Day in Engineering History Archive - September 17

September 17

1787: The U.S. Constitution was completed and signed. 1854: Auto manufacturer David Buick was born. 1901: The first U.S. patent for a mercury vapor lamp issued to Peter Hewitt of NY City. 1911: The first transcontinental airplane flight began, taking Cal Rogers 82 hours to fly from NY City to Pasadena, CA. 1916: Oswald "Mike" Villard Jr., inventor of over-the-horizon radar, was born. 1935: Sir Watson-Watt, the father of radar, applied for a patent for his radar concept. 1953: In New Orleans, LA, Carolyn Anne and Catherine Anne Mouton were the first Siamese twins to be successfully separated by surgery. 1959: The X-15 rocket plane made its first powered flight. 1962: U.S. space officials announced the selection of Neil Armstrong and eight others as new astronauts. 1972: M*A*S*H premiered on CBS TV. 1976: NASA publicly unveiled the space shuttle Enterprise.

| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

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.