Day in Engineering History Archive - May 30

May 30

1868: Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) was observed for the first time in the U.S. 1883: A rumor that the recently opened Brooklyn Bridge was in danger of collapsing triggered a stampede that led to the trampling deaths of 12 people. 1911: The first Indy 500 race was run. 1912: Wilbur Wright, of airplane fame, died. 1925: John Cocke, who invented the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), was born. 1934: Russian Alexey Leonov, the first man to walk in space, was born. 1959: The first experimental hovercraft, the SR.N1 "flew" at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. 1987: North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), designed to store full motion video and CD-Audio tracks. 1989: Student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing erected a 33-foot statue they called the ''Goddess of Democracy'' -- they would later be mowed down by Red Army tanks. 1994: Baron Marcel Bich, who built his business empire by creating throwaway Bic pens, razors and lighters, died. 2003: The final flight of the Air France Concorde SST took place.

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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.