Day in Engineering History Archive - May 17

May 17

1792: The New York Stock Exchange was founded at 70 Wall Street by 24 brokers. 1836: Sir Joseph Lockyer, who co-discovered the element helium in the sun's spectrum, was born. 1865: The first International Telegraph Convention was signed in Paris by the 20 founding member, giving birth to the International Telegraph Union ("ITU" - later the International Telecommunication Union), Morse code in postage stamp is ••  -  ••- = ITU. 1868: Automobile maker Horace Dodge was born. 1886: American agriculturist and engineer John Deere died. 1890: Comic Cuts, the first British weekly comic paper, was published. 1943: The famous Dambusters raid on key German dams occurred. 1955: The highly classified patent for the first atomic pile was issued 11 years after application. 1978: Philips announced the coming of the compact disc (CD). 1997: The first flight of the NASA/Boeing X-36 tailless fighter occurred.

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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.