July 16
Today is the Day of Trinity. 1739:
Charles de Cisternay DuFay, discoverer of positive and negative
electricity and repulsion between like charges, died. 1867: Reinforced concrete
was patented by
Joseph Monier of France. 1926: The first underwater color photographs
appeared in National Geographic magazine. 1945: The U.S. detonated the first atomic
bomb in a test at the
Trinity test site in Alamogordo, NM. 1948: The world's first production
turboprop aircraft, the Vickers Viscount, made its maiden flight. 1951: Dan Bricklin,
co-writer of, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet computer program, was born. 1957: Marine Maj.
John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record when he flew a
jet from CA to NY in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds. 1969:
Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, FL, and began the first
manned mission to land on the moon. 1979: Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.
1988: Samuel Ruben, co-founder
of Mallory battery company, died. 1994: The first of 21 fragments of the comet
Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter,
creating a 1200-mile wide fireball 600 miles high. 1997: The Dow Jones Industrial
Average (DJIA) closed above 8,000 for the first time. 1999:
John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and her sister, died when their
plane that Kennedy was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. 2002:
John Cocke, who invented the Reduced Instruction Set Computer
(RISC), died.
| 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.
|