Day in Engineering History Archive - December 14

December 14

1546: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was born. 1896: General James "Jimmy" Doolittle, famous for, amongst other things, his raid on Tokyo in 1942, was born. 1902: Laying down the first cable across the Pacific Ocean began as the British Cable Ship Silvertown left San Francisco, California, headed for Hawaii. 1922: Nobel Prize winning Russian physicist Nikolay Basov, who developed the maser, was born. 1943: American physician John Kellogg, who invented the corn flake and founded a company bearing his name, died. 1962: U.S. space probe Mariner 2 transmitted data from Venus, when it came within 22,000 miles of Venus and measured the temperature and other characteristics of the planet. 1986: Voyager, the experimental aircraft piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world. 1999: Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, announced his retirement. 2004: The Millau viaduct, the highest bridge in the world, spanning the valley of the River Tarn near Millau, France, was opened for traffic. 2011: Norman Krim, designer of Raytheon's CK722 germanium PNP transistor, 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.