Day in Engineering History Archive February 16

February 16

1843: Henry Leland, founder of Cadillac Motors, was born. 1880: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) was founded during a meeting in NYC in the office of American Machinist. 1923: The sealed doorway to the sepulchral chamber of King Tutankhamen's (Tut) tomb was opened. 1937: Wallace Carothers received a patent for nylon. 1946: The four-seat Sikorsky S51, single rotor helicopter flew as Igor Sikorsky's first commercially licensed helicopter. 1949: International Rectifier shipped the first commercial semiconductor devices. 1968: Senator Rankin Fite completed the first 9-1-1 call made in the United States in Haleyville. 1978: The first computer bulletin board system (BBS) went online in Chicago, IL. 1996: Microwave pioneer Ernst Weber died.

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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.