Day in Engineering History Archive - August 21

August 21

1789: Augustin-Louis Cauchy, French mathematician, was born. 1858: The famous debates between senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas began. 1878: The American Bar Association was founded in Saratoga, NY. 1888: William Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, received a patent on the first commercial adding machine. 1923: The first use of electric beacons mounted on the ground to provide sight direction for night flying was made. 1951: The U.S. ordered construction of the world's first atomic submarine, the Nautilus. 1958: Hawaii became the 50th state. 1965: Gemini V was launched into Earth orbit with Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad aboard. 1972: Don Cameron became the first person to pilot a hot air balloon across the Alps. 1991: A hard-line coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev collapsed in the face of a popular uprising led by Russian federation President Boris Yeltsin. 1993: Contact was lost with the Mars Observer spacecraft. 1996: Netscape browser 3.0 was released. 2024: The next total solar eclipse (April 8) will be visible from North America, and the path of totality will pass through my yard!

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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.