Day in Engineering History Archive February 14

February 14

Today is Valentine's Day. 1876: Alexander Bell filed an application for a patent for the telephone. 1877: American radio pioneer Greenleaf Pickard, inventor of the crystal detector, was born. 1924: International Business Machines (IBM) was born when the Computing- Tabulating- Recording Company formally changed its name. 1943: German mathematician David Hilbert, of Hilbert Transform fame, died. 1946: The world's first programmable electronic digital computer, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was demonstrated at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. 1950: American physicist Karl Jansky, the "Father of Radio Astronomy" who discovered the cosmic background radiation, died. 1961: Lawrencium (Lr, 103) was produced at University of CA, Berkeley. 1989: The first operational satellite of the Global Positioning System (Block II) was placed into orbit around Earth. 2006: U.S. patent #7,000,000 was awarded for Polysaccharide Fibers.

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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.