Day in Engineering History Archive - October 25

October 25

1647: Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, who invented the barometer, died. 1789: Samuel Schwabe, who first documented the roughly 10-year sunspot cycle, died. 1877: American astronomer Henry Russell, who showed the relationship between a star's brightness and its spectral type, and co-created the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, was born. 1888: U.S. explorer Richard Byrd, the first to make a flight over the North Pole, was born. 1890: Floyd Bennett, who piloted the airplane that flew Admiral Byrd, was born. 1910: William Higinbotham, who invented the first video game, "Tennis for Two," was born. 1934: Frank Julian Sprague, prodigious electrical design engineer, died. 1960: The Accutron 214, the world's first electronic wristwatch, went on sale from Bulova. 1962: Belgium's first nuclear powered electrical generation plant went online.

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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.