Today in 1888, Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, made a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London, of a 3016-person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the phonograph. It was the first “field” recording outside of a studio, as well as the first known recording of classical music.
The 1888 Crystal Palace Recordings as depicted by the London Illustrated News
“The storekeeper and the clerk depended for their livelihood on selling the goods in your day. Of course that is all different now. The goods are the nation’s. … Continue reading
Today in 1846, the first telegraph link was established between New York City and Boston. From the AP Archives: “In the spring of 1846, Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), publisher of The New York Sun, establishes a pony express to deliver news of the Mexican War. Continue reading
Today in 1974, a Universal Product Code (UPC) label was used to ring up purchases at a supermarket for the first time. The first UPC ever scanned is on a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum (now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History), which was purchased at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, utilizing NCR scanners. Continue reading
Actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell in an AT&T promotional film (1926)
Today in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell gave a public demonstration of his new invention, the telephone, at the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Bell demonstrated three induction telephones to a select jury that included Sir William Thomson, perhaps the best-known British electrical scientist and Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil. It made an enormous hit: Dom Pedro expressed everyone’s astonishment with the new machine by exclaiming (so legend has it), ‘My God, it talks!’
The Original SSEM Machine c. 1949
Today in 1948, the world’s first stored-program electronic digital computer successfully executed its first program. F.C. Williams who designed and built (with Tom Kilburn) the Small Scale Experimental Machine (later nicknamed “Baby”), described the first successful run:
“A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again.” Continue reading
Today in 1911, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was incorporated. It changed its name to IBM in 1924. Many commentators on IBM’s centenary attribute its longevity to the power of idea or ideas. Continue reading
The Politics of Network Evolution: An Interview with Richard John
Richard John is Professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and a historian of communications networks in the United States. His most recent book, Network Nation, won the inaugural Ralph Gomory prize from the Business History Conference and the AEJMC prize for the best book in the history of journalism and mass communications.
Network Nation turns the tables on several generations of historians, social theorists, and cultural critics that have been downplaying the influence of governmental institutions and civic ideals on major technological innovations. Continue reading
Hollerith tabulating machine and sorter
The Economist on IBM’s celebration of its 100th birthday tomorrow: “Official history notwithstanding, the company’s true age is 125. In 1886 Herman Hollerith, a statistician, started a business to rent out the tabulating machines he had originally invented for America’s census. Taking a page from train conductors, who then punched holes in tickets to denote passengers’ observable traits (eg, that they were tall, or female) to prevent fraud, he developed a punch card that held a person’s data and an electric contraption to read it. The technology became the core of IBM’s business when it was incorporated as Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) in 1911 after Hollerith’s firm merged with three others.” Continue reading
Atanasoff–Berry Computer replica at Iowa State University
Seventy years ago today, John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff at Iowa State University. During the next five days he learned everything he could about what became to be known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) which he first heard about when Atanasoff visited Philadelphia in December 1940. The ABC was the first electronic digital computing device but was never put to actual use because both Atanasoff and Berry left Iowa in 1942 to contribute to the war effort and did not resume the work after the war. Continue reading
The Story of Information 