Day in Engineering History Archive - January 11

January 11

1672: Isaac Newton was elected to the Royal Society. 1787: The first two moons of Uranus, Titania & Oberon, were discovered by William Herschel, six years after he had discovered the planet itself. 1872: George Pierce, inventor of the quartz crystal based Pierce oscillator, was born. 1922: Insulin was first used to treat diabetes. 1923: Tom Johnson, founder of the Celestron telescope company, was born. 1935: American aviator Amelia Earhart began a trip from Honolulu to Oakland, CA, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean. 1941: John (Jack) Gifford, a founder of Maxim Integrated Products and co-founder of Advanced Micro Devices, was born. 1954: George Cowling became the BBC's first television weatherman. 1991: Nobel physicist Carl Anderson, co-founder of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter, died. 2000: The first leg of the China-US Cable Network, the first undersea fiber optic cable network to transfer voice, data, and video traffic directly between the U.S. and China, went into service. 2009: John (Jack) Gifford, a founder of Maxim Integrated Products and co-founder of Advanced Micro Devices, 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.