Day in Engineering History Archive February 12

February 12

1791: American inventor Peter Cooper, who invented the first steam locomotive, named "Tom Thumb," was born. 1804: Heinrich Lenz, Russian physicist who framed Lenz's Law to describe the direction of flow of electric current generated by a wire moving through a magnetic field, was born. 1935: Robert Van de Graaff was issued a patent for his Electrostatic Generator design which could generate direct-current voltages higher than the 700kV. 1965: John Hammond, Jr., developer of radio remote control, died. 1973: The first four metric road signs in the U.S. were erected to post metric distance along Interstate 71 in OH. 1998: A 250-car pile-up occurred in Italy, due to fog, causing 4 deaths and 50 injuries. 2000: Peanuts creator Charles Schulz died in his sleep at his home. 2001: NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touchdown on 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid. 2004: Mattel announced the split-up of Barbie and Ken.

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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.