Day in Engineering History Archive - August 8

August 8

1576: Construction began on the Uraniborg Observatory, Hveen Island, Denmark. 1854: Metal bullet "Volcanic" cartridges were patented by Smith & Wesson. 1876: Thomas Edison received a patent for his mimeograph. 1901: Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, and after whom the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was named, was born. 1902: English physicist Paul Dirac, who shared a Nobel Prize with Erwin Schrödinger, and after whom the Dirac delta function is named, was born. 1911: Patent #1,000,000 was issued to Francis Holton for a vehicle tire. 1940: The German Luftwaffe began a series of daylight air raids on Great Britain, aka the Battle of Britain. 1945: The Soviet Union declared war against Japan during WWII. 1963: The "Great Train Robbery" took place in Britain, where a gang of 15 thieves stole 2.6 million pounds in bank notes. 1979: The temperature hit a high of 88°F on 8/8/88 in NY City. 1991: British countryman John McCarthy was set free after being held captive in Lebanon by Islamic Jihad for over five years. 1991: The Warszawa Radio mast, the tallest structure in the world, collapsed during maintenance. 1996: Sir Frank Whittle, aircraft jet propulsions pioneer, died. 2008: Harry B. Smith, the "father of pulse Doppler radar, 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.