Day in Engineering History Archive - December 22

December 22

1828: William Wollaston, discoverer of palladium and rhodium, died. 1867: Jean-Victor Poncelet, who formulated the Continuity Principle (which includes the principle of duality and the method of reciprocation), died. 1877: Swiss chemist Raoul Pictet announced his liquefaction of oxygen. 1882: The first string of Christmas Tree lights was created by Thomas Edison's associate, Edward H. Johnson. 1884: St. Elmo Brady, the first black man to earn a PhD in chemistry, was born. 1894: The United States Golf Association was formed in New York City. 1937: The Lincoln Tunnel in New York opened to traffic. 1964: The SR-71 Blackbird aircraft completed its maiden flight. 1968: The first U.S. live telecast from a manned spacecraft in outer space was transmitted from Apollo 8. 1989: Berlin's famous Brandenburg Gate re-opened for the first time in nearly three decades. 2001: Idiot Richard Reid (Rat Boy) attempted to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes.

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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.