1825: Johann Balmer, of Balmer's formula for computing wavelengths [λ=hm²/(m²-n²)], was born. 1875: Harriet Quimby, the first female pilot to fly across the English Channel, was born. 1921: The first successful marine radio navigation beacons began regular operation in the U.S. 1925: Astronaut M. Scott Carpenter, the second U.S. citizen to orbit the earth, was born. 1926: Henry Ford announced an 8 hour, 5 day work week. 1931: The Empire State Building was dedicated remotely by President Hoover from Washington, D.C. 1947: Howard Hughes tested the first airborne radar aboard a TWA Constellation. 1958: James Van Allen reported that two radiation belts encircled Earth. 1960: The Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane near Sverdlovsk and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. 1964: The first BASIC program, invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth University, was run on a computer at about 4:00 a.m. 1999: The ''Liberty Bell 7,'' the Mercury space capsule flown by Gus Grissom, was found in the Atlantic 300 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral, 38 years after it sank.
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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.