Day in Engineering History Archive - May 3

May 3

1695: Henri Pitot, discoverer of the pitot tube used for airspeed measurements, was born. 1923: Lieutenants Oakley Kelly and John Macready landed their Fokker T-2 at Rockwell Field, San Diego, CA, completing the first non-stop transcontinental flight (26 hours and 50 minutes). 1944: U.S. wartime rationing of most grades of meats ended. 1945: Allies arrested German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg. 1968: Surgeons conducted the UK's first heart transplant. 1973: The Sears Tower became the world's tallest building. 1999: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 11,000 for the first time. 2000: Datapoint, the company that commissioned the Intel 8008 microprocessor, declared bankruptcy. 2003: When dawn broke, the rocky visage of New Hampshire's famous Old Man of the Mountain was gone, having crumbled and fallen overnight. 2007: Astronaut Wally Schirra, the only man to fly in Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spaceships, 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.