This week in 1969 – IBM announced that effective January 1970 it will price its software and services separately from hardware – effectively creating the modern software industry. 1995 – For the first time, a U.S. space shuttle (“Atlantis”) linked up with a Russian space station (“Mir”). They remained docked until July 4. The joined […]
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This Week in Tech History: Henry Ford’s First Automobile
Chris Graveline
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1887 – Herman Hollerith applied for a patent for the ‘Art of Compiling Statistics’, which was his punched card calculator. He then went on to form the Tabulating Machine Company, one of the companies that would go on to become IBM. This week in 1896 – Henry Ford completed the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered […]
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1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for a patent for his wireless telegraph paving the way for radio as we know it. 1869 – Thomas Edison of Boston, MA received a patent for his electric voting machine. Ol’ Tom would soon have a filing cabinet full of patents. 1953 – The first three-dimensional cartoon premiered at […]
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This week in 1844 – Samuel Morse tapped out the message, “What hath God wrought”, in the code that now bears his name. The message was sent from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to his assistant in Baltimore, Maryland. The development inaugurated America’s telegraph industry. 1857 – William Channing and […]
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1847 – As you jog around the block today, think of Mormon pioneer William Clayton. It was on this day that he got tired of counting the revolutions of a rag tied to a spoke of a wagon wheel to figure out how many miles he had traveled. So, while he was crossing the plains […]
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This Week in Tech History: Oldest Recording of a Human Voice
Chris Graveline
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1860 – A French inventor made the oldest known recording of an audible human voice, when he recorded himself singing a French folksong on his phonautograph machine. 1892 – Voters in Lockport, NY became the first in the U.S. to use voting machines. 1964 – IBM announces the System/360 mainframe computer systems. It was the […]
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This week in 1960 – The first U.S. weather satellite was launched. “TIROS I” was put into orbit. The TIROS-1 satellite transmitted the first television picture from space and meteorologists saw the first pictures of a midlatitude cyclone over the northeastern United States. 1975 – Microsoft was founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and […]
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1797 – Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire patented an early form of washing machine for clothes, called the “box mangler.” 1880 – The first electric street lights ever installed by a municipality were turned on in Wabash, IN. 1951 – Remington Rand delivered the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau. In […]
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This week in 1857 – Elisha Otis installed his first elevator at 488 Broadway in New York City. 1931 – Schick, Inc., the razor company, displayed the first electric shaver — in Stamford, CT. 1981 – RCA put its Selectavision laser disc players on the market. Soon, the product was called “the Edsel of the […]
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This week in 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell sent the first clear telephone message — into a nearby room — to his assistant, Thomas Watson. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” were the first words spoken into the invention that Bell had created. In 1891 – Almon Strowger, an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, patented […]