May 5
 1809: Mary Kies
was awarded the first patent (1041X, destroyed in 1936 fire) to go to a woman, for a
technique for weaving straw with silk and thread. 1834:
William Whewell
wrote a letter to Michael Faraday suggesting the names Anode and Cathode in describing
the process of electrolysis. 1861:
Peter
Hewitt, inventor of the mercury vapor lamp, was born. 1917:
Eugene Bullard becomes the first African-American aviator when he
earned his flying certificate with the French Air Service. 1945: Holland and Denmark
were liberated from Nazi control. 1945: The only WW II deaths of civilians on the mainland
of the U.S. resulted from a Japanese bomb dropped over Gearhart Mountain, Oregon by an
unmanned balloon. 1961:
Alan
Shepard became the first American in space when he made a 15 minute suborbital flight
aboard the Freedom 7 spacecraft. 2000: A conjunction of the 5 bright planets - Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn occurred. 2007:
Theodore Maiman, who invented the (ruby) laser, died. 2010: ICANN
began allowing non-Latin characters for top-level domains.
| 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.
|