1900: Boston’s Symphony Hall, an acoustical marvel in its day and still regarded as one of the world’s great concert halls, opens with an inaugural concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Unlike most American concert halls, which tend to favor a wider, fan-shaped configuration, Symphony Hall was built along European lines — deep, narrow and high. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘19th century’
Oct. 15, 1900: Boston Embraces the Sound of Music
October 15th, 2010 |
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Oct. 13, 1884: Greenwich Resolves Subprime Meridian Crisis
October 13th, 2010 |
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1884: Geographers and astronomers adopt Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, the international standard for zero degrees longitude.
The late 19th century was an era of standardization. With the Second Industrial Revolution stimulating world trade, the Treaty of the Meter established the International System of weights and measures in 1875. With railroads linking together entire continents, nations [...]
Sept. 30, 1846: Ether He Was the First or He Wasn’t
September 30th, 2010 |
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1846: Dentist William Morton uses ether to anesthetize a patient in Boston. It was not the first such use, but it began a train of events leading to the widespread adoption of ether for surgical anesthesia.
Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, removed a tumor from the neck of James Venable under ether anesthesia March 30, [...]
Sept. 28, 1865: England Gets Its First Woman Physician, the Hard Way
September 28th, 2010 |
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1865: Elizabeth Garrett becomes the first woman in England to receive a medical license.
It didn’t come easy.
Bound by the restrictions on sex and class that prevailed in Victorian England, Garrett, the daughter of a London pawnbroker, was inspired to enter medicine after meeting Elizabeth Blackwell, the first practicing woman physician in the United States. First, [...]
Sept. 21, 1866: Wells Springs Forth
September 21st, 2010 |
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1866: Sci-fi legend and determined futurist Herbert George Wells is born into the lower middle class in England. The prolific author of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and many more immeasurably influential works will eventually produce an essential literary legacy that has since transcended time altogether — while terrorizing minds with debilitating [...]
Sept. 20, 1842: Dewar’s Fortune Is Scotched
September 20th, 2010 |
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1842: Sir James Dewar is born, but not into a vacuum. He will invent a vessel designed to make research into gases at extreme low temperatures easier, and it does. But the Dewar Flask also becomes the thermos bottle we use to this day, and — in a cruel twist of fate — its inventor [...]
Sept. 15, 1884: Eyeing Cocaine as Local Anesthetic
September 15th, 2010 |
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1884: A medical breakthrough just four days old opens the eyes of ophthalmologists at a medical convention — cocaine works as a local anesthetic.
“The cocaine business has indeed brought me much honor, but the lion’s share to others.”
This immortal line was written, not by Stringer Bell, but by Sigmund Freud. In 1884, the young researcher [...]
Sept. 13, 1833: Imported Ice Chills, Thrills India
September 13th, 2010 |
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1833: Nearly 100 tons of ice, cut in blocks from frozen New England lakes earlier in the year, arrives in Calcutta. The first shipment of ice imported to India soon fires up a market for cold drinks in a country unaccustomed to such a chilly luxury.
The transoceanic operation, undertaken by the Tudor Ice Co., began [...]
August 27, 1874: He’s Ammoniac, Ammoniac at the Fore
August 27th, 2010 |
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1874: Carl Bosch, a chemist whose work would transform agriculture and industry — and eventually enable the Green Revolution — is born.
Bosch’s contribution to humanity was the development of the Haber-Bosch process, a technique for creating ammonia in large quantities.
Ammonia is an essential component of agricultural fertilizers, because it’s rich in nitrogen — which makes [...]
Aug. 26, 1883: Krakatau Erupts, Changes World … Again
August 26th, 2010 |
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1883: Krakatau volcano in the Dutch East Indies roars to life with a volley of ever-increasing explosions. It will culminate the next morning with the loudest explosion in human history.
Krakatau (aka Krakatoa) had been rumbling and sending up puffs of ash since May 1883. The eruption turned deadly on the afternoon of Aug. 26, [...]
Aug. 19, 1839: Photography Goes Open Source
August 19th, 2010 |
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1839: With a French pension in hand, Louis Daguerre reveals the secrets of making daguerreotypes to a waiting world. The pioneering photographic process is an instant hit.
Using chemical reactions to make images with light was not quite new. Doing it fast was. Inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niepce created a rough image using silver salts and [...]
Aug 17, 1859: U.S. Airmail Carried by Balloon
August 17th, 2010 |
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1859: Mail is carried by air for the first time in the United States.
On a hot summer day as the temperature soared toward 91 degrees, John Wise stood at the town square in Lafayette, Indiana, waiting next to a balloon named Jupiter. Even for a balloon enthusiast and a well-known aeronaut, it was a big [...]
Aug. 12, 1888: Road Trip! Berta Takes the Benz
August 12th, 2010 |
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1888: Berta Benz, wife of inventor Karl Benz, takes her husband’s car on the first documented road trip in an automobile.
The trip would also include the first road repairs, the first automotive marketing stunt, the first case of a wife borrowing her husband’s car without asking, and the first violation of intercity highway laws [...]
Aug. 9, 1854: Thoreau Warns, ‘The Railroad Rides on Us’
August 9th, 2010 |
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1854: Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, or, Life in the Woods. His distillation of two years living in relative seclusion offers deep insights not just into the natural world and humanity’s place in it, but how that relationship was being impacted — and degraded — by the Industrial Revolution. It remains to this day a [...]
July 27, 1866: Trans-Atlantic Cable Connects Old World to New
July 27th, 2010 |
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1866: After years of planning, development and more than a few snafus, the trans-Atlantic cable is successfully laid and put into operation.
Telegraphic communication was in its infancy — it had only been 22 years since Samuel F.B. Morse made his historic transmission between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore — when the cable, stretching from Follhummerum Bay [...]
July 9–10, 1856: Visionary Tesla Born at Midnight
July 9th, 2010 |
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1856: Scientific genius and visionary inventor Nikola Tesla is born at the stroke of midnight in the unassuming village of Smiljan, in what’s now Croatia. He wastes little time in revolutionizing the world through foundational developments in electromagnetism, electrical current, wireless power and communications, weaponry, robotics, computer science, mass media and much more.
“Tesla is like [...]
June 28, 1846: Parisian Inventor Patents Saxophone
June 28th, 2010 |
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1846: Emerging from his Paris workshop, musician-inventor Adolphe Sax files 14 patents for an instrument destined to revolutionize American music nearly a century later. His new invention: the saxophone.
Initially crafted from wood, Sax’s instruments flared at the tip to form a music-amplifying bell. Designed in seven sizes from sopranino to contrabass, the saxophone combined the [...]