Day in Engineering History Archive - December 16

December 16

1907: The first U.S. radio broadcast of a singer featured Eugenia Farrar, as transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard. 1912: The first U.S. postage stamp to depict an airplane was a 20-cent Parcel Post stamp that used a biplane carrying mail. 1944: The Battle of the Bulge began in Belgium, and was the final major German counteroffensive in the war. 1945: Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino) automobile company, died. 1947: The transistor was invented by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley. 1954: Synthetic diamonds were produced at General Electric Research Laboratories. 1979: The first rocket vehicle to break the sound barrier on land reached 739.7 mph on a 3-mile test-strip at Rogers Lake, Edwards Air Force Base, CA. 1997: 700 children in Japan were hospitalized after a televised cartoon triggered a condition called "Nintendo epilepsy.

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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.