Day in Engineering History Archive - March 4

March 4

1832: French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion, who first deciphered the Rosetta Stone, unlocking the language of ancient Egypt, died. 1859 (O.S.): Aleksandr Popov, considered in Russia to be the inventor of radio, was born. 1881: Richard Tolman, who demonstrated electrons to be charge-carrying particles in flow of electricity in metals, was born. 1822: Jules Lissajous, the French mathematician after whom Lissajous figures are named, was born. 1890: The Forth Railway Bridge was opened, spanning the Forth river between Edinburgh and Dundee, Scotland. 1902: The American Automobile Association (AAA) was founded in Chicago. 1915: William Willett, who invented the concept of Daylight Saving Time, died. 1917: Republican Jeanette Rankin of Montana took her seat as the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. 1930: Ex-President Calvin Coolidge dedicated the Coolidge Dam on Gila River in AZ. 1962: The first nuclear power plant in Antarctica began operating at McMurdo Sound. 1976: Walter Schottky, of diode fame, died. 1977: The first Freon-cooled Cray-1, 133 megaFLOPS supercomputer, was shipped to Los Alamos Laboratories, NM (<20 years later, Pentium IIs beat that benchmark). 1997: President Bill Clinton barred spending federal money on human cloning due to, "troubling prospects." 2006: The final attempt to communicate with Pioneer 10 was made.

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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.