Day in Engineering History Archive - November 8

November 8

1656: English astronomer Edmond Halley, who discovered the comet that now bears his name, was born. 1881: French aircraft designer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, who developed the concept of ailerons, was born. 1895: Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays ("x" stood for "unknown") during an experiment. 1904: Harvey Hubbell received the first patent for a detachable electric plug/receptacle pair. 1910: William Frost received the first patent for an "electric insect destroyer," aka, a bug zapper. 1918: Lawrence Glendenin, co-discoverer of promethium (Pm, 61), was born. 1923: Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit, was born. 1942: "Operation Torch," a British-American invasion into French North Africa, commenced. 1978: Classic American painter Norman Rockwell died. 1984: Anna Fisher became the first "mom" to go into orbit onboard the STS-51A flight of the the second flight of the orbiter Discovery.

(copyright owned by Google)

This is Google's homepage logo for the anniversary of Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of x-rays.

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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.