This Day in Geek History: October 3 1899 John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri patents the motor-driven vacuum cleaner as a “pneumatic carpet renovator.” (US No. 634,042) He offers the services of his gasoline-powered vacuum from a horse-drawn wagon at US$4 per visit in St. Louis, but by 1906, Thurman will begin offering built-in central vacuum systems. .1901 Victor Talking Machine Company is founded by Eldridge R Johnson and Emile Berliner. 1906 In Berlin, the second international conference on wireless telegraphy adopts SOS as the international distress signal to replace the previous CQD call sign. 1922 A photo is sent via facsimile over public telephone lines for the first time. The image is sent between 1519 Connecticut Ave and the U.S. Navy Radio Staion NOF at Anacostia in Washington D.C. 1942 An A4-rocket (a modified V-2) developed under the direction of Werner von Braun is successfully launched from the Test Stand VII in Peenemünde, Germany. The 13-ton, 46-foot long V2 rocket flies perfectly over the course of 118 miles to an altitude of 53 miles (85km), becoming the first man-made object to reach space. 1947 At the California Institute of Technology, the world’s first two hundred inch diameter telescope lens, created for the Mount Palomar Observatory is finally completed after eleven years of grinding and polishing. The lens is the first of its size ever manufactured in the U.S. It began as twenty tons of glass heated to 2,700º Fahrenheit and cast in a ceramic mold on December 2, 1934. The lens will later be mounted in the Hale Telescope, named for the late Dr. George E. Hale. 1950 The U.S. Patent Office issues a patent for the transistor entitled “Three-Electrode Circuit Element Utilizing Semiconductive Materials” to AT&T Bell Laboratories researchers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. (US No. 2,524,035) The transistor had begun a revolution in the computer industry that lead to integrated circuits, microprocessors, and semiconductors. 1952 The first video recording captured on magnetic tape is shot in Los Angeles, California. The United Kingdom successfully tests its first atomic bomb, “Hurricane,” four hundred yards off the coast of the Monte Bello Islands off the Australian coast, becoming the world’s third nuclear power. In order to test the potential threat of a bomb smuggled in a ship, the bomb was detonated inside the hull of the frigate HMS Plym. Despite the explosion beginning in a ship and nine feet below the water line, the explosion created a crater twenty feet deep and a thousand feet across. In 1998, a visit to the islands will be limited to just an hour due to radiation that still lingers from the test. 1962 Sigma 7 is launched from Cape Canaveral, with astronaut Wally Schirra aboard, on a mission that will orbit the Earth six times over the course of nine-hours. 1963 The X-15 rocket plane achieves a world record speed of Mach 6.7, or about 4,520 mph, piloted by U.S. Air Force pilot Pete Knight. The internal structure of the X-15 is titanium with a skin of Inconel X, a chrome-nickel alloy. It reaches an altitude of 192,100 feet (58,552km). 1985 The Space Shuttle Atlantis,the fourth operational shuttle, embarks on its maiden flight. (STS-51-J) It’s mission is undertaken on the behalf of the Department of Defense. 1986 The Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) superconducting cyclotron at the Chalk River Laboratories opens. It is the world’s first Tandem Accelerator. 1988 The Space Shuttle Discovery completes a four-day mission, the first American shuttle flight since the Challenger disaster. The Turner Network Television (TNT) cable network is launched in U.S. with a starting subscriber base of seventeen million homes, the largest base of any cable channel launch to date. The network’s first program is the 1939 file Gone with the Wind. 1990 Nintendo sends letter to its licensees, extending to them the opportunity to manufacture their own game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System game console. 1995 Be introduces the BeBox, featuring two 66MHz PowerPC 603, up to 256MB RAM, a SCSI II bus, 16-bit CD-quality sound, three PCI slots, four MIDI ports, four serial ports, and five ISA slots. The hardware of the system will generally fail to achieve any popularity, however the company’s multithreaded, memory-protected, object-oriented, preemptively multitasking operating system will be a success. Price: US$1,600 – US$3,000 2002 Scott Dudley of Lanius Corporation releases the final version (3.02) of Maximus BBS Software under a GNU Public License. 2004 A new version of Beast, a backdoor trojan horse or RAT (Remote Administration Tool), released. Originally, written in Delphi by “Tataye” in 2002, the popular trojan is capable of infecting all Windows operating systems from 95 through XP. 2005 Hewlett-Packard announces that it has agreed to acquire RLX Technologies, a pioneer blade server hardware. The Internet Archive and an international group partners launch the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Permanent storage and scanning for the Open Content Alliance will be administered by the Internet Archive, which will also provide access through its website. The organization comes in response to Google Book Search, launched in October 2004. Where Google digitizes copyrighted works unless the rights holds specifically opts out, the OCA seeks permission from copyright holders before digitizing works. 2006 Defective by Design, an initiative organized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) launches a campaign against Digital rights management (DRM), declaring October 3rd a “Day Against DRM.” As a part of the campaign protests are organized outside several Apple Stores across the U.K. and U.S. Protesters wear hazmat suits to picket and hand out fliers explaining iTune’s DRM. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces it decision to award the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation,” which supports the Big Bang Theory and helps explain the origins of stars and galaxies. Version 11.0 of the Slamd64 Linux distribution is released. Slamd64 is the first unofficial port of Slackware to the x86-64 architecture. 2007 Russia and the United States mark the fiftieth anniversary the launch of Sputnik I, the first satellite, by forming a pact under which Russian scientific instruments will be used on future NASA missions in an attempt to locate water on Mars and the Moon. Specifically, NASA engineers want to use the Russian Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) during their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission to the Moon in October 2008 in order to explore the potential for a permanent manned lunar station in the future and aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, an unmanned mission scheduled to land on Mars in 2010 to analyze the planet’s surface. Read more at Reuters. 2010 Google acquires BlindType, a startup developing mobile technology that allows users to look at a screen less while typing.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 21:44:10 +0000
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