Day in Engineering History Archive - March 14

March 14

The "ultimate" pi day (Π = 3.141592653589...) occurred on March 14th, 1592, at 6:53 AM and 58 seconds. When written in American-style date format, this is 3/14/1592 6:53.58. 1794: Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. 1879: Nobel laureate Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. 1900: Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act (Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971). 1932: George Eastman, of Eastman-Kodak fame, died. 1950: The FBI's "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" program began. 1960: The British radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire set a new space record by making contact with the American Pioneer V spacecraft at a distance of 407,000 miles. 1971: The Rolling Stones left England for France to escape taxes. 1992: The Soviet newspaper "Pravda" suspended publication. 1994: Linux kernel version 1.0.0 was released. 2004: Daniel Tammet set the European record for memorizing and recounting pi to 22,514 digits in just over five hours. 2018: British theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking 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.