Day in Engineering History Archive - August 2

August 2

1776: Friedrich Stromeyer, discoverer of cadmium, was born. 1835: Elisha Gray, who missed being labeled as the inventor of the telephone by mere hours when Alexander Graham Bell beat him to the patent office, was born. 1880: Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was adopted officially by the British Parliament. 1865: The Trans Atlantic Cable being laid by SS Great Eastern snapped and was lost. 1909: The first Lincoln penny was issued. 1909: The Army Air Corps formed as Army took their first delivery from Wright Brothers. 1922: Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, died. 1927: Harold Black invented the negative feedback amplifier. 1936: Airplane designer Louis Blériot, died. 1939: Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging creation of an atomic weapons research program. 1964: The Pentagon reported the first of two attacks on U.S. destroyers by North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. 1984: The Peanuts comic strip was picked up by the Daily Times in Portsmouth, OH, making it the first comic strip to appear in 2,000 newspapers. 1990: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and set the stage for Operation Desert Storm.

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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.