Miscellaneous Technology

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.

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.

June 11, 1978

Texas Instruments Inc. introduces the Speak & Spell, a talking educational toy for children. The device features the first electronic duplication of the human voice on a single chip of silicon. It transformed digital information processed through a filter into synthetic speech and could store more than 100 seconds of linguistic sounds.

June 9, 1993

The motion picture Jurassic Park premiers in Washington D.C. The highest grossing film in history at the time, the contributions of Jurassic Park to the field of special effects is perhaps as important as the original Star Wars movie 16 years prior. During the production of the movie, the decision was made to incorporate the use of computer generated imagery (CGI for short) in a large scale. By interweaving the use of CGI and animatronics, the movie’s special effects were of a realism unprecedented at the time (and for many still to this day). Jurassic Park jump started a wave of movies that made heavy use of CGI throughout the rest of the 90’s, and at present, the use of CGI pioneered by the movie is now entirely commonplace.

June 4, 1977

The VHS videocassette format is introduced as Vidstar in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show starts in Chicago. VHS, or Video Home System, was based on an open standard developed by JVC in 1976. As compared to the Sony Betamax format it would compete against, VHS allowed longer playtime, faster rewinding, and fast-forwarding.

June 3, 1983

The science fiction film WarGames is released. Notable for bringing the hacking phenomena to the attention of the American public, it ignites a media sensation regarding the hacker sub-culture. The film’s NORAD set is the most expensive ever built at the time at a cost of $1 million dollars. Not widely known is that the movie studio provided the film’s star, Matthew Broderick, with the arcade games Galaga and Galaxian so he could get first-hand experience before shooting the film’s arcade scenes.

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.