September 18
1752: French mathematician
Adrien-Marie Legendre,
who introduced the Legendre Polynomials, was born. 1783:
Leonhard Euler, very
familiar to all engineering students and renowned for his photographic memory, died. 1819:
Jean Foucault, inventor
of the
Foucault pendulum, was born. 1830: B&O locomotive
Tom Thumb, the first locomotive built in America, lost
a 14-km race to a horse due to a boiler leak. 1851: The first edition of "The New York Times" was published. 1883: The first course in electrical
engineering in a college was established by the College of Engineering,
Cornell
University. 1907:
Edwin McMillan, who discovered
neptunium and
plutonium, was born. 1927: The
Columbia Phonograph Company (later the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS)
made its debut with a basic network of 16 radio stations. 1947: The
U.S. Air Force was established as a separate military branch by the National
Security Act. 1955 : Ford produced its 2,000,000th
V-8 engine. 1955: The "Ed Sullivan Show" began on CBS-TV, after having run as "The Toast of the
Town" since 1948. 1973: President
Jimmy
Carter filed a hand-written report on a UFO sighting. 1980: Cuban cosmonaut
Arnaldo Tamayo-Mendéz
became the first Latin American sent into space - onboard Soyuz 38.
| 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.
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