Day in Engineering History Archive - October 17

October 17

1887: German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, who formulated Kirchhoff's Laws of current and voltage in closed circuits, died. 1919: The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was founded. 1933: Albert Einstein arrived in the United States as a refugee from Nazi Germany. 1956: Britain's first nuclear power station opened in Calder Hall. 1956: American Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, was born. 1961: Police killed 210 Algerians in France during the "Battle of Paris." 1963: French mathematician Jacques-Salomon Hadamard, who proved the prime number theorem, died. 1973: 5-month oil embargo by Arab states against U.S. and Netherlands began. 1989: A powerful earthquake hit San Francisco, damaging the Bay Bridge. 1915: Nicholas Constantine Metropolis, designer of the MANIAC computer used to develop the atom bomb, died. 2006: The Census Clock at the Department of Commerce turned over 300,000,000. 2012: NiMH Battery Inventor Stanford Ovshinsky 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.