Day in Engineering History Archive - September 9

September 9

1737: Italian physician Luigi Galvani, after whom the word "galvanic" is named, was born. 1776: The 2nd Continental Congress replaced "United Colonies" with the "United States." 1839: John Herschel took the first glass plate photograph. 1890: Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, was born (he was not a colonel). 1909: Arthur (Art) Collins, of Collins Radio Company, was born. 1914: John Poynting, who introduced a theorem that assigns a value to the rate of flow of electromagnetic energy known as the Poynting vector, was born. 1926: The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was created by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). 1941: Dennis Richie, developer of the "C" programming language, was born. 1942: Japan dropped incendiaries over Oregon in an unsuccessful attempt to set fire to the forests in Oregon and Washington. 1947: The first "bug" in a computer program was discovered by Grace Hopper - a moth was removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log. 1975: NASA launched the Viking 2 spacecraft to Mars. 1982: The world's first private rocket, "Conestoga I", was launched. 2003: Edward Teller, "father of the H-bomb," 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.