Day in Engineering History Archive - October 10

October 10

1731: Henry Cavendish, discoverer of hydrogen and nitrogen, was born. 1845: The U.S. Naval Academy opened in Annapolis, MD (my hometown). 1846: Neptune's moon, Triton, was discovered by William Lassell. 1892: Earle Dickson, inventor of the Band-aid, was born. 1896: Lester Germer, who along with Clinton Davisson, conducted an experiment that first demonstrated the wave properties of the electron, was born. 1911: Henry Ford received a patent for his automobile transmission. 1923: The first American-built rigid dirigible was christened in Lakehurst, N.J. as Shenandoah (daughter of the stars) - it used helium for buoyancy. 1933: Waldo Semon was awarded a patent for a method of making plasticized PVC, now known simply as vinyl. 1970: Separatist gunmen kidnapped the labour and immigration minister of Quebec. 1980: The Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope network in NM, was dedicated. 1986: A tiny asteroid, named 3753 Cruithne, was found orbiting the Earth. 1995: World chess champion Garry Kasparov won a month-long championship match against Viswanathan Anand.

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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.