Day in Engineering History Archive - November 15

November 15

1630: German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who formulated the three major laws of planetary motion, died. 1806: Explorer Zebulon Pike sighted the mountaintop in Colorado now known as "Pikes Peak." 1887: German scientist Carl Gassner was issued a patent for the first "galvanic battery," or  dry cell, which used zinc as its primary ingredient. 1819: Scottish chemist Daniel Rutherford, who discovered nitrogen, died. 1904: Patent #775,134 was granted to King Gillette for the safety razor. 1965: American engineer Allen Du Mont, who invented the first commercial cathode ray tube, died. 1971: Intel announced its first user-programmable microprocessor, the 4004, in a edition of Electronic News magazine. 1988: The Soviet Union launched its first space shuttle, Buran ("Snowstorm"), unmanned, on its first and only orbital flight. 2000: The Southern Cross broadband cable went into service, connecting Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii and the U.S. west coast over a distance of 30,500 km.

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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.