This week’s milestones in the history of technology include the first practical system for electricity distribution, the first popular system for status updates and fake news distribution (i.e., Twitter), and the first playback devices for moving images (i.e., movies) and sound (i.e., records) distribution.
March 20, 1886
William Stanley demonstrates the first practical system for providing electric illumination with the use of alternating current and transformers to adjust the voltage levels of the distribution system. Providing alternating current electrification to offices and stores on Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, it was the first to include all of the basic features of large electric power systems as they still exist today. In anticipation of another widespread current phenomenon, Stanley, who entered Yale in 1879, the year Thomas Edison invented the incandescent electric lamp, dropped out of college after only part of a semester. He went to New York and made a profit from his $2,000 investment (a loan from his father) in an electroplating company. Stanley later founded the Stanley Manufacturing Company, a pioneer in the development of transformers. After being sued for patent infringement, he was forced to sell the company to GE in 1903. In yet another move showing great foresight, according to the Engineering and Technology History Wiki,
Stanley and GE discovered, in 1906, the arrangement that today we call a golden parachute. GE bought twenty-two of Stanley's patents, and offered him a healthy salary plus support for a new laboratory, where Stanley could spend half of his time working for GE and devote the other half to new business --as long as they were not in "conflict with GE." Stanley chose as his own business the manufacturing of thermos bottles, which still today say Stanley, a trade name now belonging to the Tennessee company that makes them.
March 21, 2006
The first tweet is posted. Nick Bilton in Hatching Twitter:
On March 21, 2006, at 11:50 A.M., Jack [Dorsey] twitted, “just setting up my twttr” … it all started to come together. Jack’s concept of people sharing their status updates; Ev’s and Biz [Stone]’s suggestion to make updates flowed into a stream, similar to Blogger; Noah [Glass] adding timestamps, coming up with the name, and verbalizing how to humanize status by “connecting” people; and finally, friendships and the idea of sharing with groups that had percolated with Odeo an all the people who had worked there… [Later that evening] they were like a bunch of children at a sleepover wishing each other good night. Like a group of friends talking about what they had done that evening, they all sat separately, together, having a conversation. Tweeting.
March 22, 1895
Auguste and Louis Lumières hold their first private screening of projected motion pictures. Who’s Who in Victorian Cinema: “The Cinématographe (a name used earlier by experimenter Bouly) gave its first public presentation in Paris, to the Société d’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale, on 22 March 1895. Only one film was available, La Sortie des Usines Lumière (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), shot by Louis.”
March 23, 1840
John William Draper, New York University Professor of Chemistry, physician and scientific experimenter, takes the first successful photograph of the moon, a 20-minute-long daguerreotype image using a 5-inch (13 cm) reflecting telescope.
March 24, 1959
Texas Instruments demonstrates the first integrated circuit. TI’s engineer Jack S. Kilby was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his part in the invention and development of the integrated circuit, the chip. Through this invention microelectronics has grown to become the basis of all modern technology.”
March 25, 1857
Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville receives a patent for the Phonautograph, the first device to record sound. He made sound recordings in order to analyze sound visually, not to play them back. But in 2008, audio historians and recording engineers succeeded in playing sound recordings made by de Martinville in 1860 and posted them online.
March 26, 1976
The first PC convention, the World Altair Computer Convention, is held at the Airport Marina Hotel near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The MITS Altair 8800 was a build-it-yourself microcomputer kit designed in 1975. It became a hit among hobbyists after it was featured on the cover of the January 1976 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. The keynote speaker at the convention was Bill Gates, then a 20-year-old Harvard University student and co-developer of BASIC for the Altair.
