Letter flown on February 18, 1911 in India
Today in 1911, French pilot Henry Pequet, representing the Humber Motor Company of England at the Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in Allahabad, India, carried over 6,000 cards and letters on his Sommer biplane a distance of 13 km (8.1 miles) from Allahabad to Naini, India.
Today in 1911, Fred Wiseman delivered the first mail flown by an airplane. It took him two days to fly from Petaloma to Santa Rosa, California (which he never reached with his home-built airplane), carrying three letters from the mayor and other town leaders and copies of the local newspaper, the “Press-Democrat.”
One of the letters was from John E. Olmstead, Petaluma’s postmaster, to Santa Rosa postmaster, Hiram L. Tripp. The letter read:
Dear Sir and Friend, Petaluma sends, via the air route, congratulations and felicitations upon the successful mastery of the air by a Sonoma County boy in an aeroairplane conceived by Sonoma County brains and erected by Sonoma County workmen. Speed the day when the U.S. Mail between our sister cities, of which this letter is the pioneer, may all leave by the air route with speed and safety.
Fred Wiseman flying his aircraft at a fair in May 1911
Filmo 75 camera, 1928
Today in 1907, Bell & Howell was founded by movie projectionist Daniel H. Bell and Albert S. Howell in Chicago, Illinois, as a manufacturer of motion picture cameras and projectors. Starting in 1923, Bell & Howell developed and sold the Filmo camera series, continued for more than half a century, based on its 1917 prototype for a 17.5mm camera intended for amateur use.
Robert Capa filming the Spanish civil war by Filmo, May 1937
Fifty years ago today, IBM announced the Hypertape Automatic Cartridge Loader, the first device to permit automatic loading and unloading of magnetic tape for electronic computers.
Ten years earlier, IBM introduced the magnetic tape drive vacuum column, making it possible for fragile magnetic tape to become a viable data storage medium. IBM: “Magnetic tape storage introduced the world to the idea of digital storage. Before tape, information was saved on punched cards—the data was tangible. But with magnetic tape, you could no longer see the data on the storage medium. This was a whole new concept…. tape remains the most cost-effective, flexible and scalable medium for high-capacity storage backup today—more than 50 years after it was first introduced as a storage medium.”
Data Mobility Group, March 1, 2011: “For more than a decade vendors with only disk based storage systems have been trying to convince IT buyers that tape-based storage is obsolete. Despite the marketing efforts of disk-only vendors, tape continues to play a vital role in most data centers and Data Mobility Group believes tape will become even more important in the years ahead.”
Fifty years ago today, the Sound Recording Act of 1971 went into effect, extending federal copyright protection to sound recordings. A sound recording is a derivative work of the preexisting musical work, and to obtain a copyright in a sound recording one must secure a license from the copyright owner of the musical work. Continue reading
“More singles met the last person they dated through an online dating site (21%) than anywhere else. Across all age groups, seven times as many singles met their last date online, compared to being set up by a relative.”–Match.com’s second annual Singles in America study. Continue reading
Today in 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the Cinematographe, a device that recorded, developed, and projected films.
Today in 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, under regular time controls.
“As technology continues to advance in the second half of the chessboard, taking on jobs and tasks that used to belong only to human workers, one can imagine a time in the future when more and more jobs are more cheaply done by machines than humans.”–Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, “Why workers are losing the war against machines,” The Atlantic Monthly, October 2011
From comScore’s just-released 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus
Social:
Social Networking accounted for 16.6 percent of all online minutes at the end of 2011 and is on track to surpass Portals as the most engaging online activity in 2012. Facebook continues to lead as the driving force behind this shift in consumer behavior, accounting for the largest share of online minutes across the entire web in 2011. Continue reading
“[The] App Economy now is responsible for roughly 466,000 jobs in the United States, up from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced. This total includes jobs at ‘pure’ app firms such as Zynga, a San Francisco-based maker of Facebook game apps that went public in December 2011. Continue reading
The Story of Information 