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 renown 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.