This Day in Geek History: March 7 Happy Bday Cameron Daddo :) nothing need be said 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, age 29, receives a patent for an “Improvement in Telegraphy,” which will later come to be known as the variable resistance telephone. (US No. 174,465) It will go on to become one of the single most hotly-contested patent in history. The patent application was submitted on February 14th, allegedly just two hours ahead of Elisha Gray. This first telephone has only one transducer for both listening and speaking. Originally envisioned as a way to transmit music to homes from a central location, the phone will soon gain popularity as a means of communication, becoming indispensable and highly lucrative. On March 10th, Bell will speak the famous words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” through a phone to his assistant after spilling some acid in their workshop. The message will be the first transmitted over a telephone. At the time of his patent is granted, Bell’s device had never yet worked. Due to suspicious circumstances surrounding this critical patent, many historians will later credit Gray and not Bell with the invention. According to later historical investigations, Bell’s lawyer had been holding Bell’s patent application at the ready for several months in Washington, D.C., while awaiting a patent grant in Britain, where patents are, at the time, were only granted to inventions not previous patented elsewhere. When his lawyer learned that Gray would be submitting a caveat featuring a (water) liquid transmitter, a brief seven sentence description of the innovation not present in the British application was appended to Bell’s own application. Bell’s lawyer then hand-delivered the application to the patent office just before noon, hours after Gray’s application. However, he also demanded that the application be taken straight to the patent examiner. Several weeks later, when the examiner noticed the conflicting patents, Bell was called to Washington to prove under the patent office’s first to invent rules that the Mercury liquid transmitter in his application had been his idea. Bell offered a previous patent that used Mercury as a circuit break as proof, and on March 3rd, Bells patent application is approved, despite the fact that the Mercury described by Bell’s lawyer in the application would later be proven to be ineffectual as a liquid transmitter. Within a days of receiving the patent, the Bell Company (Bell’s newly formed corporation) is besieged by lawsuits and challenges to the patent. The United States Supreme Court will ultimately upholding Bell’s patent, and Bell will go down in history as the inventor of the telephone. 1926 The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation is held between New York City and London. 1933 The game Monopoly is created and trademarked by Charles Darrow in Atlantic City. It is preceded by several other real estate games. The first, called “The Landlord’s Game,” was invented by Lizzie Magie of Virginia (patented 1904). In it, players rented properties, paid utilities and avoided “Jail” as they moved around the board. Darrow set about creating his own version, modeled on his favorite resort, Atlantic City. He introduced several innovations in his game, which had a circular, cloth board. He color-coded the properties and deeds for them, and allowed properties to be bought, rather than rented. The playing pieces are modeled on items from around his own house. The game will be mass marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935. 1955 NBC airs the musical “Peter Pan” starring Mary Martin as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook live on the anthology series “Producers’ Showcase.” It’s the first full-length Broadway production ever broadcast on color television. The show attracts an all-time record audience of 65 million and garners widespread critical acclaim. It’s success inspires a flurry of Broadway re-stagings in the coming year as well as an encore performance in January 1956. 1975 The MITS Altair newsletter, “Computer Notes,” announces the release of the Altair BASIC programming language. The language is the first product released by Micro-Soft. It will be distributed by MITS for the Altair 8800, which was released in January and sold through Popular Electronics and other hobby magazines. 1979 Scientists discover a ring around Jupiter while examining photographs taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The rings of Saturn were discovered in 1610, and the rings around Uranus were discovered in 1977. 1990 In the case of Atari Games and Tengen, Inc. v Nintendo of America, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rules in favor of Nintendo, allowing Nintendo to sue retailers who buy unauthorized video game cartridges. Read the ruling. Richard G. Wittman Jr., age 24, of Denver, Colorado admits breaking into NASA computer systems at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In his plea bargain, Wittman pleads guilty to a single count of altering information (a password) inside a federal computer. In exchange for the plea, federal prosecutors drop six similar counts. Wittman told U.S. District Judge Sherman Finesilver that it took him about one and a half to two hours on a personal computer using telnet via telephone lines in his apartment to tap into the space agency’s restricted files. Afterwords, it took NASA investigators nearly three hundred hours to track down Wittman and an additional one hundred hours to rewrite the software to prevent a recurrence of the break-in. Wittman broke into 118 systems within the NASA network and acquired “super user” status, allowing him to review the files and electronic mail of other users. Wittman admitted to the judge that he had little in the way of a computer education, stating that he had learned most of what he knew from the hand full of books the FBI had seized from his home in the course of his arrest. 1994 Intel 90MHz ProcessorIntel releases its second generation of Pentium Processors with clock speeds of 90MHz and 100MHz. 1996 NASA releases the first photos of the surface of the planet Pluto, the only planet in our solar-system never visited by a spacecraft. The images were captured in 1994 by the Hubble Space Telescope. To create a global map of the surface of Pluto, a team of astronomers took a total of twelve images at four distinct longitudes in the visible light spectrum and eight images in the ultraviolet spectrum as the planet rotated through its 6.4 day period in order to cover nearly the entire surface of Pluto. The photos reveal that the surface of Pluto has more large-scale contrast than any other planet but Earth. They also show almost a dozen distinctive albedo features, or provinces, never seen before. 1997 eMate 300Apple Computer releases the eMate 300, featuring a distinctive translucent green clamshell case. The device will be marketed as a low-cost laptop for the education market. The device features a 25 MHz ARM 710a RISC processor, the Newton operating system, It’s design will prove to be so popular that Apple will later reuse elements of its design in its first generation iBook. Code-name: Project K, Schoolbook, Shay Price: US$800 Epic MegaGames, Inc. announces the Jay Wilbur, the former chief executive officer of id Software, has been hired as “Imperial Advisor.” For the first time ever, an internet entry wins Bob Levey’s Washington Post neologism contest. Contestants are charged with creating a new word to describe a negative reaction to Washington. Scott Burroughs’ suggestion, “sqwashington,” arrived just eleven minutes before an identical entry. Nintendo plans to cut the price of its Nintendo 64 video game console from US$199 to US$150 in the United States. A Japanese newspaper reports that the cuts come in response to Sony Computer Entertainment America’s (SCEA) recent PlayStation price reductions, but Nintendo will refuse to confirm that suspicion. 1998 The website of The Jerusalem Post is hacked. 2000 The Intel Corporation announces a plan to offer a personal computer and Internet access for free to all of its seventy thousand full-time and part-time employees as early as July 2000. 2001 Express files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Jesus Oquendo, age 27, of Queens, New York is convicted and sentenced in Manhattan federal court to a twenty-seven month prison sentence on charges of computer hacking into the system of Five Partners Asset Management LLC, a venture capital company based in Manhattan, under the alias of “Sil”. Oquendo left a taunting message on the company’s network, “Hello, I have just hacked into your system. Have a nice day.” 2002 Nintendo Wifi Connection Network LogoApple Computer announces the one millionth download of its iPhoto software. Sony announces that it will release a Linux development kit for the PlayStation 2 on May 22. The US$200 kit will include a 40GB hard drive, an Ethernet adapter, a mouse, and a keyboard. 2006 At 1:31AM PST, the one millionth unique user joins the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection network. Microsoft publicly announces that it has been granted its five thousandth U.S. patent. The patent is for technology used to create a distinct “spectator experience” in Xbox 360 video games. Microsoft has a long track record of using its patents as leverage in dominating licensing markets, and it files as many as three thousand applications annually. By February 2009, the company will have registered its ten thousandth patent. 2007 Captain America comicThe Marvel comic Captain America number 25 hits shelves. In it, Captain America dies after being shot by a sniper twice, once through the shoulder and once in the stomach as he leaves a Federal Courthouse in New York City. Captain America first appeared in print in 1941, and he was actively featured in comics sold in seventy-five countries for nearly sixty years. 2007 In Turkey, the state-run Türk Telekom, Turkey’s single largest fixed-line telecommunications provider, blocks access to the video host YouTube after a court deems videos mocking Turkish founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to be insulting. In Turkey, insulting Ataturk is a criminal offense, however the broad censorship of the internet’s most popular video host sparks controversy in western nations. 2009 NASA launches the Kepler spacecraft from Cape Canaveral. Named in honor of German astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft carries a space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way over the course of the next three years
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 02:50:34 +0000
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