Day in Engineering History Archive February 29

February 29

This is a Leap Year (also known as an intercalary year or bissextile year) if it is evenly divisible by 4, and/or is a Century Leap Year (century evenly divisible by 400). 1840: John Philip Holland, "father of the modern submarine," was born. 1860: Herman Hollerith, inventor of the tabulating machine for punched cards, was born. 1880: The St. Gotthard Tunnel was connected, linking Switzerland and Italy.

Note: These historical tidbits (see daily list) 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.