1945:: A Japanese balloon bomb kills six people in rural eastern Oregon. They are the only World War II U.S. combat casualties in the 48 states.
Months before an atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima, the United States and Japan were locked in the final stages of World War II. The United States had turned the tables and [...]
Posts Tagged ‘20th century’
May 4, 2000: Tainted ‘Love’ Infects Computers
May 4th, 2010 |
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2000: The “I Love You” virus spreads to 55 million computers around the world. The damage reaches billions of dollars.
It was the love letter heard round the world. A little over a year after the Melissa Virus shattered the internet’s innocence, a student in the Philippines got the idea to craft a Visual Basic script [...]
April 30, 1939: The Future Arrives at New York World’s Fair
April 30th, 2010 |
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1939: The New York World’s Fair opens in Flushing Meadow Park. It will give visitors a glimpse of “the world of tomorrow” and shape industrial design, pop culture and the way the future would envision the future.
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1939’s ‘World of Tomorrow’ Shaped Our Today
April 30th, 2010 |
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The New York World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 promised visitors they would be looking at the “World of Tomorrow.” Not everything they saw there came true, but plenty was close. One reason for that was the fair’s own lasting influence on American architecture and industrial design.
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April 26, 1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Suffers Cataclysmic Meltdown
April 26th, 2010 |
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1986: Design flaws, compounded by human errors, cause Soviet engineers to lose control of a reaction at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. A partial meltdown occurs. Many die. Many more suffer. The final count of victims may not be over yet.
When someone says “nuclear disaster” you don’t think Three Mile Island. You probably don’t think [...]
April 22, 1993: Mosaic Browser Lights Up Web With Color, Creativity
April 22nd, 2010 |
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1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0, the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public, is released. With it, the web as we know it begins to flourish.
The web in the early 1990s was mostly text. People were posting images, photos, and audio or video clips on web pages. But these pieces of “multimedia” were [...]
April 21, 1987: Feds OK Patents for New Life Forms
April 21st, 2010 |
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1987: The U.S. Patent and Trademark office announces it will begin accepting patent applications for animals.
A year later, Harvard University was awarded the first such patent — the Oncomouse, a mouse researchers produced to be especially susceptible to getting cancer.
Three decades later, the government has issued about 800 animal patents –- on everything from [...]
April 19, 1965: How Do You Like It? Moore, Moore, Moore
April 19th, 2010 |
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1965: Gordon Moore publishes a pithy four-page analysis of the integrated-circuit business, in which he correctly predicts that chip complexity will regularly double for the foreseeable future.
Moore was, at the time, the chief of research and development for Fairchild Semiconductor, a seminal Silicon Valley startup. He later went on to co-found Intel. His prediction turned [...]
April 16, 1943: Setting the Stage for World’s First Acid Trip
April 16th, 2010 |
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1943: Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the psychedelic properties of LSD.
Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, was researching the synthesis of a lysergic acid compound, LSD-25, when he inadvertently absorbed a bit through his fingertips. Intrigued by the stimulating effects on his perception, Hofmann decided further exploration was warranted. Three days later he ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, [...]
April 14, 1996: JenniCam Starts Lifecasting
April 14th, 2010 |
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College student Jennifer Kaye Ringley turns on her “JenniCam” for the first time and begins uploading pictures of herself to the web. Refreshed every three minutes, JenniCam.org displays black-and-white images that track Ringley’s daily activities, which ranges from mundane tasks and chitchat to stripteases and sexual activity.
Raised as a nudist, 19-year old Ringley installed the [...]
April 13, 1953: CIA OKs MK-ULTRA Mind-Control Tests
April 13th, 2010 |
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1953: Central Intelligence Agency director Allen Dulles authorizes the MK-ULTRA project. The agency launches one of its most dubious covert programs ever, turning unsuspecting humans into guinea pigs for its research into mind-altering drugs.
More than a decade before psychologist Timothy Leary advocated the benefits of LSD and urged everyone to “turn on, tune in, drop [...]
April 12, 1994: Immigration Lawyers Invent Commercial Spam
April 12th, 2010 |
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1994: Members of more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups find themselves the recipients of a message imploring them to use the legal services of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel to ensure their place in line for a green card from the U.S government.
It didn’t matter that most recipients had no need for such services. They’d [...]
April 7, 1933: King Kong Opens Wide
April 7th, 2010 |
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1933: Depression-era moviegoers hungry for escape line up outside theaters for the first nationwide screenings of King Kong.
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Mega-Monsters Make Magnificent Movies
They emerged stunned by groundbreaking scenes crafted by visual effects wizard Willis O’Brien. The stop-motion pioneer transformed an 18-inch gorilla doll into a hulking monster that appears to swat airplanes atop [...]
April 6, 1903: Edgerton Born, Father of High-Speed Photography
April 6th, 2010 |
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1903: Harold Edgerton is born. The electrical engineer and photographer will change the way we see the world: fast.
Edgerton invented stop-action, high-speed photography, helping push the obscure stroboscope from a laboratory instrument into a household item. He used the technique to make a body of work that’s revered both for its scientific advancement and its [...]
April 5, 1998: Tamagotchi Distracts Driver, Kills Cyclist
April 5th, 2010 |
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1998: A driver in Marseilles, France is distracted by her Tamagotchi virtual pet. She plows into a group of cyclists, killing one and injuring another.
Tamagotchi, created by the Japanese toymaker Bandai in 1996, kicked off the “digital pet” craze. It was an egg-shaped electronic keychain with a tiny black-and-white LCD screen that played a simple, [...]
April 2, 1973: Lexis Launches Computerized Legal Searching
April 2nd, 2010 |
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1973: The law goes electronic, as the private computer-information service Lexis launches publicly.
The original Lexis product was limited to full-text searching of all cases in Ohio and New York. It took the company seven years to finally complete its manual indexing of all federal and state cases in the United States. That same year, [...]
April 1, 1998: Disney to Buy MIT for $6.9 Billion
April 1st, 2010 |
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1998: Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, long known for their school pranks, hack the school’s home page to announce to the world that the Walt Disney Co. would purchase MIT for $6.9 billion.
The prestigious school would be renamed the Disney Institute of Technology, according to an April Fools’ Day press release linked to the bogus [...]
March 31, 1901: Wuppertal Monorail Opens
March 31st, 2010 |
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1901: A suspended monorail opens in Germany, whisking passengers on an 8.3-mile loop some 40 feet over the Wupper River. Though not the world’s first single-track hanging rail system, it’s the world’s oldest monorail still in operation and Europe’s only suspended railway.
At the dawn of the era of train travel, the hilly Wupper Valley was [...]
March 29, 1927: Fastest Slug in the World
March 29th, 2010 |
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1927: The Sunbeam 1000 HP, aka the Slug, was the first car to go faster than 200 mph, in Daytona Beach, Florida. The great Henry Segrave was at the wheel and set a new land-speed record of 203.79 miles per hour.
Although the car was best-known as the “1000 HP” car, it actually had closer to [...]
March 26, 1999: ‘Melissa’ Wreaks Havoc on Net
March 26th, 2010 |
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1999: The “Melissa” worm makes a sudden appearance, screwing up specific e-mail programs by clogging them with infected e-mails issuing from the worm. It is the first successful mass-mailing worm.
Melissa was first distributed in alt.sex, a Usenet discussion group, hidden inside a file that contained the passwords to 80 pornographic websites. The worm was then [...]