March 27

1794: President Washington and Congress authorized creation of the U.S. Navy. 1845: Wilhelm Röntgen, discoverer of x-rays, was born. 1855: Sir Alfred Ewing, the physicist who discovered and named hysteresis, was born. 1855: Abraham Gesner received the first patent for kerosene. 1863: Sir Henry Royce, half of the Rolls Royce team that builds automobiles and airplane engines, was born. 1899: The first international radio transmission between England and France was achieved by the Italian inventor G. Marconi. 1910: John Pierce, communications engineer, scientist, and father of the communications satellite, was born. 1968: Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, died. 1990: The U.S. began broadcasting TV Martí to Cuba. 1994: A tokamak at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab generated the highest temperature ever recorded at 510M °C. 2002: The Passover Massacre, committed by a Palestinian homicide bomber killed 30 Israeli civilians. 2007: Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur, who was the co-developer of magnetic resonance imaging, died.