Miscellaneous Technology
Sony Walkman Makes Music Portable
July 1, 1979
The first Sony Walkman, the TPS-L2, goes on sale in Japan. It would go on sale in the US about a year later. By allowing owners to carry their personal music with them, the Walkman and their iconic headphones introduce a revolution in listening habits and popular culture at large.
The Transition to Transistors Begins
June 30, 1948
Originally designed to create improvements to electromechanical relays and vacuum tubes in telephone switching equipment, Bell Labs holds a press conference in New York to publicly demonstrate the first point-contact transistor. The transistor represents a significant advance in technology. As it is developed over the next few years, it will become the successor to the vacuum tube, the primary method of controlling electronic circuitry at the time. The use of transistors allows the development of the integrated circuit and microchips which kickstarted the rapid advance of electronic and computerized technology over the last 70+ years. Every industry that utilizes technology, from communications to computers to space travel to video games to media, owes a great deal to the development of the transistor.
I PC, UPC …
June 26, 1974
A Universal Product Code (UPC) is used to ring up a purchase for the first time at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The first item scanned was a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit gum. Take that to your trivia contents!
The First Practical Typewriter Patented
June 23, 1868
Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule are awarded a patent for the “Type-Writer” which would become the basis for the first practical and commercially successful typewriter. Evolving into what would become known as the Sholes and Glidden typewriter (which would later become the Remington No. 1), one of its lasting legacies was the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, which is still the most popular keyboard layout in the world to this day.
A popular theory states that the design of the QWERTY keyboard was intended to slow down typists in order to minimize the clashing of the typebars which would jam up the early typewriters. There is little evidence to support this theory, however, and a research study published in 2011 asserts that the QWERTY design was more directly influenced by feedback from telegraph operators who were early adopters of typewriters and found previous keyboard layouts inefficient.
Greenwich Becomes Mean
June 22, 1675
King Charles II of Britain decrees the establishment of an observatory at Greenwich for the purpose of finding better ways of determining the longitudinal locations of ships at sea. The prevailing theory at the time was that accurate star charts combined with a table of the moon’s position would help navigators establish how far east or west of Greenwich they were located. Ironically, this method did not prove reliable enough and eventually a time-based method was developed when clockmaker John Harrison created spring-driven timepieces that could keep accurate enough time on ships. It took nearly 100 years after the establishment of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich for Harrison’s method to be accepted as a reliable standard. British mariners would set at least one chronometer on their ship to Greenwich Mean Time in order to calculate their precise longitude. By 1884 72% of global commerce used nautical charts based on Greenwich and in that year it was established as the Prime Meridian of the world which also lead to Greenwich Mean Time becoming the international time standard. In the 1970’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) would become the world time standard, using GMT as its base time zone (UTC+00:00).
UNIX and UNIX-based operating systems keep time by using UTC and applying an offset for the local time zone. Notably only the Windows operating system uses local time as the assumptive basis for your computer’s clock. In fact, UNIX-based operating systems define the current time by the number of seconds which have passed since 00:00:00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970, otherwise known as the UNIX epoch. So for those of you following along, a decree by a king in 1675 is the basis for how much of our technology of today keeps track of time.
Ford Motor Company Incorporated
June 16, 1903
Henry Ford incorporates the Ford Motor Company with ten investors and $28,000. Ford will begin building automobiles on Mack Avenue in Detroit in a converted factory that previously produced wagons. This was Ford’s 3rd attempt at building a company that produced cars and the investment was down to $300 before the first Ford was sold. Eventually the Ford Model T would be largely responsible for popularizing the automobile to the general public, at one point representing half of all cars on the road.
Tokyo Skytree Completed
February 29, 2012
Construction of the Tokyo Skytree broadcast tower, delayed two months due to the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami, is completed on leap day – February 29th, 2012. The Tokyo Skytree is the tallest structure in Japan and the world’s tallest tower.