It’s Boxing Day across the Commonwealth of Nations and the first day of Kwanzaa.
1865
The first US patent for a coffee percolator (US No. 51,741) is issued to James H. Mason of Franklin, Massachusetts.
1878
Electric lighting is installed in a store for the first time in America, at the Grand Depot department store of Philadelphia, owned by John Wanamaker. Eight dynamos provide the electrical power to run twenty-eight arc lamps.
1898
Marie Curie announce the isolation of the element Radium after experimenting with pitchblende, a common uranium ore. She had observed that the ore was more radioactive than refined uranium, and concluded that there was another even more radioactive element mixed in with the ore. During the years between 1899 and 1902, Marie Curie dissolved, filtered and repeatedly crystallized nearly three tons of pitchblende with the goal of refining a sample of the element. The result was about 0.1 gram of Radium, which was enough for a spectroscopic examination to determine the exact atomic weight of Radium. She will be awarded a second Nobel Prize in part for the discovery, along with the discovery of Polonium, in 1911.
1906
The world’s first full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, is presented at the Melbourne Town Hall in Australia, where it had been filmed at a cost of £450. The subject of the movie is Ned Kelly, a bushranger, or bandit, who lived from 1855 to 1880. The film’s approximate reel length is 1219.2 metres (4,000 feet), and it precedes the world’s next feature film, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation by nine years. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 10 mins
1933
Edwin H. Armstrong patents frequency-modulated (FM) radio is patented. FM radio minimizes the static caused by interference that characterizes amplitude modulation (AM) radio. The first FM radio station won’t be built until 1937, though.
1951
The National Machine Accountants Association (NMAA) is founded and chartered in Chicago, Illinois. The group will become the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) in 1962 and the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) in 1996. The group offers support to information technology professionals. Visit the organization’s official website.
1954
The popular radio program The Shadow airs for the last time. The show, which first aired in 1930, was the most popular of the numerous pulp dramas of the radio era.
1973
Soyuz 13 lands on Earth after a week in orbit.
1974
The Salyut 4 space station is launched.
1982
Time Magazine awards its title of The Man of the Year to the personal computer, the first non-human to receive the honor. The magazine describes the choice as 1982’s “greatest influence for good or evil.” The article recognizes that, “by itself, the personal computer is a machine with formidable capabilities for tabulating, modeling or recording. Those capabilities can be multiplied almost indefinitely by plugging it into a network of other computers. This is generally done by attaching a desk-top model to a telephone line (two-way cables and earth satellites are coming increasingly into use). One can then dial an electronic data base, which not only provides all manner of information but also collects and transmits messages: electronic mail.” In 1980, 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States with that number doubled in the following year, according to the article, but eighty percent of Americans expected that “in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers.”
1990
Garry Kasparov beats Anatoly Karpov to retain the world chess championship. It is Karpov’s second attempt at regaining the championship from Kasparov, after he had lost the title to Kasparov in 1985 and had tried to regain it in 1987.
1997
The homepage of the Biomedical department of the University of Montreal is hacked. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
2007
Shares of Apple, Inc. reaches a value of US$200 a share for the first time as investor confidence continued at the conclusion of a strong fiscal year that included the release of an updated iPod Nano and the introduction of the iPod Touch.
|
|
|
Comments are closed
