first dentist to use ether (letheon) during a tooth extraction, died. 1869: Hippolyte Mège Mouriés patented margarine following a contest held by Emperor Napoleon III to find a suitable substitute for butter used by the French Navy. 1904: Pavel Cherenkov, who discovered the radiation bearing his name, was born. 1916: The Boeing Company, originally known as Pacific Aero Products, was founded in Seattle by William Boeing. 1933: Wiley Post began the first solo flight around world. 1940: The first betatron was placed in operation, Urbana, IL. 1943: Astronomer Jocelyn Burnell, who discovered the first four pulsars, was born. 1944: The Greenwich Royal Observatory was damaged by German V1 "Buzz Bomb." 1952: The first transatlantic helicopter flight began. 1954: The Boeing 707 - the first commercial jet transport airplane built in U.S. - was tested. 1955: The first electric power generated from atomic energy to illuminate an entire town was obtained from the Utah Power and Light Company's station in Arco, Idaho. 1965: The spacecraft Mariner IV sent back the first close-up pictures of the planet Mars. 1965: Congress passed a law requiring all cigarette packages to carry a health warning. 1975: Three American astronauts blasted off aboard an Apollo spaceship hours after two Soviet cosmonauts were launched aboard a "Soyuz" spacecraft for a mission that included an Apollo-Soyuz linkup of the two ships in orbit. 1975: The Detroit Tigers trademark was registered. 1996: MSNBC made its debut on cable and the Internet. 1999: China declared that it had invented its own neutron bomb.

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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.