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Category Archives: This day in information
Ballpoint Pen Patented
Seventy years ago today (June 10, 1943), László Bíró filed for a patent on a new type of pen and, with his brother György, formed Biro Pens of Argentina. While working as a journalist in Hungary in the previous decade, he noticed that the … Continue reading
Posted in This day in information, Writing
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Sound on Film Demonstrated for the First Time
Today in 1922, Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner publicly demonstrated for the first time a motion picture with a soundtrack optically recorded directly onto the film. In the first sounds ever publicly heard from a composite image-and-audio film, Helena Tykociner, the inventor’s wife, spoke the … Continue reading
Posted in Film, This day in information
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Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1949 and 2013
Today in 1949, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. “The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed–would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper–the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Censorship, This day in information
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Lovelace and Babbage Meet, Fly on Imagination’s Wings
One hundred eighty years ago today (June 5, 1833), Ada Byron (later Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage when visiting his house to see a portion the Difference Engine, or what her mother, Lady Byron, called his “thinking machine.” James Gleick writes in The Information: A … Continue reading
The Birth of International Television
Sixty years ago today (June 3, 1953), The New York Times declared the “birth of international television.” From Broadcast Engineering: Satellite coverage of the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer enabled the largest audience ever, an estimated 750 million … Continue reading
Posted in Television, This day in information
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Speech Transmission Over Wires Conceived
Today in 1875, during an experiment conducted by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson, a receiver reed failed to respond to the intermittent current supplied by an electric battery. Bell told Watson, who was at the other end … Continue reading
Posted in Telegraph, Telephone, This day in information
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Napster Released
Today in 1999, Napster released its file sharing service, letting people swap music stored on their computers. Wikipedia: “On June 1, 1999, Fanning released a preliminary beta program of Napster and soon, hundreds of college students at Northeastern were up and trading … Continue reading
Posted in Copyrights, music, This day in information
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AP Launched
Today in 1846, The New York Sun carried the first dispatches from the Mexican War, marking the birth of the Associated Press. Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), publisher of The New York Sun, established a pony express to deliver news of the Mexican … Continue reading
First Photograph of a Solar Eclipse
Today in 1854, William and Frederick Langenheim made eight sequential photographs of the first total eclipse of the sun visible in North America since the invention of photography. Although six other daguerreotypists and one calotypist are known to have documented … Continue reading
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First World Wide Web Conference
Today in 1994, the First International WWW Conference was held at CERN, Geneva. Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web: “It was the first time the people who were developing the Web were brought together with all sorts of people who were using it … Continue reading
Posted in This day in information, World Wide Web
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The Story of Information 