Day in Engineering History Archive - August 18

August 18

Today is Women's Voting Rights Day. 1685: Brook Taylor, developer of the Taylor Series in mathematics, was born. 1735: The "Evening Post" of Boston, MA, was published for the first time. 1868: Pierre Janssen discovered helium in the solar spectrum during eclipse. 1930: Eastern Airlines began passenger service. 1932: Scottish aviator Jim Mollison made the first westbound transatlantic solo flight. 1937: The FCC issued the first FM radio station construction permit to W1XOJ in Paxton, MA. 1940: Canada and the U.S. established a joint defense plan, the "Ogdensburg Agreement," against the possible enemy attacks during World War II. 1940: The most intense day of air attacks during the Battle of Britain cost Germany more than 70 planes. 1940: Walter Chrysler, founder of the Chrysler Corporation, died. 1947: Hewlett Packard Company was incorporated. 1958: Kirt Blattenberger, webmaster of the RF Cafe website, was born. 1966: The first pictures of earth taken from moon orbit by Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft.

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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.