Day in Engineering History Archive - May 5

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.

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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.