Day in Engineering History Archive - December 1

December 1

1743: German physicist Martin Klaproth, who discovered uranium, zirconium, and cerium, was born. 1792: Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky, who is credited with developing non-Euclidean geometry, was born. 1935: German astronomer Bernhard Schmidt, who invented the type of reflecting telescope named after him (Schmidt telescope, Schmidt-Cassegrain, etc.), died. 1941: The U.S. Civil Air Patrol was created. 1941: Federico Faggin, inventor of the Z80 microprocessor, was born. 1969: The U.S. government held its first draft lottery since World War II. 1989: Ford acquired Jaguar Cars for $2.5 billion. 1990: British and French workers digging the Channel Tunnel ("Chunnel") under the English Channel finally met in the service tunnel after knocking out a passage large enough to walk through and shake hands, 22.3 km from the U.K. and 15.6 km from France. 1998: Exxon announced an $80B deal to buy Mobil, thus creating Exxon-Mobil, the 3rd largest company on the planet.

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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.