Day in Engineering History Archive - August 12

August 12

1865: Joseph Lister (hence Listerine mouthwash) became the first surgeon to use disinfectant during an operation. 1877: Thomas Edison invented the phonograph and made the first sound recording. 1882: Vincent Bendix, who manufactured aircraft and automobile systems, was born. 1887: Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist with the dead cat (maybe), was born. 1896: Gold was discovered in the Klondike River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. 1948: Harry Brearley, inventor of stainless steel, died. 1957: My sister, Gayle, was born - Happy Birthday! 1953: The Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb. 1957: Lt. Cmdr. Don Walker landed a Skyknight on USS Antietam in first test of an Automatic Carrier Landing System. 1957: My older sister, Gayle, was born - Happy Birthday! 1960: Echo One, the first balloon satellite, was launched by the U.S. from Cape Canaveral, FL. 1962: Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 astronauts were the first two humans in space at the same time. 1946: President Harry Truman signed a bill establishing the National Air Museum, which eventually became the National Air and Space Museum - the most visited museum in the world. 1977: The first test glide of the Space Shuttle Enterprise occurred. 1981: IBM introduced the IBM PC personal computer and PC-DOS 1.0. 1989: William Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for work on transistors (transfer/resistor) with with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, died. 2004: Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, electrical engineer and co-inventor of the CAT scan machine, died.

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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.