Other projects

In 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

In 2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

In 240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

In 1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

In 2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

In 1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such devices years later.

In 2002 – Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife.

In 2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to colelct information abotu the Moon, particularly around the poles.

In 1862 – During the US Civil War, W.H. Fancher and C.M. French of Waterloo, New York, received a patent for the “New and Improved Ordnance Plow,” a horse-drawn plow with a gun attached.

In 1936 Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

In 1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

In 1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.l

In 1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

1869, John Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt received a U.S. patent for pyroxylin plastic, which they called “Improved Method of Making Solid Collodion” (No. 91,341). The process was slightly flammable, but was essential to the development of plastics.

In 1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.
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In 1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”.

1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff in Iowa City to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.

In 1951 – The U.S. Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

In 1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.

In 1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.

In 1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.

In 1897 – Karl Elsener legally registered his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.

In 1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.

In 1997 – 3Com Corp. and U.S. Robotics Corp. completed their merger. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.

In 1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.

In 1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.

In 1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.