Day in Engineering History Archive - January 1

January 1

0045 BC: The Julian calendar went into effect. 1748: Johann Bernoulli, discoverer of exponential calculus, died. 1817: German physicist Martin Klaproth, who discovered uranium, zirconium, and cerium, died. 1818: Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was first published. 1863: Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring an end to slavery. 1890: The Tournament of Roses parade was first held in Pasadena, CA. 1894: Satyendra Bose, of the Bose-Einstein condensates fame, was born. 1894: German physicist Heinrich (Rudolf) Hertz, who was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves, died. 1897: Albert Taylor, who regarded as "the father of navy radar," was born. 1902: The first radio broadcast demonstration in U.S. was given by N. B. Stubblefield. 1908: The ball signifying the New Year landed for the first time at Times Square in New York City, having been dropped 60 seconds earlier in 1907 (converted to an LED array for 2006). 1939: The Hewlett Packard (HP) company was founded. 1972: Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was adopted worldwide. 1992: Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, credited with coining the term "bug" in computers, died. 2000: Greenwich Electronic Time (GeT) initiated in UK as an international standard for all electronic commerce. 2024: Copyright for Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy versions of Mickey Mouse expired.

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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.