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 March 13
 1773:
Joseph
Priestley, discoverer elemental oxygen, ammonia, hydrochloric acid gas, carbon
monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and oxides of nitrogen, was born. 1781: The planet
Uranus was discovered
by Sir William Herschel. 1842:
Henry Shrapnel,
inventor of the type of mortar that bears his name, died. 1855:
Percival Lowell,
the American astronomer who helped discover Pluto and believed that there was life
on Mars, was born. 1933: Astronomer
Robert
Innes, who discovered
Proxima Centauri,
the closest star to our sun, died. 1937:
Elihu Thomson,
electrical engineer and inventor whose discoveries in the field of alternating current
led to the development of successful alternating current motors, died. 1886:
Albert
Stevens, who took the first photograph of Earth showing its curvature, was born.
1989: A series of solar flares caused a violent magnetic storm that brought power
outages over large regions of Canada. 1992: The FCC ruled companies can own 30 AM
and 30 FM stations. 998: Astronomers debunked a warning that a mile-wide
asteroid might collide with
Earth on 10/26/2028, saying the calculations were off by 600,000 miles.1998: German
engineer Hans
von Ohain, who developed the first operational jet engine (HeS3b used in the
Heinkel He 178), died. 2012:
Tom
Johnson, founder of the Celestron telescope company, died.
Note: These
historical tidbits (see daily
list) have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in my
It Happened When? Factoid 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.
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