Day in Engineering History Archive - August 30

August 30

1844: Francis Baily, who studied the solar eclipse phenomenon of Baily's Beads, died. 1871: British Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, who discovered alpha (α) and beta (β) particles, as well as gamma (γ) radiation, was born. 1907: John Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC computer, was born. 1914: The first bombing of Paris by a German airplane occurred. 1928: Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien, who formulated the black body radiation displacement law, died. 1929: General Electric delivered to Colonel E.H. Green the first commercial hybrid auto that used both gasoline and electric power. 1940: Sir J.J. Thomson, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on cathode rays, died. 1963: The Hot Line communications link between the White House and the Kremlin became operational. 1983: Guion Bluford Jr. became the first black American astronaut to travel in space, flying aboard the shuttle Challenger. 1985: My son, Philip, was born - Happy Birthday! 1993: "The Late Show with David Letterman" premiered on CBS. 1994: The largest U.S. defense contractor was created when the Lockheed and Martin Marietta corporations agreed to a merger. 2004: Astronomer Fred Whipple, who proposed the "dirty snowball" model for comets, 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.