Day in Engineering History Archive - December 19

December 19

1852: Nobel physicist Albert Michelson, who first accurately measured the speed of light, was born. 1915: Alois Alzheimer, who discovered the disease named after him, died. 1930: Amelia Earhart became the first autogyro pilot to carry a passenger - in the PCA-2 Pitcairn Autogyro. 1936: Juan de la Ciervra, inventor of the autogiro, died in an airplane accident. 1953: Robert Millikan of charged oil drop experiment fame and Nobel laureate, died. 1958: The first known radio broadcast from outer space was made from a pre-recorded tape aboard the SCORE satellite for President Eisenhower's Christmas message. 1961: The first Canada-to-Europe call was place via the CANTAT-1 transatlantic cable. 1972: Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific, winding up the Apollo program of manned lunar landings. 1974: The Altair 8800 microcomputer was first put on sale as a do-it-yourself computer kit, and cost $397. 1982: Frederick Emmons, considered along with Shockley, to be the founder of Silicon Valley, died. 1984: Great Britain agreed to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1997. 1997: Masaru Ibuka, who founded the company that became Sony Corporation, 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.