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March 9, 1454: This Man Is a Continent … or Two

1454: Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence, Italy. He’ll give his name to two continents. He seems to have been in Seville when another Italian in Spain, Christopher Columbus, returned to the nearby port of Cadiz from his first journey to the West ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  8 Mar 2010

Related Topics: Christopher Columbus,  Cadiz, Inc.

Feb. 22, 1857: Hertz Enters Cycle of Life

1857: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz is born. The physicist will make key discoveries about the transmission of electromagnetic waves and eventually give his name to a pervasive measurement of the electronic age. Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany, where his ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  22 Feb 2010

Related Topics: James Clerk Maxwell

Tech Presidents Day: George, Tom and Abe

Wired.com marks Presidents Day weekend with brief vignettes of three of our techiest presidents: Washington steered national policy toward an embrace of science, Jefferson made a significant contribution to paleontology, and Lincoln devised and ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  11 Feb 2010

Feb. 9, 1870: Feds Get on Top of the Weather

1870: President Ulysses S. Grant signs a bill creating what we now call the National Weather Service. Forecasting models were simple but generally effective. It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  8 Feb 2010

Related Topics: Ulysses S. Grant

Feb. 8, 1865: Mendel Reads Genetics' Founding Paper

1865: Gregor Mendel reads his first paper on genetics to the local scientific organization. It will be decades before Mendel’s intellectual seeds take root in the fertile grounds of Darwinism and grow a scientific revolution. Mendel was born in 1822 ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  8 Feb 2010

Related Topics: Gregor Mendel,  Alfred Russel Wallace

January 1997: CES Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas

1997: The Consumer Electronics Show, previously a semi-annual event in Las Vegas and Chicago, becomes a Las Vegas annual. The show is on. Organizers held the first Consumer Electronics Show in New York City from June 24 to 28, 1967. The 200 exhibitors ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  6 Jan 2010

Jan. 5, 1943: George Washington Carver Bites the Dust He Enriched

1943: George Washington Carver dies, leaving a legacy of a revived and diversified Southern agriculture and hundreds of new and improved food products. Think of him whenever you’re enjoying peanut butter. Carver was born into slavery in Missouri ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  4 Jan 2010

Related Topics: Henry Ford

Jan. 4: Braille, Pitman Birthdays Celebrate New Ways to Write

1809: Louis Braille is born. He’ll devise a tactile alphabet for the blind. 1813: Isaac Pitman is born. He’ll devise a shorthand alphabet for quickly writing what people are saying. It’s probably more important that the two men were white, male ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  4 Jan 2010

Dec. 22, 1882: Looking at Christmas in a New Light

1882: An inventive New Yorker finds a brilliant application for electric lights and becomes the first person to use them as Christmas tree decorations. Edward H. Johnson, who toiled for Thomas Edison’s Illumination Company and later became a company ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  22 Dec 2009

Related Topics: White House,  General Electric

Dec. 16, 1832: A Towering Engineer Is Born

1832: Gustave Eiffel is born in Dijon, France. His innovative metal-structure design still supports buildings, bridges and even statues. Eiffel was graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. He began his career by supervising ...

From RANDY ALFRED, Wired,  15 Dec 2009

Related Topics: Chrysler

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