Day in Engineering History Archive - September 30

September 30

1846: Ether was used as an anesthetic for the first time. 1862: Theodore Timby patented the revolving gun turret. 1882: The world's first hydroelectric power plant in the U.S. was opened on the Fox River, in Appleton, WI. 1882: Hans Geiger, inventor of the Geiger counter alpha particle detector, was born. 1882: Charles Lawrance, designer of the famed J-5 Whirlwind radial engine, was born. 1899: 1st wireless message in the Navy's history sent by Lt. Blish, U.S.N. 1917: Irving Berlin Kahn, inventor of the teleprompter, was born. 1935: The Boulder Dam (renamed to Hoover Dam), in Boulder City, NV, was dedicated 1947: The World Series was televised for the first time, and the sponsors only paid $65,000 for the entire series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees. 1949: The Berlin Airlift ended after 278,288 flights and delivery of 2,326,406 tons of supplies. 1954: The U.S. Navy commissioned the Nautilus submarine as the first atomic-powered vessel. 1968: The Boeing 747 was rolled out of the factory. 1982: H. Ross Perot Jr. and Jay Colburn completed the first circumnavigation of the world in a helicopter, the Spirit of Texas. 1985: Seismologist Charles Richter, who devised the earthquake-measuring scale that bears his name, died.

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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.