September 27

1825: George Stephenson operated the first locomotive that hauled a passenger train. 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. 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.