"Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better"
The chemical giant Dupont jumped into the apparel game when it launched Dacron, the first ever commercially available polyester fabric, known as Dacron in New York City on May 8, 1951. The first offering was men’s blended suits, made with 55% dacron and 45% worsted wool. Polyester was later was blended with a number of other fabric types, including cotton. Advertised as modern and easy, Dupont targeted its fabrics across markets, from couture to factory workwear. Today, almost 50% of the consumer fabric market is still made up of polyester.
1937
On May 6th, 76 years ago, the Luftschiff Zeppelin #129, also known as the Hindenburg, crashed while landing in Manchester Township, New Jersey. It was the largest aircraft by volume in the world at the time. Of the 97 people on board, 36 died as a result of the crash. The highly publicized and photographed crash turned the public off of airships (also known as zeplins) forever, marking the end of a (very short-lived) era.
1790
In 1790, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand with the new French National Assembly decided to create a simple, new system of measurement units. The first unit chosen was based on a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The following year, after a proposal by the French Academy of Sciences, the definition of a meter was revised to 1/10 000 000 of the distance between the north pole and the equator. It wasn’t until April 7, 1795, however, that this new decimal system, that was a precursor to the metric system were declared the legal and official means of measure within France. Hence the annoying conversion chart above. A less remembered fact is that there was a simultaneous proposal (later dropped) to change the week from seven to ten days, called “décades,” thus abolishing Sabbath and the Church’s stranglehold on people’s Sunday mornings.
1742
Jean Senebier, the botanist who first clearly demonstrated that plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of direct light, was born May 6th, 1742. His 1800 publication, “Physiologie végétale,” was fundamental to the development in understanding photosynthesis.
Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.
Sparkler Filters’ IBM 402, with self-employed field engineer Duwayne Leafley in the foreground. (Photo Courtesy Ed Thelen / IBM 1401 Group)
Sparkler’s IBM 402 is not a traditional computer, but an automated electromechanical tabulator that can be programmed (or more accurately, wired) to print out certain results based on values encoded into stacks of 80-column Hollerith-type punched cards.
Companies traditionally used the 402 for accounting, since the machine could take a long list of numbers, add them up, and print a detailed written report. In a sense, you could consider it a 3000-pound spreadsheet machine. That’s exactly how Sparkler Filters uses its IBM 402, which could very well be the last fully operational 402 on the planet. As it has for over half a century, the firm still runs all of its accounting work (payroll, sales, and inventory) through the IBM 402. The machine prints out reports on wide, tractor-fed paper.
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!
Way Back In Time…
1964
The Bell Labs-produced picture phone made the world’s first transcontinental video call from Anaheim, CA to New York, NY 49 years ago this week. Later that year, the phone was displayed the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, where visitors could pay $16 to $27 for 3-minute phone calls to Chicago or Washington. Though AT&T tried to market them commercially, picture phones were only picked up for internal use by a few large companies, and ultimately AT&T discontinued the service by the 1970s.
1867
The patent for the zoetrope was granted to William F. Lincoln of Providence, RI on April 23, 1867. The zoetrope had been invented some 2,000 years earlier in China by Ting Huan, but was rediscovered in the western world, with patents filed first by William George Horner in England under the name Daedaleum in 1834, and over thirty years later in the United States, where the name zoetrope caught on for the pre-film device that mimics movement.
1813
The first contract for machine-manufactured interchangeable parts across different models was signed on April 16, 1813 with Berlin, CT gun manufacturer Simeon North. For the first time, the federal government stipulated that the 20,000 pistols be made with interchangeable parts, a tall orders in the age of hand-machining. North invented a number of machine production techniques, including possibly the first milling machine that enabled more uniformity across parts than had previously been possible using hand-milling techniques. North maintained a fifty-three year long contract with U.S. Department of War to manufacture guns.
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!
Way Back In Time…
1954
On March 25th, 1954 the first commercially available color television was sold by RCA. The TV was built using a 1947 patent by Alfred Schroeder for a shadow mask CRT and was available just weeks after the first national color broadcast on January 1st, 1954. The combination of expensive equipment and lack of broadcast material made color slow to catch on, and it wasn’t for another decade that the average American home had a color television.
1885
The first commercially produced continuous-strip photographic film was manufactured on March 26, 1885 by the Eastman Dry-Plate and Film Company in Rochester, NY. George Eastman had received his patent in 1884 intending roll-style film to replace bulky, inconvenient glass-plate photography that had preceded it.
1773
Nathaniel Bowditch, born in Salem Massachusetts, some 150 years after the witch trials spread fear and superstition across his otherwise reputable town, was known for early innovation in mapmaking in the colonial United States as well as the first insurance actuary as president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company in Salem.
1759
In a letter written to a friend dated March 30, 1759, Giovanni Arduino first proposed stratigraphic chronology via a geological classification system that divided formations into four categories: the Primitive, Secondary, Tertiary and Volcanic or Quaternary. Aspects of this classification system are still in use today. But clearly the important aspect of Giovanni Arduino is the fact that he shares his last name with a certain single-board microcontroller. Coincidence? Of course not!
H.P. Lovecraft, the beloved weirdo scifi writer who inspired countless horror flicks and metal bands died 75 years ago last Friday. He was buried in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, RI, immediately adjacent to Butler Hospital, the insane asylum his father had perished in some forty years earlier.
1752
Mary Dixson Kies, the first woman to obtain a U.S. patent, was born on March 21st, 1752, in Killingly, Connecticut. After patenting a new method for weaving in straw hats, she found it difficult to reap a profit from her invention and despite her work, died penniless in Brooklyn in 1837. A similar design had been developed earlier by a woman, Betsy Metcalf, who refused to file a patent for shame of having her name, as a woman, appear before Congress.
1474
On March 19th, 1474, Venetian Patent Law declared that “each person who will make in this city any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, as soon as it is reduced to perfection… It being forbidden to any other in any territory and place of ours to make any other contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and licence of the author up to ten years.” The first modern patent law of any kind, Venice was aiming to attract new business and invention to its city. The law set a precedent that spread like wildfire: England and France quickly followed suit and shortly afterwards nearly the whole of Europe had some sort of patent law enacted.
Coal tar…ahem, saccharin was invented mistakenly in a lab at Johns Hopkins University on February 27, 1879 while a scientist named Constantin Fahlberg was developing coal tar compounds. After returning home, his lips came into contact with his hands, and he realized that the compounds had an intensely sweet flavor. He developed it into something marketable, which later became the first commercially available artificial sweetener, always in a pink packet, known as saccharin.
1864
On March 1, 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the African American female to become a doctor, after receiving her degree from the New England Female Medical College in Boston.
1852
John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kellogg’s, born February 26th, 1852, was an early proponent of low calorie, low fat diets, his at-the-time bizarre lifestyle now seems a portent for many of the medical and dietary beliefs that are now commonplace. He publicly announced his conviction that cigarettes caused lung cancer long before any study had linked the two, and he advocated vegetarianism and regular exercise decades before it became regular for the medical establishment to do so.
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!
1897
In 1897, Ferdinand Braun published a paper on a Braun Tube, the first known version of a cathode-ray tube. He first developed it as a means of understanding time-dependence of alternating currents. The Braun Tube evolved into the handy-dandy oscilloscope, used by makers everywhere!
1809
Happy 204th Birthday, Charles Darwin. It’s not widely known, but the author of On the Origin of Species sat on his theory of natural selection for over two decades, worrying about persecution, before news of an imminent and very similar publication pushed him to publish.
1791
Peter Cooper, whose name is sprawled across New York City, shares a birthday and a funny beard with Charles Darwin. He built a fortune in ventures and inventions as broad as glue, telegraphs, railways and steel. His biggest legacy, though (which was radical in its day) was that the working class should be educated, free of charge. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art formed by Cooper in 1859, is still running tuition-free (though it started charging tuition to grad students for the first time last year) for all undergraduates who attend the fields of engineering, architecture and art. It’s the only institution of its kind in the United States. We wish there were more Peter Coopers around today.
Robert Hofstadter was born today ninety-eight years ago. He pioneered work in the structures of nucleons and his work helped create an understanding of the order of subatomic particles.
1897
3.141592653589793238462… = 3.2!?!?!?! The Indiana Legislature passed a law mandating that the circumference of a circle equal 3.2 times its diameter. It argued that “the ratio of the diameter and circumference [pi] is as five-fourths to four.” It made it through the Indiana House but not through the Senate…
1821
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn an M.D. in the United States, was born on February 3rd, 1821. Incidentally, when she was accepted to medical school, reviewers at the Geneva Medical School (now Hobart and William Smith College) initially thought her application was a spoof. Nonetheless she graduated in 1849.
Photo Credit: TRF_Mr_Hydecc
On January 30, 1950, the development of the hydrogen fusion bomb was ordered by President Harry Truman. This new type of thermonuclear device was far more powerful than the fission bombs used against Japan in WWII.
1911
On February 1st, 101 years ago, fingerprints were used for the first time in the US to convict a person in a court of law. Thomas Jennings was sentenced to death and hanged in Cook County, Illinois for the murder of Clarence Hiller.
1903
Photo credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library
Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale was born 110 years ago yesterday. She developed new x-ray technology in order to study crystal structures. Her work, though seemingly esoteric, had an enormous impact on organic chemistry. She was the first woman to be elected (1945) to the Royal Society of London. Born into an Irish middle class family of ten at a time when it was rare for women to even attend college, she went on to become a tenured professor at University College London and the first woman president of the Union of Crystallography.
1855
The first commercially viable “mechanical calculating machine” was patented to a William Seward Burroughs, born January 28, 1855. The patent was submitted in 1885 and he formed his company, the American Arithmometer Company, shortly after, in 1886 (we kind of wish there were still companies around with names like that…) The wealth built by his invention enabled his grandson, William S. Burroughs II, to become a member of the beat generation instead of a banker. You could say his poetry was built partly by a calculator…
1400
Photo Credit: Cecil Sanders via cc
(Not specific to January, but sort of feels that way after last week…)
In 1400, and a few centuries before and after, it was significantly colder across the globe than normally… the world was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. Average temperatures across the globe plunged and stunted human population growth and agricultural potential for much of the (normally) temperate world. The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished and the population of Iceland was halved. Certain agricultural products were abandoned because of changing rain patterns…orange crops in southern China failed and the Thames River in London froze. The Little Ice Age only ended about one hundred years ago, at the end of the 19th century or the early 20th century, bringing about another re-adjustment in agriculture and population (ahem, Great Plains).
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. – Dr. Emmett Brown.
Here’s a look back at the maker world and beyond!
2011
Two years ago Becky was still broadcasting Make: Live from her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
2010
Three years ago we launched book-selling with our perennially popular Arduino and electronics guides.
2008
Five years ago Phil and Make sent TV-B-Gone Kit to CES, to widespread acclaim and confusion when tvs at booths across CES were mysteriously silenced.
2006
On New Year’s Day seven years ago, LadyAda felt compelled to stay at home & organize all the x0xb0x stuff for the third run. The satisfying results pictured above.
Way Back In Time…
1948
On January 24, 1948, IBM dedicated an early prototype, called a Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, in New York City. The machine occupied a 30′x60′ room, with space for a punch card operator to work in the center.
1930
Today in 1930 Clyde Tombaugh photographed what was then labeled the last planet to be discovered in the solar system, Pluto. Pluto has subsequently been downgraded to a mere dwarf planet after it was discovered that it shared the Kuiper belt with several other bodies.
1911
On January 23rd, 102 years ago, after having already earned a Nobel Prize, Marie Curie was denied entrance into the French Academy of Sciences. She went on to win a second prize despite the Academy.
Road? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. - Dr. Emmett Brown. For the third edition of Time Travel Tuesday, we’ll be looking at Christmas day here at Adafruit, across the DIY, open source and science/tech world!
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