1806
Ralph Wedgewood patents carbon paper, which he describes as an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings” in London, England.
1849
Edgar Allan Poe dies at 5:00am four days after being found in a Baltimore, Maryland gutter.
1868
Cornell University opens in Ithaca, New York. Four hundred twelve students enroll for its first term, a record among American universities.
1913
Once again, Henry Ford overcomes the resistance of many of his own stockholders with a revolutionary method of building automobiles. Ford, who for ten years has advocated manufacturing the greatest number of cars to sell at the lowest price, can now assemble one of his Model Ts at its Highland Park plant within three hours. Ford himself can build an entire car with his hands, but in his factory, automobiles are manufactured on an assembly line. One worker attached doors, another fenders, another the engine. Ford projects that his assembly line will turn out more than 250,000 Model T’s in the first year alone.
1931
Short-exposure infrared photography is first demonstrated by researchers at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. The first short-exposure infrared photo taken is of a group of fifty Kodak engineers in a totally dark room flooded with invisible infrared light for the purpose.
1952
Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland are granted the first patent for the bar code system. (US No. 2,612,994) The bar codes consist of a series of concentric rings that form a bull’s eye. Read the patent online.
Raphael Robinson discovers the 664-digit Mersenne prime M2203, which can be expressed as 22,203 – 1, using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). The number will be the largest prime number discovered for almost two whole days, until Robinson’s unprecedented discovery of a fifth Mersenne prime in a single year.
1954
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) demonstrates its first calculator to rely completely on transistors. The device consumes only five percent of the power of a comparable electronic calculator. Three years later, IBM will introduce the resulting consumer model, the IBM 608, which will be the world’s first all-transistor commercial calculator.
1958
The United States’ first manned space-flight program is renamed Project Mercury. Read more about Project Mercury at the NASA website.
1959
U.S.S.R. probe Luna III transmits the first photographs ever taken of the far side of the Moon. Twenty-nine photographs are taken from a distance of 63,500km over a period of forty minutes, then developed onboard and transmitted back to Earth on October 18, 1959. The photographs cover approximately seventy percent of the surface of the far side of the Moon. The photographs are very noisy and of a relatively low resolution, but astronomers will identify numerous features from them.
1968
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) publicly adopts its own self-regulating film ratings systems, consisting of four possible classifications: G (general), M (mature), R (restricted, no unaccompanied children) and X (over 16 only). All films released after November 1st will carry one of these ratings.
1971
Three product announcements are made by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM): the IBM 3410 magnetic tape subsystem; the IBM 2596 card read-punch; and extension of the 96-column punched card to the IBM System/360 and IBM System/370.
1974
The merger of the Philips and MCA disc systems is officially ratified by the two companies’ boards of directors.
1983
The Macintosh Introduction Plan, a list of popular developers and celebrities that will be invited to beta-test the Mac computer as a marketing ploy, is first compiled.
1992
Hewlett-Packard releases version 9.0 (S800) of the HP-UX operating system, a proprietary implementation of Unix. Visit the official HP-UX website.
1997
Sun Microsystems takes legal action against Microsoft for shipping Internet Explorer 4.0 with a non-standard implementation of the Java programming language. Sun files a breach of contract lawsuit in a US District Court in San Jose, California.
1998
478 domains are hacked by a hacker using the handle “Cha0s”.
2001
Jeff Herrings, the active developer of the Renegade bulletin board system (BBS), announces that the development of the Renegade BBS has ceased and the popular application has officially been discontinued.
2002
The discovery of a dwarf planet orbiting the Sun in the midst of the Kuiper belt dubbed Quaoar is announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Palm announces its first Zire handheld computer, featuring a 16MHz Motorola Dragonball EZ processor, 2MB RAM, 2MB ROM, the Palm OS 4.1, a 160×160 pixel monochrome 1.9-inch LCD screen, and a rechargeable battery. Price: US$99 Weight: 3.6oz
2003
Nokia releases the N-Gage handheld video game system worldwide. It features a 104MHz ARM processor, 64MB RAM, a 176×208 pixel 4096-color display, cell phone functions, wireless Bluetooth connectivity, USB port, XHTML web browser, MP3 audio player, email support, stereo FM radio, and instant messaging. Games are available on MultiMedia Cards. Price: US$300
Yahoo! acquires Overture Services, Inc. to provide Yahoo! Search Marketing products.
2006
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announces the first film titles to be released on 50GB Blu-Ray format, including Click, due to be released October 10th, Black Hawk Down, on November 14th, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby on December 12th.
2007
Intel releases the 2333MHz Dual-Core Xeon 3065, featuring a 4,096KB Level-2 Cache and a 1,333MHz front-side bus. Price: US$163
MSNBC.com acquires the Newsvine community-powered news website. Visit the NewsVine website.
The Trend Micro website is hacked by a Turkish hacker using the web handle “Janizary” or “Utku”.
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