Day in Engineering History Archive - May 21

May 21

1792: Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, who discovered the circulation effect that bears his name, was born. 1878: Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss was born. 1916: Daylight Saving Time was introduced in Britain as a war-time measure to save fuel. 1927: Charles Lindbergh completed his 33-1/2 hour solo, non-stop flight from New York to Paris. 1932: Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, from Newfoundland to Ireland. 1956: The U.S. exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean over Bikini Atoll. 1927: Dudley Allen Buck, inventor of the cryotron switch and ferroelectric RAM, died. 1959: Radar pioneer and head of the National Security Agency Scientific Advisory Board panel on Electronics Louis Nicot Ridenour, died. 1965: English aircraft designer Sir Geoffrey De Havilland died. 1980: "Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back," was released.

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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.