Day in Engineering History Archive - September 27

September 27

1825: George Stephenson operated the first locomotive that hauled a passenger car. 1831: The first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was held in York. 1894: Lothar von Richthofen, WWI flying ace and brother of the Red Baron, was born. 1892: Book matches were patented by Joshua Pusey. 1918: Sir Martin Ryle, who developed the first synthetic aperture radio telescope systems, was born. 1938: The Queen Elizabeth was launched at the John Brown & Company shipyard at Clydebank, Scotland. 1956: USAF Captain Milburn Apt piloted the Bell X-2 to Mach 3.2, the first time past Mach 3. 1993: General James "Jimmy" Doolittle, famous for, amongst other things, his raid on Tokyo in 1942, died. 1997: The space shuttle "Atlantis" docked with the problem-plagued Russian "Mir" station to drop off American David Wolf and pick up Michael Foale. 2003: The first European mission to the Moon was launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket.

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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.