Day in Engineering History Archive - May 12

May 12

1909: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land Camera, was born. 1926: The airship Norge became the first vessel to fly over the North Pole. 1930: The first planetarium in the U.S. opened to the public, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL. 1936: The Dvorak typewriter keyboard was patented. 1940: The Nazi conquest of France began with the crossing Meuse River. 1942: A Nazi U-boat sunk an American cargo ship at mouth of Mississippi River. 1958: The U.S. & Canada formed the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). 1978: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that they would no longer exclusively name hurricanes after women. 1980: The first nonstop crossing of U.S. via balloon began. 1994: Roy Plunkett, inventor of Teflon, died.

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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.