Day in Engineering History Archive - November 19

November 19

1863: President Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in PA. 1901: Granville Woods issued a patent for a third rail to operate electrified railways (hence the term indicating a politically charged topic). 1916: India prime minister Indira Gandhi was born. 1922: Englishman Stanley Runcorn, discoverer of earth's magnetic core reversals, was born. 1956: American astronaut Eileen Collins, the first female Space Shuttle pilot, was born. 1959: Ford Motor Company announced it was halting production of the unpopular Edsel. 1969: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean made man's second landing on the moon. 1996: The Clinton administration and Republican congressional leaders reached a deal to end a six-day budget standoff and resulting partial government shutdown (the "Monica thing" occurred during this shutdown). 1998: Japanese-American Ted Fujita, who discovered the phenomenon of microbursts, died. 1999: The People's Republic of China launches its first Shenzhou spacecraft.

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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.