Day in Engineering History Archive - October 13

Day in Engineering History October 13 Archive - RF CafeOctober 13

1st Cellular Service Launched - RF Cafe1776: Peter Barlow, who invented the Barlow lens that is commonly used to increase optical magnification, was born. 1792: The cornerstone of the White House was laid. 1860: The first successful aerial photograph in the U.S. was taken from a balloon at 1200 feet over Boston, MA. 1916: General Motors was incorporated. 1945: Milton Hershey of chocolate fame died. 1953: The first U.S. patent for a burglar alarm operated by ultrasonic sound was issued to Samuel Bagno. 1957: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra introduced the Ford Edsel on an hour long special, "The Edsel Show." 1971: Alec Harley Reeves, inventor of pulse coded modulation (PCM), died. 1972: Herman A. Affel, co-inventor of coaxial cable, died. 1983: Ameritech Mobile Communications (now Cingular) launched the first U.S. cellular network in Chicago. 1985: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory observed the first proton-antiproton collisions. 1987: Nobel Prize winner Walter Brattain, co-inventor of the transistor, died. 1992: The U.K. government announced plans to close a third of its deep coal mines.

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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.