Day in Engineering History Archive - July 25

July 25

1843: Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh, inventor of the rubberized raincoat that bears his name, died. 1857: Frank Julian Sprague, prodigious electrical design engineer, was born. 1909: Louis Blériot made the first successful crossing the English Channel in his Blériot XI monoplane. 1920: English chemist Rosalind Franklin, who made the image of the DNA helix structure, was born. 1946: The first underwater nuclear explosion took place with the "Baker" atomic bomb during "Operation Crossroads" at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. 1956: The Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm off the New England coast, claiming the lives of 51 people. 1959: The SR.N1 hovercraft became the first hovercraft to cross the English Channel. 1969: Sen. Ted Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the crime at Chappaquiddick, where he left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in the car he drove off a bridge while drunk. 1978: Louise Joy Brown, the first test tube baby, was born in Oldham, England. 1987: Charles Draper, "the father of inertial navigation," died. 1984: Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.

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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.