Day in Engineering History Archive - August 11

August 11

The Dog Days of Summer end. 1896: The first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off pull chain was patented by Harvey Hubbell. 1909: The liner Arapahoe was the first ship to use the radio distress call, SOS (save our ship, Morse Code ···---···). 1919: Industrialist Andrew Carnegie died. 1921: Tom Kilburn, who was the first to succeed in storing and then retrieving a bit of data via software, was born. 1934: A load of America's most dangerous prisoners became the first inmates on Alcatraz Island. 1942: Actress Hedy Markey (Lamarr) received a patent for a secret communication system (spread spectrum). 1951: WCBS-TV in New York City televised the first baseball doubleheader (in color) between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves. 1962: The Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight. 1977: Sir Frederic Williams, co-inventor of the CRT (the "Williams tube"), died. 1984: President Ronald Reagan joked during a voice test for a radio address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." 1992: The Mall of America opened in Minneapolis as the largest shopping mall in the United States. 1997: President Clinton made the first the use of the line-item veto approved by Congress. 1999: The last total solar eclipse of the millennium occurred.

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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.