September 18
1752: French mathematician
Adrien-Marie
Legendre, who introduced the
Legendre
Polynomials, was born. 1783:
Leonhard Euler,
very familiar to all engineering students and renowned for his photographic memory,
died. 1819: Jean Foucault, inventor of the
Foucault pendulum, was born. 1830: B&O locomotive
Tom Thumb, the first locomotive
built in America, lost a 14-km race to a horse due to a boiler leak. 1851: The first
edition of "The New York Times" was published. 1883: The first course in electrical
engineering in a college was established by the College of Engineering,
Cornell University. 1907:
Edwin McMillan, who discovered
neptunium and
plutonium, was born. 1927: The
Columbia Phonograph Company (later the Columbia Broadcasting System,
CBS) made its debut with a basic network of 16 radio stations. 1947: The
U.S. Air Force was established as a separate military branch by
the National Security Act. 1955 : Ford produced its 2,000,000th
V-8 engine. 1955: The "Ed Sullivan
Show" began on CBS-TV, after having run as "The Toast of the Town" since 1948.
1973: President
Jimmy Carter filed a hand-written report on a UFO sighting. 1980:
Cuban cosmonaut Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendéz became the first Latin American sent into
space - onboard Soyuz 38.
| 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.
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