This Day In Tech Events That Shaped the Wired World

March 12, 1790: Batteries Now Included

daniell11790: John Frederic Daniell, a 19th-century scientific and academic heavyweight, inventor of the first practical electric battery and all-around geek, is born in London, England.

Daniell, the son of a prominent London attorney, attended prestigious schools in Europe where he excelled in science — especially when it came to performing experiments and building instruments.

After he graduated, he ran a sugar-refining plant where he developed several technical upgrades to the refining process.

The scientific community noticed Daniell after he published several chemistry papers, and he landed a plush job with the newly anointed Continental Gas Company, a British firm dedicated to developing the burgeoning natural-gas lighting industry. His new appointment with Continental would be the 21st-century equivalent of a top job at Tesla Motors.

Daniell developed gas lighting for various French and German cities and figured out a way to generate gas resin from turpentine.

Years later, he invented the dew-point hygrometer (for gauging humidity) and a pyrometer (a device for measuring superhot temperatures). He wrote a series of papers for the Horticultural Society explaining the importance of humidity regulation in greenhouses.

But he’s best known for his contribution to portable electric power and storage. Building on what he learned about chemistry and electricity during his overseas studies and work with Continental, Daniell conceived and built the precursor to the modern-day battery in 1836.

Performing electrical experiments had previously involved mucking around with lightning (dangerous) or using a primitive battery (weak) developed by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta back in 1800. Volta’s battery, also known as a voltaic pile, consisted of stacked metal discs arranged to conduct an electric current. The battery’s juice depleted quickly and was of little practical use.

Daniell’s battery, known as the Daniell cell, lasted much longer. It used copper and zinc electrodes submerged in a solution of copper sulphate and zinc sulphate. When the zinc oxidized, it reacted with a cathode and the copper was reduced. This produced a continuous flow of electric power.

battery2

His breakthrough was key to advancing communications technology, in particular, the telegraph.

Daniell later became a high-ranking official at the Royal Society. He worked in academia until his sudden and rather mysterious death in 1845 when he was 55.

Sources: Various
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March 11, 1985: ConnNet Lets the Public Jack In, X.25 Style

1985: The nation’s first local, public packet-switching network opens for business. Can ISPs be far behind?

Hooking in to the world’s network of interconnected computers isn’t a notable event these days, especially now that millions of us have always-on connections in our mobile devices that are rarely beyond arm’s reach.

But 25 years ago, things were very different when the Southern New England Telephone Company turned on ConnNet. It was the first local, public packet-switched network in the United States.

Customers in Connecticut could connect in and reach NewsNet, the National Library of Medicine, CompuServe and Dow Jones News Retrieval. Companies could rent dedicated lines and get service from 4,800 to an astonishing 56,000 bits per second.

Computers using dial-up connections pulled down 300 to 1,200 bits per second. (If you have a 5-Mbps connection now, you are downloading more than 4,000 times as fast as the fastest ConnNet dial-up.) Employees could log in to their office mainframe remotely, if their employers paid to hook their systems into ConnNet.

ConnNet was not technically the first public internet service provider, however. It was instead part of a global network using the X.25 protocol, which was rendered obsolete in the 1990s by the more popular Internet Protocol, or IP, which you’re probably using to read this post right now.

Southern New England Telephone Company was not new to bringing the latest telecommunications technology to consumers. It opened the first commercial telephone exchange in the world in New Haven, Connecticut, on Jan. 28, 1878. It had 21 subscribers.

The company also printed the world’s first phone book. Its business was always independent of AT&T, until it was bought up in 1998 by SBC Communications (now AT&T), and is now known as AT&T Connecticut.

ConnNet’s anniversary comes a little less than a week before the FCC releases the first-ever national broadband plan, which will call for expanding broadband to all Americans — in part by making it more affordable. It sets a goal for 2020 of 100 million Americans having 100-Mbps broadband connections. That’s more than 300,000 times faster than the basic 300-bps service of 1985.

Source: Various

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March 10, 2000: Pop Goes the Nasdaq!

Wall Street

2000: The Nasdaq hits 5,048.62, the high-water mark of the dot-com boom. It’s all downhill from here.

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10 Years After: A Look Back at the Dot-com Boom and Bust

The boom is more accurately described as a bubble, since it rested largely on wild stock speculation and freewheeling venture-capital investment that resulted in the often ludicrous overvaluation of sketchy internet companies. Established business practices — for example, asking questions like “What do you guys actually do?” — were being ignored by investors and VCs hoping to cash in quick on new models that often were no models at all.

The frenzy was built on what seemed to be the limitless potential of the internet as a cash cow for those daring enough to take risks. In the end, e-commerce did become a big deal, but it has evolved pretty much along conventional business lines.

Big companies predominate and smaller entrepreneurs with a solid plan can thrive. The Jolt Cola kids, and their skateboards and Foosball tables, have largely passed from the scene.

On March 9, 2000, however, the sky was still the limit. But the euphoria, built as it was on smoke and mirrors, couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

On March 10, the Nasdaq Composite index peaked, more than doubling its value of a year before. But then the slide began, and it was a precipitous drop, which is why March 10 is generally considered the day the bubble burst.

Source: Various

Photo: Charles Molineaux delivers a live broadcast from the Nasdaq MarketSite on March 9, 2000, showing the Nasdaq composite index’s first — and so far, only — close above 5,000.
Stuart Ramson/AP

This article first appeared on Wired.com March 10, 2007.

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March 9, 1454: This Man Is a Continent … or Two

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1454: Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence, Italy. He’ll give his name to two continents.

Vespucci, the son of a notary, went to work for the Medici banking house. They dispatched him as an agent to Seville, Spain, where he arranged the fitting out of ships and the trading of their cargoes.

He seems to have been in Seville when another Italian in Spain, Christopher Columbus, returned to the nearby port of Cadiz from his first journey to the West Indies. Vespucci later helped Columbus prepare his vessels for the Genoese mariner’s second and third voyages of discovery.

Not content to sit on the sidelines when fame and fortune were in the offing, Vespucci arranged for and outfitted his own expeditions to seek a short trade route to India. Vespucci set sail in 1499 and explored the northern coast of what we now call South America. Because he was looking for India, he called the local waters there the “Gulf of the Ganges.”

On his second voyage, Vespucci made a major breakthrough. He followed the eastern coast of the new land south, and south and farther south. He was in fact off the coast of Patagonia, within 400 miles of Tierra del Fuego.

The coast was like nothing previously known to Europeans. Vespucci was convinced it wasn’t Asia at all, but a new world entirely.

Vespucci made one or perhaps two additional voyages to what some were soon calling the New World. A popular account of Vespucci’s journeys appeared in a pamphlet, “The Four Voyages of Amerigo.” It received widespread circulation, thanks to the growth of a relatively new technology, the printing press.

Martin Waldseemüller, a modernist-humanist German clergyman and cartographer, reprinted “The Four Voyages of Amerigo” in 1507 with his own “Cosmographic Introduction.” He opined:

I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part … America, after Amerigo [Vespucci], its discoverer, a man of great ability.

Waldseemüller included a map of the the new lands, on which the name “America” makes its earliest appearance.

The map was popular. The name caught on, and it stuck.

And it spread. America was first used as a name for only the southern continent of the New World, but Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map included both North America and South America.

Vespucci died in Seville in 1512. Though he reached America after Columbus (and others), it is not unjust that two continents are named in his honor. He does seem to have originated the idea that the new lands were not merely offshore islands of Asia. He reorganized the data, he shifted the paradigm, he deserves the eponym.

So, half a millennium later, the meme lives on. We do not often refer to the New World as Columbia — except in patriotic song and the name of the U.S. national capital. Nor do we call it Ericsonia or Cabotland. Nor is our nation’s name (and we should be grateful for this) Waldseemüller or the United States of Vespucci.

Source: Various

Image: Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map was the earliest to slap Amerigo Vespucci’s name on the lands bordering the western Atlantic Ocean.

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March 8, 1955: The Mother of All Operating Systems

whirlwind

1955: Computer pioneer Doug Ross demonstrates the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine. It’s a new idea: a permanent set of instructions on how the computer should operate.

Six years in the making, MIT’s Whirlwind computer was the first digital computer that could display real-time text and graphics on a video terminal, which was then just a large oscilloscope screen. Whirlwind used 4,500 vacuum tubes to process data.

The Whirlwind occupied 3,300 square feet and was the fastest digital computer of its time. It also pioneered a number of new technologies, including magnetic core memory for RAM.

Another one of its contributions was Director, a set of programming instructions on paper tape that is regarded as the predecessor of operating systems in computers. The Director was designed to issue commands to the 4-year-old Whirlwind machine.

The idea was to eliminate the need for manual intervention (.pdf) in reading the tapes for different problems during a computing session.

The Director tape would communicate with the computer through a separate input reader. That means different tapes with various problems to be computed would be recognized and appropriately processed. A Director tape would make a complete run possible by pushing a single button.

Programmers John Frankovich and Frank Helwig wrote the first Director tape program. The software concept was to connect a Flexowriter — a mechanical, heavy-duty tape reader — to a newer, faster photoelectric tape reader.

This allowed the team to feed the spliced-together paper tapes directly to Whirlwind, without having a separate human operator.

Lead programmer Doug Ross finally demonstrated it in 1955.

The Director tape was also probably the first example of a Job Control Language–driven operating system. JCL is a scripting language used on mainframe operating systems to instruct them how to run a batch job or start a subsystem.

The Whirlwind is credited with leading to development of the SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, system used by the U.S. Air Force. It’s also said to have influenced most of the computers of the 1960s.

Source: Wikipedia, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Photo: Stephen Dodd, Jay Forrester, Robert Everett and Ramona Ferenz test Whirlwind in 1950.
Courtesy Mitre Corp.

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March 5, 1904: Tesla’s Having a Ball

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1904: Physicist Nikola Tesla attempts to explain the phenomenon of “ball lightning.”

Ball lightning (if it exists at all) is an electrical discharge, usually appearing in spherical shape that, unlike regular lightning, tends to linger awhile. It occurs naturally but rarely, and despite the best efforts of Tesla and others, the exact origin of the phenomenon remains a mystery.

Although reported sightings are most common during storms and other unsettled weather, ball lighting has been observed during periods of absolute calm. It has also been spotted in some pretty screwy places: hovering over a kitchen stove, following a car down a street and, most famously, flying alongside aircraft during World War II. Allied pilots, mistaking the glowing spheres for the lights of enemy aircraft, referred to them as “foo fighters.”

“I never saw fire balls,” Tesla wrote in Electrical World and Engineer on March 5, 1904, “but as compensation for my disappointment I succeeded later in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially,” He regarded ball lightning as a manifestation of a larger phenomenon: “[T]his planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball.”

Tesla hoped to use this phenomenon to transmit through the air not only telegraph and voice signals, but electrical power itself. Contemporary reports say Tesla used a generating apparatus to create electrical balls about 1½ inches in diameter and played with them to wow onlookers.

Tesla is perhaps better known for his pioneering work on alternating current as the basis for an electrical-distribution grid. George Westinghouse bought Tesla’s patents, and AC power eventually triumphed over Thomas Edison’s competing direct-current system.

Source: PhysicsWeb, Scientific American

Image: Tesla sits in his lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, circa 1900.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com March 5, 2007.

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March 4, 1877: The Microphone Sounds Much Better

Emile Berliner

1877: Emile Berliner files a patent caveat for a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner.

Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner’s carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades. And they may not have been capable of surmounting such great distances, hindering one of humanity’s most important advances.

Like most of today’s microphones, early designs turned compressions in the air, otherwise known as sound, into electrical signals. But the results didn’t sound good by any account, and the device lacked practicality for widespread use. Bell’s microphone, for instance, involved suspending a diaphragm above a pool of electrified liquid.

Berliner’s patent application improved on the existing design by adding a layer of carbon particles in between two contacts, one of which acted as a diaphragm for catching sound waves. Movements of the diaphragm created varying pressure on the carbon particles, allowing more or less electricity to pass between the contacts.

This process converted sound waves into electricity more accurately than any other microphone could at the time. It became commonplace in telephones, and even radio, until the appearance of the condenser microphone in the mid-1920s.

Although Berliner’s microphones still sounded hissy, they proved critical not only for encoding speech into electricity, but for amplifying the signal in the wire every so often to compensate for electrical resistance. Without that amplification, Bell’s telephone would have remained a mere curiosity, rather than transforming the world.

In those pre–vacuum-tube, pre-transistor days, Berliner’s carbon-disk microphones were coupled to little speakers to amplify the signal mechanically over long distances. Presumably, you’d be able to eavesdrop on a conversation simply by standing near one of these mechanical repeaters.

Carbon Mic

Bell paid $50,000 for Berliner’s microphone patent (about $1.1 million in today’s money) and began manufacturing telephones using the technology in 1878. But controversy dogged the patent, which was eventually thrown out, much to Berliner’s dismay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Thomas Edison, and not Berliner, invented the carbon microphone.

In truth, neither can claim total credit.

As Bell executive W. Van Benthuysen told The New York Times (.pdf) in December 1891, the idea of transmitting speech by varying the current between two contacts as they are affected by sound waves was common knowledge in some circles, having appeared in published works as early as 1854 — well before either Berliner or Edison (who filed a similar patent) claimed credit for the idea in 1877.

“It was known long before the date of Bell’s [formerly Berliner's] patent that the resistance of a circuit is varied without being broken by variations in the intimacy of contact or amount of pressure between the electrodes in contact, from one to the other of which a current is passing,” said Van Benthuysen, adding that France’s Count Du Moncel had written extensively on the topic over two decades earlier.

Nonetheless, Berliner reputedly went to his grave in 1929 convinced that Edison had stolen his idea. Before that, he did receive ample credit for another crucial invention: the lateral-cut disc record, whose design is still prized by hipsters and purists alike. Before that, everybody was using Edison’s phonograph cylinders, which took up much more space, and were difficult to duplicate.

Berliner’s records were used in toys from 1888 until 1894, when his company began selling records using a logo of a dog cocking its ear towards a record player. Modified versions of the “His Master’s Voice” logo have been used by record companies around the world, including RCA in the United States. It now forms the retail entertainment chain HMV’s logo.

The saga of the carbon-button microphone comes as a reminder that while history feels the need to assign great ideas to individual people, their origins are often murky and collaborative in nature, and owe no small part to people ripping each other off.

We couldn’t find any accounts of Emile Berliner’s first words transmitted by microphone, but they were probably not “Ich bin ein Berliner” — as nice as that would have been.

Source: Various

Photo: Emile Berliner sits with a couple of microphones in 1927./Courtesy Library of Congress
Diagram courtesy TutorVista

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    March 3, 2005: Fossett Circuits Globe Alone, All in One Go

    2005: Steve Fossett completes the first nonstop, unrefueled, solo airplane flight around the world.

    Fossett — who enjoyed well-earned reputations as a sailor, aviator and adventurer — set 116 records in five sports. As of June 2007, 60 of them still stood. Among his accomplishments, Fossett set circumnavigation records in a balloon (2002) and a catamaran (2004), as well as transcontinental speed records for turboprop planes — including two in one day, in 2003.

    For his solo airplane flight, Fossett piloted a specially designed craft with a carbon-composite airframe and a single Williams jet engine, christened Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. He took off from Salina, Kansas, and headed east with the prevailing winds, returning to Salina 67 hours later, after flying 25,000 miles. His average speed of 342.2 mph set the record for unrefueled nonstop speed around the world.

    But, on the theory that you can never hold too many aviation records, Fossett made the flight again in 2006. That time, he flew the GlobalFlyer 26,389 statute miles in 76 hours, 45 minutes, establishing the record for the longest nonstop flight by any aircraft in history.

    When he wasn’t off setting records, Fossett killed time by competing in various endurance sports, like the Iditarod sled race and the Ironman Triathlon.

    Fossett disappeared Sept. 3, 2007, during what was supposed to be a brief flight in Nevada. A massive online effort failed to find Fossett or the single-engine plane he was flying. DNA analysis of bone fragments discovered near the plane wreckage a year later confirmed his death.

    Source: Wikipedia

    Photo: Richard Branson (left) and Peggy Fossett watch as Steve Fossett lands the GlobalFlyer airplane at the Salina Municipal Airport, Kansas, on March 3, 2005, after successfully flying the craft solo around the world without refueling.
    Associated Press/Charlie Riedel

    Updated from article that appeared on Wired.com March 3, 2007.

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    March 2, 1949: Around the World Without Landing

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    1949: After 94 hours, 1 minute of flying time, a Boeing B-50 named Lucky Lady II lands at Carswell Air Force Base, Texas, completing the first ever nonstop, around-the-world trip by an airplane.

    The flight covered 23,452 miles, averaging a ground speed of 249 miles per hour. The modified bomber required air-to-air refueling four times as it flew ever eastward.

    The Lucky Lady II departed Fort Worth, Texas, on Feb. 26 with the express goal of making the first nonstop transglobal flight. The airplane was an updated version of the B-29 that had fought in World War II and was close to being obsolete by 1949.

    Jet aircraft were the future. The Boeing B-52, which continues to serve as the mainstay of the U.S. bomber fleet today, would make its first flight just three years later. Despite the fact that officials knew the propeller-driven B-50 would not remain the premier bomber for long, there was a need to send a strong message to an evolving Cold War adversary that the United States military could fly anywhere in the world with one of its aircraft.

    World War II established the importance of controlling the skies during a modern conflict. Bombers from the major combatants inflicted devastating damage to cities in Europe and Asia. The ability of an aircraft to fly long distances to deliver a payload of bombs established the importance of the bomber fleet.

    After the Soviets blocked land access to Berlin in 1948, the ability to deliver humanitarian assistance further established the importance of being able to fly heavy aircraft for long distances. The Berlin Airlift also made it clear the Cold War had truly begun.

    The newly formed United States Air Force wanted to demonstrate that air power eliminated all distance or geographical barriers for the military. The thinking was that aerial circumnavigation without the need to land would show the Soviet Union that the USAF could strike anywhere.

    Refueling while flying was the biggest challenge of the flight. Though commonplace today, the technique was not widely used at the time. The Lucky Lady II was refueled from its close relative, the tanker version KB-29. Four pairs of KB-29s based in the Azores, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Hawaii were used as airborne gas stations.

    The record-setting flight used a probe-and-drogue system, similar to what the Navy uses today. Essentially a long hose is reeled out from the KB-29 tanker and is attached to a refueling nozzle on the B-50 during flight.

    The Lucky Lady II was actually the second aircraft set up for the around-the-world flight. The first B-50, Global Queen, experienced engine problems after taking off Feb. 25 and landed in the Azores. Lucky Lady II departed a day later under the command of Capt. James G. Gallagher and successfully completed the flight with a crew of 14.

    In the 45 years since Orville Wright flew 120 feet Dec. 17, 1903, aircraft had pushed the limits of distance. The first transglobal flight took place in 1924 and lasted 175 days, with numerous stops where major repairs were required to the Douglas World Cruisers. In 1931, Wiley Post flew a Lockheed Vega named the Winnie Mae around the world in 8 days, 15 hours.

    The 1949 flight led to further developments in air-to-air refueling. Air Force officials said that medium-range bombers could become intercontinental bombers, and even fighter aircraft could use airborne tankers to extend their range. This aerial-refueling capability would be critical with the dawn of the jet era. Jet engines made for very fast aircraft, but also very thirsty aircraft that burned tremendous amounts of fuel.

    The jet-powered B-52 bomber erased the Lucky Lady II’s record in 1957 with a circumnavigation lasting just 45 hours, 19 minutes. Another B-52 lowered the record in 1980 to 42 hours, 23 minutes. The record still stands today.

    Source: Various

    Photos: 1. A tanker plane refuels the Boeing B-50 Lucky Lady II./Courtesy National Museum of the U.S. Air Force
    2.     Lucky Lady II sits at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona./Courtesy U.S. Air Force

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    March 1, 1966: Probe Makes First Contact With Another Planet

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    1966: The Soviet probe Venera 3 successfully lands on the surface of Venus. It’s the first time anything man-made makes contact with an extraterrestrial surface beyond the Moon.

    The Soviet Union originally designed the vehicle to explore Mars, but repurposed three of them as Venera probes to visit Venus. In February 1966, Venera 2 managed to fly by the planet at a distance of 15,000 miles, but its instruments failed before it could send the data back to Earth. The probe eventually began orbiting the sun.

    The Soviets got much closer on their next attempt. Venera 3 was supposed to land a probe on the planet’s surface, collecting and sending back data as it descended toward the planet with a parachute.

    The probe weighed around a ton and was equipped with instruments to gather data on the temperature, pressure and composition of the Venusian atmosphere, which it probably did.

    Before reaching the atmosphere, Venera 3 had already communicated with Earth 93 times, but ground control lost contact with the spacecraft on Feb. 16, just before its probe reached the atmosphere. The probe landed on Venus on March 1, becoming the first Earthly craft to touch alien terrain.

    The following Venera missions became more and more successful, as the Soviets learned from their earlier attempts. Venera 4 was the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet. In 1970, despite a parachute failure at the last minute, Venera 7 landed mostly intact and became the first probe to transmit data back to Earth from another planet.

    Venera 13 transmitted the photo below and 13 others from the Venusian surface March 1, 1982, exactly 16 years after Venera 3 landed.

    In all, 14 Soviet landers made it to the surface of Venus, and the United States landed the Pioneer Venus Multiprobe in 1978. Earthlings have also sent landers and rovers to Mars. In 2005 the Huygens probe successfully disengaged from the Cassini spacecraft and landed on the surface of the Saturnian moon Titan. Probes have also made contact with two asteroids and a comet.

    venera_13

    Source: NASA

    Images: Courtesy NASA

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