Day in Engineering History Archive - August 25

August 25

Today is 007 Day (Sean Connery born). 1609: Galileo demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. 1814: The British continue burning Washington, D.C., but the Patent Office was saved by the British Superintendent of Patents, Dr. William Thornton. 1819: James Watt, inventor of the steam engine and after whom the unit of power is named, died. 1830: The first locomotive in the U.S. to carry passengers, the "Tom Thumb," carried 26 passengers 13 miles over the tracks of the B&O Railroad. 1867: Michael Faraday, who discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction (Faraday's Law), died. 1880: Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel model train company, was born. 1908: Antoine Becquerel, who discovered radiation (Becquerel rays) from uranium salts, died. 1910: Arnold Neustadter, inventor of the Rolodex (rolling index), was born. 1921: Peter Hewitt, inventor of the mercury vapor lamp, died. 1944: Paris was liberated from Nazi occupation (Freedom Tuesday). 1956: George Pierce, inventor of the quartz crystal based Peirce oscillator, died. 1965: The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained (SITU) was founded. 1981: Voyager 2 flew past Saturn and provided hundreds of close-up images. 1991: Linus Torvalds posted a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup stating his intention to create what would become the Linux operating system. 1992: Hurricane Andrew, the U.S.'s 2nd most destructive hurricane (Katrina #1) thrashed south Florida and the Louisiana coast.

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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.