Day in Engineering History Archive - November 23

November 23

1616: English mathematician John Wallis, who introduced the infinity symbol (∞), was born. 1826: German astronomer Johann Bode, who developed Bode's Law, died. 1837: Nobel Prize winner Johannes van der Waals, of molecular electrostatic forces fame, was born . 1874: A paper by Ferdinand Braun was published in the Annalen der Physik und Chemie describing his discovery of the electrical rectifier effect. 1889: The first jukebox made its debut in San Francisco, at the Palais Royale Saloon. 1897: A patent was issued for a pencil sharpener to John Love of Fall River, MA. 1910: Aviation pioneer Octave Chanute died. 1948:The first patent for a lens to provide zoom effects was issued to F.G. Back as a "varifocal lens for cameras." 1963: Lyndon Johnson took over as president of the U.S. following the assassination of JFK. 1971: The People's Republic of China was seated in the UN Security Council.

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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.