FM Radio is born, the first instant camera is shown off and color TVs go on sale … It all happened This Week in Tech History.
This week in 1873 – E. Remington and Sons began manufacturing the first practical typewriter. The strong as steel, heavy black clunkers became instant fixtures in offices across the country. It would be another half-century before electric typewriters made their appearance.
1941 – FM Radio began in the U.S. when station W47NV in Nashville, TN started operations. This was the first commercial FM radio station to receive a license, some 20 years after its AM radio counterpart, KDKA in Pittsburgh. After ten years of financial losses, the station ceased operations in March of 1951.
1947 – Edwin Land demonstrated a nifty new gadget to the Optical Society of America in New York City. It was the first camera to take, develop and print a picture on photo paper (in black and white back then) all in about a minute. He called his invention the Polaroid Land Camera. It became an ‘instant’ success.
in 1954 – The first color television sets using the NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public. The RCA CT-100 set offered a 15-inch screen and sold for a cool $1,000 dollars. In today’s money, you’d be looking at over $7500. While other sets had beaten RCA to market, slightly. It was RCA’s backwards compatibility with black and white broadcasts that came to define the market.
And this week in 1965 – The Ranger 8 space probe crashed into the Moon after a successful mission of obtaining the first close-up images of the lunar surface. These pictures were used for scientific study, as well as helping to select landing sites for the Apollo program astronauts.