Day in Engineering History Archive - April 26

April 26

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. 1900: Seismologist Charles Richter, who devised the earthquake-measuring scale that bears his name, was born. 1921: The first U.S. broadcast of the weather was made from St. Louis, MO, station WEW. 1933: Arno Penzias, who with Robert Wilson, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the background microwave "Big Bang" radiation, was born. 1962: The Ranger IV space probe became the first U.S. craft to land (a planned crash) on the moon. 1986: The world's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in Pripet, Russia (formerly Soviet Union). 1989: Lucille Ball died (hard to believe so long ago).

| 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.