Richard Trevithick's 240th birthday

http://www.google.co.uk/logos/2011/trevithick11-hp.jpg

Richard Trevithick (13 April 1771 – 22 April 1833) was a Cornish inventor and mining engineer. His most significant success was the high pressure steam engine and he also built the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive. On 21 February 1804 the world's first locomotive-hauled railway journey took place as Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren Ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Richard Trevithick, by John Linnell (1792-1882)

Guillermo González Camarena's birthday

Source: http://www.google.com.mx/logos/2011/camarena11-hp.jpg

Guillermo González Camarena (February 17, 1917 – April 18, 1965) (aged 48), was a Mexican engineer who was the inventor of color television. [Read more on wikipedia]

115th Birthday of Juan de la Cierva

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Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu (21 September 1895 – 9 December 1936) was a Spanish civil engineer and pilot. His most famous accomplishment was the invention in 1920 of the Autogiro, a single-rotor type of aircraft that came to be called autogyro in the English language. After four years of experimentation, De la Cierva developed the articulated rotor which resulted in the world's first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft in 1923 with his C.4 prototype.

De la Cierva was born in Murcia, Spain to a wealthy family. After several successful experiments with aviation as a boy, he eventually earned a civil engineering degree. He moved to England in 1925, where with the support of Scottish industrialist James G. Weir, he established the Cierva Autogiro Company.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, De la Cierva supported the forces of Francisco Franco, helping the rebels to obtain the De Havilland DH-89 'Dragon Rapide' which flew General Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco. His brother was killed by the Republican army in Paracuellos del Jarama. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Happy 4th of July and Happy Birthday Rube Goldberg!

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Reuben Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970) was a Jewish American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Goldberg is best known for a series of popular cartoons he created depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways – now known as Rube Goldberg machines. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime including a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948 and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award 1959.

Goldberg was a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society, and is the name sake of the Reuben Award which the organization awards to the Cartoonist of the Year. He is the inspiration for various international competitions, known as Rube Goldberg contests, which challenge participants to make a complex machine to perform a simple task. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Konrad Zuse's 100th Birthday

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Konrad Zuse (pronounced [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 Berlin – 18 December 1995 Hünfeld near Fulda) was a German engineer and computer pioneer.

His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, in 1941 (the program was stored on a punched tape). He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3. His S2 computing machine is considered the first process-controlled computer, which was used to help develop the Henschel Werke Hs 293 and Hs 294, which were precursors to the modern cruise missile. It is also considered one of the first analog-to-digital converters. Many of his projects were in collaboration with the Nazi Germany, which supported, financed, and deployed many of them. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Konrad Zuse in 1992

Dennis Gabor´s 110th birthday

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Holography support courtesy of the Departments of Electrical Engineering
and Applied Physics at Stanford University

Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS (original Hungarian name: Gábor Dénes; 5 June 1900 – 8 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Milutin Milankovich's Birthday

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Milutin Milanković (Serbian Cyrillic: Милутин Миланковић) (born in Dalj, Austria-Hungary on 28 May 1879, died Belgrade, Yugoslavia on 12 December 1958), was a Serbian geophysicist and civil engineer, best known for his theory of ice ages, suggesting a relationship between Earth's long-term climate changes and periodic changes in its orbit, now known as Milankovitch cycles. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Portrtait by Paja Jovanović, 1943

Birthday of Nikola Tesla

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Nikola Tesla (Serbian: Никола Тесла; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor. This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. [Read more on Wikipedia]