Day in Engineering History Archive - July 9

July 9

1856: Serbian-American high voltage experimenter Nikola Tesla was born. 1865: Count Amedeo Avogadro, who discovered that at the same T and P all volumes of a perfect gas contained the same number of particles, and defined 6.022 x 10^23 units per mole of a substance, died. 1872: The doughnut cutter was patented by John F. Blondel. 1894: Percy Spencer, inventor of the microwave oven, was born. 1910: Walter Brookins became the first to fly an airplane a mile in the air. 1911: John Wheeler, who coined the term "Black Hole," was born. 1919: Present-day Ford Motor Company incorporated in DE. 1932: King Gillette, inventor of the safety razor, died. 1953: New York Airways began the first commuter passenger service by helicopter. 1956: Dick Clark first hosted "Bandstand." 1962: The "Starfish Prime" high altitude nuclear tests were performed at Johnston Island. 1964: My sister, Tina, was born - Happy Birthday! 1968: Frederick Schollhammer received a patent for his "Portable Beam Generator," otherwise known as a hand-held laser ray gun.  1979: Voyager 2, made its closest approach to Jupiter. 1982: A man broke into Buckingham Palace and spent ten minutes talking to the Queen in her bedroom. 1999: A jury in Los Angeles ordered General Motors to pay $4.9B to six people severely burned when their Chevrolet Malibu exploded in flames in a rear-end collision. 1999: Charles P. "Pete" Conrad, the third human to walk on the moon during Apollo 12, died.

| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

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.