1646
The very first patent in the the New World (America) is issued by the General Court of Massachusetts to Joseph Jenkes, to protect his scythe mill engine from competition for fourteen years. The patent comes four years before the first US corporate charter, which will also be issued by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts. The patent reads, in part, “The Cort considringe ye necessity of raising such manifactures of engins of mils to go by water for speedy dispatch of much worke wth few hands, F.r being sufficiently informed of ye ability of ye petitionr to pforme such workes grant his petition (yt no othr pson shall set up, or use any such new invention, or trade for fourteen yeares w’hout ye licence of him ye said Joseph Jenkes) so farr as concernes any such new invention, & so as it shalbe alwayes in ye powr of this Corte to restrain ye exportation of such manifactures, & ye prizes of them to moderation if occasion so require.”
1869
Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev publishes the first version of his periodic table of the elements in a presentation entitled “The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements,” which he presents to the Russian Chemical Society. In his final version of the periodic table, in 1871, he will leave gaps, predicting the properties of unknown elements.
1886
America’s first alternating current power plant goes into operation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. George Westinghouse demonstrates transmission at 500 volts for four thousand feet, with a step-down for lights in stores. Driven by a water mill, it will start producing commercial power two weeks later, but it will be damaged by an accident and abandoned. However, Westinghouse succeeds in demonstrating the advantage of using transformers at the source in order to transmit power at a higher voltage, with fewer energy losses, and over greater distances than possible with Edison’s direct current system. Westinghouse will open his first successful AC generating plant on November 30, 1886 in Buffalo, New York.
1896
The first appearance of an auto on the streets of Detroit occurs when Charles Brady King drives his “Horseless Carriage” down one of its main streets. When his auto breaks down, speculators respond by telling him to “get a horse.”
1913
This date is written by Niels Bohr on his first paper describing his new ideas on atomic structure and mailed it to his mentor, Ernest Rutherford. It was one of three historic papers he wrote on the subject.
1927
Fritz Lang’s science fiction film Metropolis is released in the US. It is the most expensive film ever made, costing approximately seven million Reichsmark.
1930
General Foods puts “Birds Eye Frosted Foods,” the first individually packaged frozen foods on the market in Springfield, Massachusetts. To test the market, the product is sold in eighteen retail stores. Clarence Birdseye got his idea after seeing Canadians thawing and eating naturally frozen fish. In 1922, he began preparing frozen fish for sale and developing processes for freezing foods. By 1927, Birdseye had expanded the line to twenty-six items, including eighteen cuts of frozen meat, spinach, peas, a variety of fruits and berries, blue point oysters, and fish fillets. In May, sales will explode.
1948
USS Newport News, the first air-conditioned naval ship, is launched from Newport News, Virginia.
1950
Silly Putty is introduced as a toy by Peter Hodgson, a marketing consultant, who packaged one-ounce portions of the rubber-like material in plastic eggs. It can be stretched, rolled into a bouncing ball, or used to transfer colored ink from newsprint. The original discovery is made in 1943 by James Wright, who combined silicone oil and boric acid in the laboratories of General Electric. He was researching methods of making synthetic rubber, but at the time no significant application existed for the material. However, it was passed around as a curiosity. Hodgson saw a sample and realized its potential simply for entertainment and coined its name for marketing it as a toy. Its popularity made him a millionaire.
1953
James D. Watson and Francis Crick submit their first article on the double helix structure of DNA, “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” to the journal Nature. It will be published in the April 25th issue of the magazine.
We wish to put forward a radically different structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis… Both chains follow right-handed helices… The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by purine and pyrimidine bases… They are joined together in pairs, a single base from one chain being hydrogen-bonded to a single base from the other chain, so that the two lie side by side with identical z-co-ordinates. One of the pair must be a purine and the other a pyrimidine in order for bonding to occur.
1978
Chris Lundberg, Richard Desman, and Sugu Aria, all top executives at computer manufacturer IMSAI quit their jobs. Read more about the history of the IMSAI at the PC History website.
1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Scott Young scores a record-setting 7,302,100 points playing the arcade game Dark Planet at the Another Galaxy arcade in McHenry, Illinois, and Mike Buck scores a record-setting 388,190 points playing the Midway arcade game Ms. Pac-Man at the Eastgate Cafe in Ottumwa, Iowa. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
1986
In the nation’s first computer sting operation executed by a local law enforcement agency, seven teenagers are arrested on various hacking charges in Fremont, California. Three of the hackers are fifteen years old, two are sixteen, one is seventeen, and one is 19. The arresting officer, Sgt. Dan Pasquale, has been communicating regularly with about one hundred thirty hackers and pirates in at least seven states under the alias “Revenger”. The charges, mostly misdemeanors, include trafficking in stolen long distance service codes and stolen credit card numbers, trafficking stolen property, and possession of dangerous weapons. Read more about the sting at Gary Robson’s online archive of his Blacklisted! 411 article.
1991
In the lawsuit of Apple Computer versus Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, Federal District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker denies Hewlett-Packard’s request to declare Apple’s copyrights invalid and rejects Microsoft’s argument that portions of Windows are covered by the 1985 license from Apple. However, the judge agrees to Microsoft’s request to consider the copyright issue feature-by-feature, rather than on the basis of overall look and feel. Visit the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab website to to read the entire court declaration.
Rumors arise regarding the Michaelangelo computer virus, which is coded to launch its destructive payload on this, Michelangelo’s 516th birthday.
1992
The Michelangelo computer virus reveals itself in as many as one million IBM compatible computers. The virus strikes the first time the computer is turned on after midnight of the previous day, on this, Michelangelo’s 517th birthday. The virus is transmitted through the boot segments of floppy disks that are exchanged between users. Once activated, the program overwrites the first one hundred sectors of the hard disk with nulls any disks in use, often requiring the entire hard drive to be reformatted as a result. Concerns over the Michelangelo virus, which had been discovered a month earlier, raises concerns among everyone from personal computer users to world governments. As many as five million computers were reportedly in danger of contracting the virus.
1993
The Michelangelo computer virus, which was first discovered in February of 1992 and went on to become the first virus to gain mainstream media recognition, begins to affect computers around the globe. Media coverage of the virus sparked near-hysteria in the weeks leading up to March 6, the date the virus deploys. It’s coverage marked the first time in history that the average person believed their life would be thrown into chaos due to a computer failure, regardless of whether or not they owned a computer. As will later be the case with the Y2K bug, Michelangelo’s birthday will pass with very little damage.
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