Today in Tech History with Tom Merritt

In 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…Read more →

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. In 1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the…Read more →

In 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”. In 1951 – The U.S. Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer. In 1962 –…Read more →

In 1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US. In 1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.…Read more →

In 1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for 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…Read more →

In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. 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…Read more →

In 1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen. In 1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time. In 2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s…Read more →

In 1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes. In 1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (U.S. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation. In…Read more →

In 1637 – Rene Descartes published “Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”, which formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It’s also the source of the quote “I think, therefore I am.” In 1949 – George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The book still…Read more →

In 1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II. In 1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an…Read more →

In 1917 – Following a declaration of war against Germany, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order closing all radio communication not required by the US Navy. In 1965 – Hughes Aircraft’s Early Bird launched into orbit. It was the…Read more →

In 1911 – Cuthbert Hurd was born in Estherville, Iowa. He would grow up to work at IBM where he quietly persuaded the company that a market for scientific computers existed. He sold 10 of the very first IBM 701s…Read more →

In 1954 – Daniel Kottke was born in Bronxville, New York. He would go on to befriend Steve Jobs at Reed College, assemble the first Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak and work on the original Macintosh team. In 1975 –…Read more →

In 1966 – Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. It completed its first orbit in two hours 58 minutes. In 1973 – Martin Cooper, general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division made the first handheld portable…Read more →

In 1973 – Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York. In 1978 – The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral’s invention of a hook and…Read more →