Day in Engineering History Archive - December 15

December 15

1791: The first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights (yes, that includes the 2nd), went into effect following ratification by the state of Virginia. 1819: Scottish chemist Daniel Rutherford, who discovered nitrogen, died. 1832: French architect Gustave Eiffel, of tower fame, was born. 1836: The U.S. Patent Office caught fire and burned to the ground. 1851: Charles Duryea, who along with his brother built the first commercially sold automobiles, was born. 1852: Antoine Becquerel, who discovered radiation (Becquerel rays) from uranium salts, was born. 1958: Austrian-Swiss Nobel physicist Wolfgang Pauli, of Exclusion Principal fame, died. 1964: A patent was granted to Kenneth Olsen for a magnetic core memory. 2000: The Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine shut down permanently, 14 years after its catastrophic meltdown. 2001: The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened to the public after a decade-long restoration.

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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.