Day in Engineering History Archive - March 30

March 30

239 B.C.: The first recorded passage of Halley's Comet was noted by Chinese astronomers. 1791: The French Académie des sciences finally decided that a metre would be a 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator. 1811: Robert Bunsen, of laboratory burner fame, was born. 1842: Dr. Crawford Long first used ether as anesthetic during minor operation. 1858: The first U.S. patent was issued for a combination lead pencil and eraser. 1879: German astronomer Bernhard Schmidt, who invented the type of reflecting telescope named after him (Schmidt telescope, Schmidt-Cassegrain, etc.), was born. 1891: Arthur Herrington, designer of the famous Jeep, was born. 1914: John Poynting, who introduced a theorem that assigns a value to the rate of flow of electromagnetic energy known as the Poynting vector, died. 1981: President Reagan was shot and wounded by John Hinkley. 1993: Charlie Brown of the Peanuts comic strip (my favorite), hit his first home run. 2006: Marcos César Pontes became the first Brazilian 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.