Day in Engineering History Archive - November 20

November 20

1866: James Haven and Charles Hettrich of Cincinnati, OH, received the first patent for a yoyo in the U.S. 1882: Astrophotographer Henry Draper died. 1889: Astronomer Edwin Hubbell was born. 1906: American radio pioneer Greenleaf Pickard received a patent for the first silicon crystal detector. 1923: Garrett Morgan patented an automatic traffic signal. 1924: Benoit Mandelbrot, popularize of fractal geometry, was born. 1945: The Nuremberg trials of Nazis began at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. 1954: American aviation pioneer Clyde Cessna died. 1967: At 11 AM, the Census Clock at the Department of Commerce hit 200 million (300 million in October 2006). 1985: Microsoft released Windows version 1.0. 1991: The U.S. provided $1.5B in food and technical assistance to the Soviet Union. 1993: NAFTA was approved by the U.S. senate - that "giant sucking sound" of jobs turned out to be a "giant blowing sound" of illegals into the country. 1998: Construction of the International Space Station (ISS) began. 2000: Intel introduced its Pentium-4 microprocessor.

| 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.