Day in Engineering History Archive February 18

February 18

1745: Alessandro Volta, inventor of the storage battery and namesake of the "volt" unit, was born. 1838: Ernst Mach, of speed of sound unit defining fame, was born. 1851: Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, founder of elliptical functions, died. 1871: Harry Brearley, inventor of stainless steel, was born. 1875: Auguste Bartholdi was granted patent for the Statue of Liberty. 1898: Car manufacturer and racing star Enzo Ferrari was born. 1908: Lee de Forest received a patent on his Audion amplification tube. 1885: Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was first published. 1930: The ninth has-been planet of our solar system, Pluto, was discovered. 1957: American astronomer Henry Russell, who showed the relationship between a star's brightness and its spectral type, and co-created the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, died. 1967: The "Father of the Atomic Bomb," Robert Oppenheimer, died. 1977: The space shuttle Enterprise, sitting atop a Boeing 747, went on its maiden "flight" above the Mojave Desert. 1981: American aviation pioneer Jack Northrop died. 2001: Veteran NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Sr., 49, died from injuries suffered in a crash at the Daytona 500.

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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.