The First Crossword Puzzle
Today in 1913, journalist Arthur Wynne published the first crossword puzzle in the New York World. According to Jen Carlson, a New York Times editorial in 1924 called it “a primitive form of mental exercise.” See also NPR’s “100 Years Of Solvitude” and the Atlantic’s interview with Deb Amlen, writer of Wordplay, the official crossword blog of The New York Times.
January 1984: This is a brief clip of Steve Jobs speaking with Boston Computer Society members as he makes the first public showing ever of Macintosh. Steve Wozniak and the designers of Macintosh join with Steve in a very lively demo of a revolutionary breakthrough in personal computing.
William Shockley, 1963
“The life of William Shockley—Nobel Prize winner, inventor of the junction transistor, and founder of the seminal silicon electronics laboratory—has been well chronicled. But recently, while digging through the Shockley archives at Stanford University, researcher David C. Brock made a shocking discovery: As early as 1951, Shockley had his heart and his tremendous technical acumen set on creating a robotic workforce. According to Brock, it was Shockley’s unyielding but ultimately unsuccessful push to field an automaton army that set the stage for the Silicon Valley we know today. The “men of imagination and initiative” that he brought together—including Moore, Noyce, Hoerni, Kleiner, and Last—soon took silicon electronics in new directions, spurring the creation of countless new tech companies that produced a dizzying number of advances.”
Read more at IEEE Spectrum
“Three key factors shaped the production operations design of [Ford’s] Cleveland Engine Plant. The first was the decision that Delmar Harder made in April 1947 to organize an Automation Department within his Manufacturing Division. Harder charged the new unit’s engineers and production experts with the development of relatively inexpensive, reliable methods of automating the transfer of materials in process from one operation to another. His instructions were to design and install such “automation” devices if the cost of each device were less than $3000 (or roughly ten to fifteen percent over the annual wages of an average, fully employed blue collar worker in the automobile industry at the time). Payback for these devices had to be in one year. Thus, for all intents and purposes, to be viable each automation device had to eliminate at least one worker.”
David A. Hounshell, “Ford Automates: Technology and Organization in Theory and Practice,” Business and Economic History, Fall 1995
Note: The first published mention of “automation” in the sense of “The action or process of introducing automatic equipment or devices into a manufacturing or other process or facility” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is from American Machinist, October 21, 1948.
The so-called “Peutinger Map” is the only Roman world map known to have survived antiquity. Preserved in a single, medieval copy now housed in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, the map stretches from Britain in the west to India in the east, covering a series of 11 parchment rectangles totaling over 6.7 meters (22 feet) in length.
In preparing his 2010 book on the subject (Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered; Cambrige UP), Richard Talbert collaborated with the staff of the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC Chapel Hill and with ISAW’s Digital Programs team to produce digital tools that were used to record and analyze the map. These have been published online so that students and scholars can verify his findings and form their own impressions of the map and its content. These include:
From the exhibition Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
Source: Sofya Yampolsky
Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania
Today in 1965, the University of Pennsylvania awarded Richard L. Wexelblat a Ph.D. in computer science. Many Ph.D. candidates had performed computer-related work before, but Wexelblat’s diploma was the first one to carry the designation “computer science.”
The Story of Information 