Day in Engineering History Archive - March 12

March 12

1824 German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, who formulated Kirchhoff's Laws of current and voltage in closed circuits, was born. 1831: Auto maker Clement Studebaker, the world's largest producer of horse-drawn vehicles, was born. 1894: Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time. 1914: George Westinghouse, founder of Westinghouse Electric Company and inventor of railway braking systems, died. 1923: Astronaut Wally Schirra, the only man to fly in Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spaceships, was born. 1925: Japanese Nobel laureate Leo Esaki, who pioneered work on electrons tunneling in solids, was born. 1929: G.L. Pierce received a patent for the basketball. 1942: Nobel laureate Sir William Bragg, after whom Bragg's Law of diffraction is named, died. 1951: Dennis the Menace first appeared in the funny pages.

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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.