Day in Engineering History Archive - November 9

November 9

Happy Birthday Hedy Lamarr! - RF CafeHappy Birthday Carl Sagan!  Please click here to visit RF Cafe.1877: The American Chemical Society was incorporated in NY. 1914: Frequency hopping spread spectrum inventor Hedy Lamarr was born. 1921: Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with the photoelectric effect. 1934: American astronomer Carl Sagan (aka Butt-Head Astronomer), of the PBS series fame, was born. 1961: USAF Major Robert White flew the X-15 rocket plane to a record speed of Mach 6.04 (6,587 km/h) and to a 30.97 km altitude. 1965: The biggest electricity grid failure in U.S. history, the "Great Northeast Blackout," caused a 13-hour blackout in northeast America and parts of Canada. 1989: East Berlin opened its borders. 1967: The first flight of the Saturn V heavy booster of the Apollo program (Apollo 4) was made. 1972: Anik A, Canada's first domestic communications satellite, was launched. 1978: Kirt B. (that's me) entered the USAF to train as a radar repair technician. 1985: Gary Kasparov,, 22, became the youngest world chess champion. 1994: German scientists at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany created the first atom of element 110 (ununnilium, Unn). 2005: The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its Venus Express spacecraft from Kazakhstan. 2011: First nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS).

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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.