Day in Engineering History Archive - May 27

May 27

1890: A patent was issued for the first jukebox. 1901: The Edison Storage Battery Company was organized. 1909: William Hansen, inventor of the klystron tube, was born. 1919: A U.S. Navy NC-4 flying boat completed the first transatlantic flight. 1937: TheGolden Gate Bridge was opened to the public for foot traffic. 1930: Cellophane transparent adhesive tape was patented by inventor Richard G. Drew, who sold the patent to 3M. 1931: The first U.S. full scale (30 by 60 feet) wind tunnel for testing airplanes was opened in Langley Field Research Center, VA. 1931: Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer became the first humans to venture into the stratosphere when they rode their balloon to an altitude of 51,783 feet. 1941: The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 1961: The first black light was sold. 1988: Ernst Ruska, an electrical engineer who invented the electron microscope, died. 1994: The highest temperature produced in a lab was a plasma temperature of 510 M°C in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor operated at Princeton.

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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.