Day in Engineering History Archive - March 17

March 17

1762: The first St. Patrick's Day parade was held in New York City. 1834: Gottlieb Daimler, German engineer and pioneer automobile manufacturer, was born. 1845: The rubber band was patented by Stephen Perry of London. 1846: Friedrich Bessel, of Bessel function fame, assumed room temperature. 1853: Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, of Doppler effect fame, died. 1905: Albert Einstein published his thesis on the photoelectric effect, "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation and of Light." 1950: Scientists at the University of CA at Berkeley announced a new radioactive element, number 98, which they named "californium" (Cf). 1958: The Vanguard 1, the world's oldest satellite still in orbit, was launched by the U.S. 1967: Snoopy and Charlie Brown of "Peanuts" were on the cover of "LIFE" magazine. 1974: The Arab oil embargo was lifted by OPEC, during which time OPEC members earned more than $100 billion (a nice bit of extra loot for funding terrorism worldwide). 1999: Intel released the Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ Processor. 1999: America Online completed the acquisition of Netscape Communications Corporation. 2007: Fortran creator John Backus died.

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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.