Day in Engineering History Archive - September 18

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.

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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.