Day in Engineering History Archive - October 19

October 19

1875: English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, who invented the resistive bridge circuit that eventually bore his name, died. 1914: The U.S. Post Office established the first fleet of government-owned autos for mail delivery to end rampant fraud by private contractors. 1937: British Nobel Prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford, who discovered alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma radiation, died. 1941: The first wind turbine to generate energy for an alternating current central power system was placed in service in Grandpa's Knob, VT. 1953: The first jet transcontinental nonstop scheduled service began. 1987: Black Monday - the stock market crashed as the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 508 points, or 22.6% in value. 1972: American engineer Philip Drinker, who invented the iron lung, died. 1973: A U.S. Federal Judge signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. 2006: The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 12,000 for the first time. 2006: Duke University researchers announced the first demonstration of a working invisibility cloak.

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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.