Day in Engineering History Archive - June 26

June 26

1824: Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), after whom the absolute temperature scale is named, was born. 1898: German aircraft engineer Willy Messerschmitt was born. 1902: William Lear, designer of the Lear Jet, was born. 1910: Roy Plunkett, inventor of Teflon, was born. 1911: Sir Frederic Williams, co-inventor of the CRT (the "Williams-Kilburn tube"), was born. 1948: The Berlin Airlift began as the U.S., Britain and France started ferrying supplies to the isolated western sector of Berlin. 1974: A package of Wrigley's chewing gum with a bar code printed on it passed over a scanner in Troy, OH, becoming the first product ever logged under the new UPC computerized recognition system. 1976: The CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, was opened as the world's tallest free-standing structure, at a height of 1815 feet 5 inches. 2000: Rival scientific teams completed the first rough map of the human genetic code after a ten-year race.

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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.