Day in Engineering History Archive - August 4

August 4

1693: Champagne was invented by Dom Perignon. 1790: The U. S. Coast Guard was established. 1893: Herman A. Affel, co-inventor of coaxial cable, was born. 1921: The first radio broadcast of a tennis match occurred in Pittsburgh, PA. 1900: Etienne Lenoir, who developed the first commercially successful internal combustion engine, died. 1922: Every telephone in the U.S. and Canada went dead as Bell System shut down all its switchboards and switching stations for 1 minute, from from 6:25 to 6:26 PM, in memory of Alexander Graham Bell, who died two days earlier. 1954: Britain's first supersonic fighter plane, the P-1 English Electric Lightning, made its maiden flight. 1954 : The uranium rush began in Saskatchewan, Canada. 1971: The U.S. launched the first satellite (subsatellite) into lunar orbit from manned spacecraft as part of the Apollo 15 mission. 1977: U.S. Department of Energy was created. 1987: The FCC voted 4-0 to rescind the [un]Fairness Doctrine for broadcasters. 1998: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) plunged 299.43 points, the 3rd-biggest point drop up to that time.

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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.