Day in Engineering History Archive - March 18

March 18

1833: Lucy Hobbs Taylor, the first woman to earn a dental degree in America, was born. 1858: Rudolf Diesel, German thermal engineer who invented the internal-combustion engine that bears his name, was born. 1871: Augustus De Morgan, who formulated De Morgan's laws for Boolean algebra, died. 1899: Saturn's moon, Phoebe, was discovered by William Pickering. 1909: Einar Dessau of Denmark used a shortwave transmitter to converse with a government radio post about six miles away in what's believed to have been the first broadcast by a ''ham'' operator. 1965: The first space walk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left his Voskhod 2 capsule and remained outside the spacecraft for 20 minutes, secured by a tether. 1974: Oil-producing Arab countries agreed to lift their 5-month embargo on petroleum sales to the U.S., during which gasoline prices soared 300%. 1987: The discovery of "high-temperature" superconductivity was announced at an American Physical Society in New York City. 1998: Hideo Shima, Japanese designer of the world's first "bullet train," died. 2014: Marlan Bourns, founder of Bourns and inventor of the Trimpot trimming potentiometer, 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.