Day in Engineering History Archive - December 7

December 7

Today is Pearl Harbor Day. "December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy." - President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 1905: Gerard Kuiper, who discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of Neptune, and after whom the Kuiper Belt is named, was born. 1909: Leo Baekeland was awarded a patent for Bakelite, which was the forerunner to today's synthetic plastics. 1934: Wiley Post was credited with discovering the jet stream when he flew into the stratosphere over Bartlesville, OK. On December 7th, 1941, Japanese forces attacked American and British territories and possessions in the Pacific, including the home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, thus launching America into World War II. Today, America and Japan are the staunchest of allies. 1960: Walter Noddack, discoverer of the element rhenium (Re, 75), died. 1970: Rube Goldberg, engineer famous for his drawings of Mouse Trap-like contraptions, died. 1972: The Apollo 17 crew blasted off on the last manned mission to the moon, and Eugene Cernan became the last human to step foot on the moon. 1977: Peter Goldmark, who developed the first color commercial television system as well as the 33-1/3 LP phonograph record, died. 1993: German physicist Wolfgang Paul, who developed the Paul trap for holding electrons long enough to study them, died. 1999: U.S. patent #6,000,000 was issued for a method of synchronizing files on two different computers. 2003: Japan abandoned its first Martian probe after a five year journey.

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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.