Day in Engineering History Archive - May 26

Day in Engineering History May 26 Archive - RF CafeMay 26

Happy Birthday Sally Ride! - Please click here to visit RF Cafe.1854: Frederick Langenheim took the first photograph of a solar eclipse. 1872: A fire extinguisher was patented by Thomas J. Martin. 1874: Henri Farman, the airplane designer who invented ailerons, was born. 1888: Nobel Prize winner Ascanio Sobrero, who discovered nitroglycerine, died. 1908: The first major Middle East oil strike was made in Persia (now Iraq). 1927: Ford Motor Company produced its last "Tin Lizzie." 1939: Charles Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic, died. 1946: A patent was filed in the U.S. for an H-bomb. 1951: Sally Ride, the first American woman to orbit the earth when she flew aboard Space Shuttle Challenger, was born. 1959: The word "Frisbee" became a registered trademark of Wham-O. 1961: A U.S. Air Force bomber flew across the Atlantic in a record time of just over three hours. 1969: The "Apollo 10" astronauts returned to Earth after a successful 8-day dress rehearsal for the first manned moon landing. 1981: Satya Pal Asija received the first U.S. patent for computer software. 1994: President Clinton announced his administration would no longer link China's trade status with its human rights record. 1999: Waldo Semon, the inventor of PVC plastic, died. 2003: English astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who first identified Stonehenge as an astronomical observatory, died. 2007: Homer Stewart, an early pioneer of rocket research who helped develop the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer I, 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.