Time ripens all things, no man is born wise. ~Miguel de Cervantes
1878 – Stephen Timoshenko, Ukrainian-American engineer is born.
Stepan Prokopovych Tymoshenko was a Russian engineer who later travelled to the US. He is believed to be the father of modern engineering mechanics. A founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Tymoshenko wrote seminal works in the areas of engineering mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, many of which are still widely used today. Having started his scientific career in Russian Empire in Ukraine, Tymoshenko emigrated to the United States during the Russian Civil War.
1938 – Bob Kahn, American computer scientist and engineer, co-developed the Transmission Control Protocol is born.
Robert Elliot “Bob” Kahn is an American electrical engineer, who, along with Vint Cerf, invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
1947 – The transistor is first demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor’s terminals changes the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.
The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its development in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and the inventors were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
1954 – First successful kidney transplant is performed by J. Hartwell Harrison and Joseph Murray.
The first kidney transplants between living patients were undertaken in 1952 at the Necker hospital in Paris by Jean Hamburger although the kidney failed after 3 weeks of good function and later in 1954 in Boston. The Boston transplantation, performed on December 23, 1954, at Brigham Hospital was performed by Joseph Murray, J. Hartwell Harrison, John P. Merrill and others. The procedure was done between identical twins Ronald and Richard Herrick to eliminate any problems of an immune reaction. For this and later work, Dr. Murray received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1990. The recipient, Richard Herrick, died eight years after the transplantation.
1986 – Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California becoming the first aircraft to fly non-stop around the world without aerial or ground refueling.
The Rutan Model 76 Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. It was piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base’s 15,000 foot (4,600 m) long runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record. The aircraft flew westerly 26,366 statute miles (42,432 km; the FAI accredited distance is 40,212 km) at an average altitude of 11,000 feet (3,350 m). This broke a previous flight distance record set by a United States Air Force crew piloting a Boeing B-52 that flew 12,532 miles (20,168 km) in 1962.
2013 – Adafruit’s Makers, hackers, artists & engineers on Google+ passes 70,000 members!
Last year we hit 70,000 members of our G+ community – this year we are at over 97,000!
