Day in Engineering History Archive - May 22

May 22

1783: Englishman William Sturgeon, who devised the first electromagnet capable of supporting more than its own weight, was born. 1849: Abraham Lincoln received a patent for the floating dry dock. 1859: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, was born. 1891: The first public motion picture was shown in Thomas Edison's lab. 1908: The Wright Brothers registered their flying machine for a U.S. patent. 1973: Robert Metcalfe wrote a memo at Xerox describing a data transfer protocol for what he termed the "Ethernet." 1983: My dear wife, Melanie (Sue Goodwin), and I were married - Happy 40th Anniversary! 1990: Microsoft released Windows 3.0. 1992: Johnny Carson hosted the "Tonight Show" for the last time, telling his audience, "I bid you a very heartfelt good night." 1995: Two new moons were discovered orbiting Saturn using the Hubble Space Telescope. 2007: The European Space Policy was formalized as a joint effort between the ESA and the EU.

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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.