Day in Engineering History Archive - March 1

March 1

1611: John Pell, who introduced the division sign (the obelus, ÷) to England, was born. 1862: Peter Barlow, who invented the Barlow lens that is commonly used to increase optical magnification, died. 1896: Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity when he developed the photographic plate he left in a desk drawer and found it had fogged with the image of the uranium compound crystals resting on it. 1932: The infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, N.J. 1954: The hydrogen bomb, code-named Castle Bravo, was exploded in a test over the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. 1966: The Soviet unmanned spacecraft Venus 3 crashed (purposely) on Venus. 1990: The controversial Seabrook, NH, nuclear power plant won federal permission to go on line after two decades of protests and legal struggles. 1991: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land Camera, died. 2006: Jordanhill Railway Station became the 1 millionth article on the English Wikipedia.

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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.