Day in Engineering History Archive March 8

March 8

1618: Johann Kepler formulated his Third Law of Planetary Motion. 1854: U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry made his second landing in Japan, and within a month had concluded a treaty with the Japanese. 1862: The Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (built upon the USS Merrimack's hull) was launched. 1879: Otto Hahn, co-discoverer of nuclear fission, was born. 1917: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, of airship fame, died. 1946: Frederick Lanchester, automobile and aeronautics pioneer who built the first British petrol automobile, died. 1965: The United States landed about 3,500 Marines in South Vietnam - the first of many. 1974: The newly renamed Charles de Gaulle International Airport began service. 1979: Volcanoes - the first active in the solar system other than Earth - on Io were discovered by Voyager 1. 1983: President Ronald Reagan made his famous "Evil Empire" speech. 

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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.