Day in Engineering History Archive - March 23

March 23

1749: French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace born. 1775: American revolutionary Patrick Henry declared, "...give me liberty, or give me death!" 1857: The world's first passenger safety elevator, by Elisha Otis, went into service in a store in New York City. 1873: Richard Proctor, who first proposed that lunar craters are caused by meteors rather than volcanic actions, was born. 1903: The Wright brothers obtained an airplane patent. 1909: British Lt. Shackleton found the magnetic South Pole. 1912: German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun was born. 1983: President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars"). 1989: Electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman announced that they had created nuclear ("cold") fusion in a test tube at room temperature. 2001: The Russian space station, Mir, burned up in Earth's atmosphere after far out-living its designed lifespan. 2007: Set theory mathematician Paul Cohen 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.