May 20

1874: Levi Strauss received a patent for making blue jeans with copper rivets. 1895: Reginald Mitchell, designer of the famous Spitfire airplane that beat back the German Luftwaffe in WWII, was born. 1901: Hideo Shima, Japanese designer of the world's first "bullet train," was born. 1913: William R. (Bill) Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard, was born. 1921: Marie Curie was presented with a gram of radium worth $100k at the White House. 1927: Charles Lindbergh took off from New York to cross the Atlantic for Paris aboard his airplane the "Spirit of St. Louis" (a 33-1/2 hour flight). 1932: Amelia Earhart took off to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the first woman to achieve the feat. 1940: Igor Sikorsky demonstrated his helicopter to the public. 1956: The first hydrogen fusion bomb (H-bomb) to be dropped from an airplane exploded over Namu Atoll at the northwest edge of the Bikini Atoll. 1982: Merle Tuve who first used pulsed radio waves to explore the ionosphere, died. 1990: The Hubble Space Telescope sent its first photograph from space.