Day in Engineering History Archive February 26

February 26

1829: Blue jeans inventor Levi Strauss was born. 1866: American industrialist Herbert Dow, founder of Dow Chemical Company, was born. 1852: American physician John Kellogg, who invented the corn flake and founded a company bearing his name, was born. 1896: Henri Becquerel unintentionally discovered radioactivity from uranium caused by the element having sat upon a photographic plate in his desk drawer. 1903: Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling machine gun, died. 1933: A ground-breaking ceremony was held at Crissy Field for the Golden Gate Bridge. 1935: Radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) was first demonstrated by Sir Robert Watson-Watt of England. 1966: The first Saturn 1B rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, on an unmanned suborbital test flight. 1970: National Public Radio (NPR) was founded. 1991: Iraqi troops fled Kuwait City. 1993: Muslim terrorists exploded a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. 2023: Morris Tanenbaum, inventor of the silicon microchip, 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.