Day in Engineering History Archive - July 11

July 11

1857: Sir Joseph Larmor, the first to calculate the rate at which energy is radiated by an accelerated electron, and the first to explain the splitting of spectrum lines by a magnetic field, was born. 1902: Samuel Goudsmit, who along with George Uhlenbeck, conceived of the concept of electron spin, was born. 1910: Dr. John Stapp, who pioneered research in high acceleration effects on the human body, was born. 1927: Theodore Maiman, inventor of the first operational laser, was born. 1934: The first appointments to the newly created Federal Communications Commission were made. 1955: The U.S. Air Force Academy was dedicated in Colorado Springs, CO, at Lowry Air Base. 1955: Congress authorizes all U.S. currency to say "In God We Trust." 1962: The first worldwide TV transmission occurred when the Telstar communications satellite picked up broadcast signals from France and bounced them down to an antenna in Maine, delivering the first live television picture from Europe to America. 1979: The abandoned U.S. space station Skylab returned to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showered debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.

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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.