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The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.
1884
The state of Mississippi approves the first state-supported college for women, the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College. Visit the official Mississippi University for Women website.
1894
Atlanta pharmacist Dr. John Pemberton sells the first bottles of his tonic, Coca-Cola. He creates the liquid in his backyard from a combination of cinnamon, coca leaves, lime, and kola nuts brewed in a brass kettle in an attempt to find an alternative to alcoholic beverages during prohibition. He markets the formula as a brain and nerve tonic for medical use, but he’ll later add carbonated water and sell it as a beverage.
1907
German engineer Alfred Maul is issued a patent for a camera-carrying space rocket capable of carrying and returing photography equipment and scientific instruments. Maul is the same engineer who, in 1904, successfully took aerial photographs of the ground from a height of 2,000 ft. (600m) by attaching cameras to a black powder rocket, thereby creating the first instrumented sounding rocket.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
105 A.D.
In China, Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Han Dynasty Chinese Imperial Court, invents the world’s first paper from a mixture of bamboo, fish nets, mulberry, and rags. He will eventually become wealthy after he present his paper to the Emperor Han Ho Ti.
1702
The first regularly printed English-language newspaper, The Daily Courant is launched by Edward Mallet in London, England. The paper consists of a single sheet with two columns. Printed in the rooms above the White Hart pub on Fleet Street, the paper will run until 1735.
1811
The Luddite riots break out in Nottingham, England. Driven by poverty and insufferable living conditions, a group of laborers launch an assault on the factory where they work, destroying sixty-three lace and stocking manufacturing frames that threaten to render many of their jobs unnecessary. The outbreak occurs in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, when starvation and unemployment are running rampant across Europe. Over the next three weeks, armed mobs of Luddites will continue to root out the frames, destroying two hundred of the devices in all.
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I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.
1797
Thomas Jefferson presents a paper on the Megalonyx to the American Philosophical Society. It will be published as “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society 4:255-256, along with an account by Caspar Wistar (1761-1818). This is arguably the first American publication in paleontology, but it is certainly the only paleontology paper written by Jefferson. In 1822, this huge extinct sloth will be named “Megalonyx jeffersoni” by a French naturalist. It is a bear-sized ground sloth species, over two meters tall, which was widespread in North America during the last Ice Age. Read more about Jefferson’s Ground Sloth at Yukon Beringia.
1849
Abraham Lincoln becomes the first United States president to apply for a patent. (US No. 6,469) The patent is described as a method of “Buoying vessels over shoals.” Read the patent application at Google Patents Search.
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