Day in Engineering History Archive - February 5

February 5

1840: Scottish inventor of the pneumatic tire, John Dunlop, was born. 1840: Prolific inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, who developed the Maxim (machine) gun and also was the father of ARRL founder Hiram Percy Maxim, was born. 1850: The first adding machine with keys was patented by Du Bois Parmelee. 1897: The Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of π -- the "Indiana Pi Bill" died in the state Senate (because it was obvious in error). 1901: Edwin Prescott received a patent for his 20 foot diameter loop-the-loop centrifugal railway (roller coaster) at Coney Island. 1915: Robert Hofstadter, Nobel Prize for Physics recipient for measuring the sizes of the neutron and proton in the nuclei of atoms, was born. 1971: Alan Shepard and Edward Mitchell walked on the moon for four hours during the third manned moon expedition, Apollo 14. 1974: U.S. space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up photos of Venus' cloud structure. 1978: One of the worst blizzards in recorded history hit the U.S. northeast.

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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.

| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

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.