Day in Engineering History Archive - December 4

December 4

1791: Britain's Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in world, was first published. 1798: Italian physician Luigi Galvani, after whom the word "galvanic" is named, died. 1850: Englishman William Sturgeon, who devised the first electromagnet capable of supporting more than its own weight, died. 1913: Robert Alder, inventor of the TV remote control, was born. 1923: WEAF radio (660 AM, NY) began broadcasting Eveready Hour. 1965: NASA launched Gemini 7 with Air Force Lt. Colonel Frank Borman and Navy Commander James A. Lovell aboard. 1973: Pioneer 11 passed within 34,000 km of Jupiter. 1978: Samuel Goudsmit, who along with George Uhlenbeck, conceived of the concept of electron spin, died. 1991: Pan American World Airways ceased operations. 1994: Netscape and Sun Microsystems announced plans to develop JavaScript. 1998: Unity, the second module of the International Space Station, was launched.

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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.