Day in Engineering History Archive - July 8

July 8

1695: Christiaan Huygens, discoverer of the wave theory of light and of Saturn's moon Titan, died. 1831: John Pemberton, the pharmacist who invented Coca-Cola, was born. 1838: Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, of airship fame, was born. 1856: Charles Barnes patented a crank operated machine gun. 1873: Anna Nichols became the first woman patent examiner. 1889: The Wall Street Journal was first published. 1932: At the low point of The Great Depression, the DJIA hit 41.22. 1937: England began its 999 emergency phone system. 1947: The Roswell Daily Record headline read, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region." 1958: The first gold record album was presented by the RIAA for the soundtrack "Oklahoma!" 1969: The withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam began. 1994: Kim Il Sung, North Korea's communist leader since 1948, died at age 82, and was succeeded by the maniacal little pot-bellied Kim Jung Il. 1999: Astronaut Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., the third man to walk on the moon, died in a motorcycle accident.

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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.