Day in Engineering History Archive - August 7

August 7

Today is National Lighthouse Day. 1802: Germain Hess, early thermochemistry researcher who developed Hess's law of constant heat summation, was born. 1886: Alan Hazeltine, inventor of the "neutrodyne" receiver that eliminated squeaks and howls of early radio receivers, was born. 1888: Theophilus Van Kannel received a patent for the revolving door. 1919: Captain Ernest Hoy became the first pilot to fly over the Canadian Rockies. 1927: The Peace Bridge between the U.S. & Canada was dedicated. 1928: The U.S. Treasury Department issued a new bill that was one third smaller than the previous bills. 1929: The German airship Graf Zeppelin began an around-the-world flight. 1942: U.S. Marines launched America's first offensive in World War II, landing on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal. 1959: Explorer 6 transmitted the first TV photo of Earth from space. 1994: The first telephone link was made between Israel and Jordan. 1996: NASA announced that life may have existed on Mars. 1996: More than six million America Online (AOL) customers worldwide were left stranded when the system crashed for almost 19 hours. 1998: U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania were bombed killing 224 people - Osama bin Laden was later indicted for the attacks.

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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.