May 18
 1850:
Oliver Heaviside, developer
of the Heaviside step function, was born. 1897:
Dow Chemical
was incorporated. 1912: The U.K.'s first
automated telephone exchange opened for business at Epsom. 1917: The
U.S. Congress passed the
Selective Service Act, calling up soldiers to fight World War I. 1950:
The U.S. and Great Britain greed to the terms of
NATO. 1933: The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was formed as "a corporation clothed
with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private
enterprise," to perform research on civil engineering challenges. 1953: The first woman
to fly faster than the speed of sound,
Jacqueline Cochran, piloted an F-86 Sabrejet over California at an
average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour. 1969: Apollo 10 was launched. 1974: India became
the 6th nation to explode an
atomic
bomb. 1980:
Mount St. Helens blew its top. 1991:
Helen Sharman became first Briton in space. 2004:
Arnold Beckman,
founder of Beckman Instruments, died - at 104 years old!
| Jan |
Feb | Mar |
Apr | May |
Jun | Jul |
Aug | Sep |
Oct | Nov |
Dec |
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.
|