Day in Engineering History Archive - May 6

May 6

1840: Adhesive postage stamps were first sold in Great Britain. 1916: The first U.S. radio telephone ship-to-shore conversation was made between the Navy Department and AT&T. 1929: Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur, who was the co-developer of magnetic resonance imaging, was born. 1937: The Hindenburg caught fire while docking at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station, NJ, killing 36 of the 97 people onboard. 1941: Bob Hope gave his first USO show at California's March Field. 1954: Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old British medical student, became the first man to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. 1955: West Germany was admitted into NATO. 1960: Republican President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960. 1962: The first nuclear warhead fired from a Polaris submarine was launched. 1963: Theodore von Kármán, who designed the Bell X-1 supersonic airplane, died. 1994: The Queen and France's President Mitterrand formally open the Channel Tunnel during two elaborate ceremonies in France and Britain.

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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.