Day in Engineering History Archive - May 2

Day in Engineering History May 2 Archive - RF CafeMay 2

1st Trans-Atlantic TV Broadcast by Early Bird Satellite. Click here to return to the RF Cafe homepage.1519: Leonardo Da Vinci died. 1800: English chemist William Nicholson discovered electrolysis when he took wires from the poles of a battery he had built and dipped them in water, and found bubbles of gas were released due to the effect of current flow through water. 1802: Physicist Heinrich Gustav Magnus, who discovered the Magnus Rotor effect, was born. 1892: German air ace Manfred von Richtofen, "The Red Baron," was born. 1912: BF Goodrich was incorporated. 1919: The first U.S. air passenger service was started. 1952: De Havilland ushered in the commercial jet age its Comet airliner. 1965: The "Early Bird" satellite was used to transmit television pictures across the Atlantic. 1997: Tony Blair became, at age 44, Britain's youngest prime minister in 185 years. 2000: The "Selective Availability" feature of GPS was discontinued, making the full system precision available to all users.

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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.