Colors burst in wild explosions
Fiery, flaming shades of fall
All in accord with my pounding heart
Behold the autumn-weaver
In bronze and yellow dying
Colors unfold into dreams
In hordes of a thousand and one
The bleeding
Unwearing their masks to the last notes of summer
Their flutes and horns in nightly swarming
Colors burst within
Spare me those unending fires
Bestowed upon the flaming shades of fall
He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart if wonder.
1877
Nicolaus Otto, Francis Crossley, and William Crossley are granted a patent for the first internal-combustion engine to burn gasoline in a piston chamber. (US No. 194,047) View the patent online.
1911
Captain Carlo Piazza of the Italian military flies a Blériot XI monoplane on an hour long reconnaissance mission of Turkish troop positions, becoming the first pilot to use an airplane for military purposes. Just more nine days later, Italian forces will carry out history’s first bombing raid based on the intelligence gathered by Piazza.
1956
The first video footage recorded on magnetic tape is televised coast-to-coast in the US.
1963
The first AED program is compiled in a compatible time-sharing system using a bootstrap language compiler.
1972
The BBC announces the development of world’s first teletext service, which will later be renamed Ceefax, and outlines a series of tests of the system. Ceefax is a news service for the deaf that is the forerunner of early Internet news services. The system uses spare lines in the vertical blanking interval of the television signal to carry information for display on television receivers via a decoder. The BBC will first launch the system on September 23, 1974.
1973
Elaine Thompson begins working for Atari, Inc. in their Los Gatos, California facility as a staffer on the PONG assembly line.
1981
According to Twin Galaxies, Dennis Hernandez scores a record-setting 30,100,000 points on Atari’s Asteroids after playing the game Friday, October 23, through Sunday, October 25 for fifty hours and twelve minutes at Space Odyssey in Geneva, New York. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
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No truth can make another truth untrue.
All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge.
Once you have seen the larger pattern,
You cannot get back to seeing the part as the whole.
1746
Princeton University is chartered.
1878
Thomas Alva Edison receives a patent for “Quadruplex-Telegraph Repeaters.” (US No. 209,241) The patent describes circuits that operate each other, so that messages are repeated automatically into one circuit by the receiving instrument of the other circuit, rather than instead of the finger key being operated by hand.
1926
J. Gordon Whitehead, a McGill University student, sucker punches the famous magician Harry Houdini in the stomach. Houdini will die eight days later on October 31. Popular myth will later hold that the punch is what killed Houdini, but, in fact, the magician will die of appendicitis. Many experts will later agree, however, that Houdini failed to seek treatment for the appendicitis until its late stages because he believed that the pain was the lingering after effect of the punch. Though there are many witnesses to the incident, Whitehead will never be arrested. Don Bell will document the event in the 2004 book “The Man Who Killed Houdini.”
1938
Former Bell Telephone physicist Chester F. Carlson makes the first xerox copy using a sulphur coating on a zinc plate, vigorously rubbed with a handkerchief to apply an electrostatic charge. A glass slide is prepared using India ink to write “10-22-38 ASTORIA,” then laid on the sulphur surface in a darkened room. After illuminating them with a bright incandescent lamp for a few seconds, the slide is removed and lycopodium powder is sprinkled on the sulphur surface and blown off, leaving a near-perfect image of the message. Permanent copies are then made by transferring the powder images to wax paper and heating the sheets to melt the wax. Carlson call this new science “xerography” which means “dry writing.” Xerography in the form of the Xerox machine won’t be commercially available for another twenty-one years.
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1879
Thomas Edison perfects the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb using a filament of carbonized cotton sewing thread at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His first new bulb lasts approximately 13½ hours before burning out, but in subsequent tests, the life of the bulb in increased to forty hours. The idea of electric lighting isn’t new, several people had worked on and even developed forms of electric lighting, such the arc lamp. However, no current light method is practical for residential use. Edison set out to design a lamp with soft light that was lightweight and economical as simple to operate as gas lamps but without the foul smell. The discovery comes after Edison tested over six thousand vegetable fibers, including bamboo, baywood, boxwood, hickory, cedar, and flax, for suitability. It required eighteen months of work, US$40,000, and 1,200 experiments.
1915
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and Western Electric Company (WE) transmit the first transatlantic message over radio telephone. The call is placed by B. Webb of AT&T from Arlington, Virginia, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France through relay points in Canada. The test of radiotelephony represents a significant advance in technology brought about by the development of vacuum-tube transmitters and receivers, which had previously been limited to a range of roughly ten miles. In addition to conversation, the capabilities of the connection are also demonstrated with music.
1918
Margaret Owen of New York City sets a world typing record of 170 words per minute on a manual typewriter.
1925
The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company publicly demonstrates the first photoelectric cell at the Electrical Show at Grand Central Palace in New York. The sensitivity of the photocell to light is used to count objects as they interrupt a beam of light. The device is also used to open doors as a person or car approaches in a more practical demonstration.
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