Day in Engineering History Archive - July 5

Day in Engineering History July 5 Archive - RF CafeJuly 5

Happy Birthday William John Macquorn Rankine! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe1795: Antonio de Ulloa, who discovered the element Platinum (Pt), died. 1820: Scottish physicist William Rankine, an early investigator of thermodynamics who developed the Rankine Cycle, was born. 1892: Andrew Beard was issued a patent for the rotary engine. 1911: George Stoney, who introduced the term "electron" as the fundamental unit of electric charge, died. 1944: Harry Crosby took the first rocket airplane (the Northrop MX-324) for its maiden flight at Harper Dry Lake, CA. 1946: Bikini swimwear, named after the Bikini atoll A-bomb test, was first displayed in Paris. 1951: Dr. William Shockley announced that he had invented the junction transistor. 1952: The last London tram, No. 1951, ceased operation. 1966: A Saturn 1-B rocket was launched at Cape Kennedy, FL, to become the first unmanned Apollo test flight, and made 4 orbits at an altitude of about 113 miles. 1986: Statue of Liberty reopened after being refurbished. 1991: France performed nuclear warhead test at Muruora Island.

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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.