Day in Engineering History Archive - December 23

December 23

1790: French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion, who first deciphered the Rosetta Stone, unlocking the language of ancient Egypt, was born. 1823: The poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement C. Moore ("'Twas the Night Before Christmas...") was published. 1870: Thomas Edison was issued a patent for an "Improvement in Magneto Electric Machines." 1880: Thomas Edison incorporated the Edison Electric Light Company of Europe. 1939: German aircraft designer Anthony Fokker, creator of the Red Baron's famous DR-1 triplane, died. 1973: Gerard Kuiper, who discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of Neptune, and after whom the Kuiper Belt is named, died. 1975: The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 was signed into law. 1986: The experimental airplane Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, completed the first non-stop, around-the-world flight without refueling as it landed safely at Edwards AFB in CA.

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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.