Google celebrates Sputnik - 50th Anniversary
History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1.
The world’s first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path.
Today Google celebrates the 50th Anniversary of Sputnik with a flashy Google logo:
That launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments. While the Sputnik launch was a single event, it marked the start of the space age and the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race.
Up Close and Personal With Hans Lippershey
This Day in Tech - 1608: Hans Lippershey, a German-born Dutch spectacle-maker, demonstrates the first refracting telescope, the forerunner of the modern optical telescope.
The modern refracting telescope uses two lenses, a convex objective lens (nearer the “object” being observed) and a convex eyepiece (or ocular) lens. Together, they bend light and focus parallel light rays at a single point. That has the effect of magnifying distant objects for the viewer.
Others have laid claim to inventing the first telescope, but Lippershey’s demonstration in front of the States General (parliament) of the Netherlands, is the earliest documented evidence, so priority generally goes to him.
Lippershey seized upon the idea after one of his assistants found that by lining up a long-focus lens and a short-focus lens in front of the eye, distant objects appeared closer. He mounted the lenses in a tube at the optimum distance of separation, liked what he saw and applied for a patent.
The Dutch government, appreciating the refracting telescope’s military value, became a customer. Galileo also got wind of the new device, built his own version, and turned it to the sky. The word “telescope” was reportedly coined in 1611 by a guest at a banquet honoring Galileo.
Galileo’s design featured a convex objective lens and a concave ocular lens, which represented an improvement over Lippershey’s original design.
However, it was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler who first used convex lenses for both the objective and ocular.
That configuration is still used in modern devices like binoculars and telephoto lenses.
A Basic Car for the Great Unwashed
This Day in Tech - 1908: The first production Model T rolls out of the Ford plant on Piquette Avenue in Detroit.
The Model T was the first mass-produced automobile in history; approximately 15 million were built during a period lasting nearly 20 years.
It achieved exactly what Henry Ford set out to do: to “build a motorcar for the great multitude.”
While it may be fairly described as the world’s first people’s car, history has been less kind to the Model T in other regards.
Time magazine included the 1909 Tin Lizzy on its list of The 50 Worst Cars of All Time, describing it as “a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.”
Nor was the Model T where assembly-line production was introduced, as is widely believed.
According to the Time “tribute”:
Ford engineer William Klann studied the process by visiting another assembly line — or “disassembly line,” if you will — at a slaughterhouse.
He then applied what he had observed to the business of building automobiles, lots of them, quickly and efficiently.
By 1913, the Model T’s fifth full production year, an evolving assembly-line process had reduced the time for building an individual motorcar from 12 hours to an hour and a half.
By 1927, the Model T’s last year, Ford was cranking them out at a rate of one every 24 seconds.
But if Ford was an innovator in production technique, he was positively hidebound when it came to design.
The Model T remained virtually unchanged during its lifespan and by the early 1920s it was too antiquated to compete with the more modern designs coming off the drafting tables of other car companies, notably Chevrolet.
It probably didn’t help that the Tin Lizzy came in only one color — black — for most of its career.
Nevertheless, the Model T would remain the most widely produced car in history until being surpassed by the Volkswagen Beetle in the second half of the 20th century.
Google celebrates 9th Birthday
Happy 9th Birthday Google!
May all your non-evil birthday wishes come true!
Jimmy Doolittle Proves You Can Fly Blind
This Day in Tech - 1929: Aviation pioneer Jimmy Doolittle demonstrates that instrument flying - in other words, “flying blind” is possible from takeoff to landing.
The impact on commercial aviation was immediate and far-reaching, making all-weather flying safe and practical.
Prior to his flight, Doolittle helped develop the artificial horizon, forerunner to the attitude indicator, which uses a gyroscope for determining an aircraft’s relative orientation to the ground. It proved to be the key instrument in making blind flying possible.
Nowadays, with sophisticated navigation technology on board, most commercial pilots fly under instrument flight rules, meaning they rely almost solely on the aircraft’s instruments - rather than visual sightings - to avoid other planes and obstacles.
Doolittle was already one of America’s most famous aviators at the time of his blind flight.
Later, during World War II, he was awarded the Medal of Honor after he led a small squadron of B-25 bombers in the first raid against the Japanese mainland, only four months after Pearl Harbor.
Majestic 12, Purported Secret Government UFO Board
This Day in Tech - 1947: If the secret committee known as the Majestic 12 ever really existed, this is the day that the group was allegedly created by a memorandum from President Harry Truman.
If real, this shadowy coven of scientists, military brass and government officials came together in response to the Army’s recovery of an alien spacecraft that crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.
Their purpose: to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Roswell incident and to maintain vigilance against further alien incursions.
Among the names who appear as original members of MJ-12:
- Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, first director of the CIA
- James Forrestal, secretary of defense
- Dr. Vannevar Bush, who headed the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development
Confirming the existence of MJ-12 is central to the argument by UFO conspiracy theorists that the U.S. government has deliberately hidden UFO information from the public ever since Roswell.
The government, whether irritated by the crazies who won’t leave it alone or genuinely interested in keeping the presence of aliens under wraps, has consistently denied MJ-12’s existence and dismissed UFO reports as mistaken identity or hoaxes (PDF - 607.04 KB).
The military continues to maintain that the wreckage retrieved at the Roswell ranch came from a top-secret research balloon.
That explanation has never flown with UFO watchers, who have produced a mountain of evidence purporting to prove that not only does MJ-12 exist, but there’s a really big cover-up going on. (Forrestal’s untimely death in 1949, officially ruled a suicide, has helped fuel the fire.)
Sixty years on, and the argument still rages.
It’s time to cue up X-Files theme music… “we are not alone” … or are we?
Let me know your thoughts with your constructive comments below.