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   December 21
1807:
Joseph
Fourier's memoir "On the Propagation of Heat in Solid Bodies," was read to the
Paris Institute, and contained what we now call Fourier series, which he had worked
upon since around 1804. 1878:
Jan Łukasiewicz,
who invented Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), was born. 1898: Scientists Pierre and
Marie Curie discovered the radioactive
element radium.
1929: My father,
"Arthur Blattenberger, was born. 1937: Founding father of the
ARPANET Lawrence Roberts was born. 1968:
Apollo 8, the
first manned voyage to the moon, was launched. 1988: A Libyan terrorist's bomb exploded
aboard Pan
Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747, over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. 1990:
American aeronautical engineer
Kelly
Johnson, who founded the Lockheed
Skunk Works,
died. 2012: The Long Count of the
Mayan calendar cycled.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in my
It Happened When? Factoid 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.
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