Day in Engineering History Archive November 5

November 5

1824: The Rensselaer School was founded in Troy, NY, becoming the first engineering college in the U.S. 1863: James Packard, of automotive fame, was born. 1879: James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations have tortured countless EE students, died at age 48. 1895: The first U.S. patent was granted to George B. Selden for the auto. 1901: Henry Ford received a patent for a motor carriage. 1906: Astronomer Fred Whipple, who proposed the "dirty snowball" model for comets, was born. 1914: Great Britain, France & Russia declared war on Turkey. 1935: Edwin Armstrong first demonstrated FM radio at a meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers. 1935: Parker Brothers launched the game of Monopoly. 1959: The American Football League was formed. 1992: Jan Hendrik Oort, Dutch physicist and astronomer of Oort Cloud fame, died. 1992: Chemical evidence of 5,000 year old beer was found in cave in Iran.

| 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.