Day in Engineering History Archive - August 24

August 24

1635: The first recorded hurricane in America occurred at Plymouth Colony. 1814: British forces captured Washington, D.C., and burned down many landmarks including the Capitol and the White House. 1832: Sadi Carnot, who investigated the efficiencies of steam engines and for whom the Carnot Cycle is named, died. 1888: Rudolf Clausius, who developed the 2nd law of thermodynamics, died. 1891: Thomas Edison patented his motion picture camera. 1909: The first concrete was poured for the Panama Canal. 1932: Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly non-stop across the United States. 1956: A U.S. Army H-21 helicopter became the first rotary-winged aircraft to fly non-stop across the United States. 1966: The USSR launched the Luna 11, which orbited the Moon while for the first time keeping in constant radio contact with earth. 1968: France exploded a hydrogen bomb over a South Pacific testing ground and became the world's 5th thermonuclear power. 1992: China and South Korea established diplomatic ties. 1995: Windows 95 debuted - I remember standing outside Office Depot waiting for the doors to open. 1997: Louis Essen, who invented the quartz crystal ring clock and the first practical atomic clock, 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.