1994: Wired.com, then known as HotWired, invents the web banner ad. Go ahead, blame us.
The Mosaic browser was just morphing into Netscape in 1994. And if you think ads slow down page loads now, readers had to download the first banner ads over thin dial-up connections.
Despite those handicaps, the gaudy banner ad took over the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘20th century’
Oct. 26, 1948: Death Cloud Envelops Pennsylvania Mill Town
October 26th, 2010 |
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1948: An inversion layer settles over the rust belt town of Donora, Pennsylvania, trapping industrial pollution in the atmosphere. When it clears six days later, 20 people are dead, another 50 are dying and hundreds will live out their days with permanently damaged lungs.
Inversion occurs when the air near the ground is cooler than the [...]
Oct. 20, 1984: An Aquarium for the Ages Opens
October 20th, 2010 |
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1984: The Monterey Bay Aquarium opens in California.
The aquarium occupies the site of an old sardine cannery at the edge of Monterey Bay, one of the most fertile and diverse marine environments on earth. That diversity inspired the idea of devoting the aquarium solely to the rich marine life indigenous to its own stretch of [...]
Oct. 19, 1943: A Wonderful Discovery, and a Helluva Row
October 19th, 2010 |
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1943: A biochemistry grad student discovers streptomycin, a synthetic antibiotic used to treat tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.
Sole credit for the discovery initially went to Selman Waksman — who would receive the Nobel Prize in 1952 — who ran the laboratory at Rutgers University where the research was performed. But it was Albert Schatz, a [...]
Oct. 18, 1985: Nintendo Entertainment System Launches
October 18th, 2010 |
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1985: Nintendo releases a limited batch of Nintendo Entertainment Systems in New York City, quietly launching the most influential videogame platform of all time.
Twenty-five years ago today, the American videogame market was in shambles. Sales of game machines by Atari, Mattel and Coleco had risen to dizzying heights, then collapsed even more quickly.
Retailers didn’t [...]
Oct. 14, 1985: C++ Adds to Programming
October 14th, 2010 |
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1985: The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language is published. The author, Bjarne Stroustrup, is also the language’s creator.
Stroustrup had been hacking away at his replacement for the C programming language at AT&T Bell labs since 1979, where he and his colleagues in the research department were given free reign to experiment [...]
Oct. 11, 1995: ‘We’re Trashing the Ozone Layer’
October 11th, 2010 |
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1995: Two Americans and a Dutch scientist win the Nobel Prize for chemistry for their research showing that the release of nitrogen oxide through manmade chlorofluorocarbons damages the Earth’s natural ozone layer.
The groundwork for the Nobel was laid by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist working at the Max-Planck-Institut in Germany, who in 1970 released a [...]
October 7, 1954: IBM Gets Transistorized
October 7th, 2010 |
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1954: IBM builds the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes.
IBM already had a business selling calculating machines, and it was humming along quite nicely. The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, which IBM introduced in 1948, was a desk-sized cabinet that ate and spat out punch cards in its single-minded mission [...]
Oct. 6, 1927: The Jazz Singer Gives Movie Audiences the ‘Talkies’
October 6th, 2010 |
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1927: Prohibition-era movie audiences in New York City get drunk with excitement when they hear Broadway belter Al Jolson appear on the big screen and bark, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”
At the premiere of The Jazz Singer, attendee Doris Warner recalled that when Jolson and co-star Eugenie [...]
Oct. 5, 1931: First Nonstop Trans-Pacific Flight Ends in Cloud of Dust
October 5th, 2010 |
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1931: More than 41 hours after departing Japan, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. perform a controlled crash landing near Wenatchee, Washington. After the dust settles, they emerge from the airplane to complete the first-ever nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean.
Pangborn had served as a flight instructor during World War I, and then followed the [...]
Oct. 4, 1958: ‘Comets’ Debut Trans-Atlantic Jet Age
October 4th, 2010 |
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1958: Two DeHavilland Comets depart London and New York, each bound for the other city. Flying for the British Overseas Airways Corporation, the two aircraft complete the first trans-Atlantic jet passenger service, dramatically reducing the travel time between the United States and Europe.
Jet airliners had been around since the Comet first carried passengers from London [...]
Oct. 1, 1950: Come Fly With Me, Says BBC
October 1st, 2010 |
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1950: The BBC airs the first live, in-flight TV broadcast, from a specially outfitted plane flying over London. It is not free of glitches, but once TV stations are introduced to the concept of air supremacy, news coverage will never be the same.
Live TV from an aircraft was bound to happen — this wasn’t a [...]
Sept. 29, 1920: Radio Goes Commercial
September 29th, 2010 |
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1920: The Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh advertises ready-made radio receivers that can pick up a local broadcast station. Commercial radio is just weeks away.
Frank Conrad was assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. He’d been interested in radio since 1912. To settle a $5 bet (around $110 in today’s money) [...]
Sept. 24, 1960: First Nuclear Carrier, USS Enterprise, Launched
September 24th, 2010 |
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1960: USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is launched in Newport News, Virginia. CVN-65, nicknamed Big E, was the first carrier of its kind, powered solely by its eight nuclear reactors.
With nuclear power to propel it, the Enterprise does not need to carry its own fuel oil and has more room for aircraft and [...]
Sept. 17, 1908: First Airplane Passenger Death
September 17th, 2010 |
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1908: During flight trials to win a contract from the U.S. Signal Army Corps, pilot Orville Wright and passenger Lt. Thomas Selfridge crash in a Wright Flyer at Fort Myer, Virginia. Wright is injured, and Selfridge becomes the first passenger to die in an airplane accident.
After Wilbur and Orville Wright made their historic first-ever airplane [...]
Sept. 16, 1985: Jobs Quits AppleSept. 16, 1997: Jobs Rejoins Apple
September 16th, 2010 |
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Sept. 16: It’s an auspicious day in the history of Steve Jobs. It’s the day he quit Apple and the day he returned.
Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple Computer on Sept. 16, 1985, after losing a boardroom battle for control of the company with then-CEO John Sculley.
Jobs had co-founded Apple seven years earlier with [...]
Sept. 10, 1941: Stephen Jay Gould Born
September 10th, 2010 |
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1941: Stephen Jay Gould, who will become a famous evolutionary theorist and popular science writer, is born in New York City.
As a 5-year-old, Gould became fascinated by paleontology during a visit to the American Museum of Natural History with his father. “I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever [...]
Sept. 9, 1926: Radio Sets Up a National Broadcasting Craze
September 9th, 2010 |
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1926: The National Broadcasting Company is established. The network would dominate radio during that medium’s Golden Age and become the foundation of a massive media empire that to this day just keeps growing.
During the Radio Days, NBC was the most successful in the game, but it was far from the earliest successful player. That distinction [...]
Sept. 8, 1930: Scotch Tape Starts Sticking
September 8th, 2010 |
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1930: 3M begins marketing the first waterproof, transparent, pressure-sensitive tape after employee Richard Drew figures out how to coat strips of cellophane with adhesive.
Initially sold by the St. Paul, Minnesota, company as a moisture-proof seal for bakers, grocers and meatpackers, the product quickly got repurposed during the Depression by money-strapped consumers who used the tape [...]