Day in Engineering History Archive - October 14

October 14

Today is World Standards Day for technology. 1884: Transparent paper-strip photographic film was patented by George Eastman. 1908: George Brown, who developed the turnstile TV antenna, and the vestigial sideband filter, was born. 1923: Xilinx co-founder Bernard Vonderschmitt was born. 1927: Oil was discovered at Kirkuk in Iraq. 1947: Chuck Yeager became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in the rocket powered Bell X-1 over Murac Dry Lake, CA. 1960: The 4th legal definition of the meter was made to be 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the orange-red light radiation of the krypton-86 atom (transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5). 1984: Sir Martin Ryle, who developed the first synthetic aperture radio telescope systems, died. 1996: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 6,000 for the first time. 1997: British Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green broke the land-speed record by driving a jet-powered car faster than the speed of sound. 2001: NASA's Galileo spacecraft passed within 112 miles of Jupiter's moon Io. 2004: The FCC adopted rules for broadband over power lines (BPL). 2010: Benoit Mandelbrot, popularize of fractal geometry, died.

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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.