A Brief History On August 31, 2019, a sightseeing tourist helicopter crashed in Norway, killing the pilot and all five passengers. Sadly, the thrill of taking a helicopter tour of Hawaii, The Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, New York City, Hoover Dam, and any of a number of tourist sites is often marred by a jarring crash that too often kills the occupants of the chopper. Digging Deeper The military are not strangers to massive use of helicopters, and during the Vietnam War, the US lost 5,607 of their military whirlybirds. While helicopters are useful for troop and gear transport, medevac,…
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A Brief History On August 24, 2016, the European Southern Observatory discovered the closest planet to Earth that is not in our solar system, calling this newfound planet Proxima Centauri b. Digging Deeper Located in the tri-star system known as Alpha Centauri, our new planet orbits the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri. Not only is it the closest known exoplanet, it is also believed to exist in the “habitable zone,” meaning it is just the right distance from its star to support life. Also intriguing, its size is nearly identical to that of Earth. Before you start making a reservation…
A Brief History On August 21, 1888, American inventor William Seward Burroughs of New York patented the first successful American adding machine, a device that remained in service until superseded by electronic calculators in the 1970s. While mechanical adding machines date back long before that of Burroughs’s, his machine was definitely an improvement and was made to even print results. Digging Deeper Other old fashioned tech that also worked rather well is the slide rule, a computing device that could perform all sorts of mathematical operations almost as quickly as an electronic calculator. Invented in the 1600s by William Oughtred,…
A Brief History On August 20, 1962, the NS Savannah set out on her maiden voyage, a trip from Yorktown, Virginia to Savannah, Georgia, through the Panama Canal and on to Hawaii. This nuclear-powered cargo ship, the first of its kind, was built in New Jersey at a cost of $47 million. Digging Deeper The ship itself only cost $18 million, but adding the nuclear reactor and fuel added a whopping $29 million to the price, paid by the US government. An allegedly “civilian” nuclear-powered icebreaker had been built by the USSR in 1957, and in all, only four nuclear-powered…
A Brief History On August 10, 2024, we celebrated another World Lion Day, a day to educate people about the great feline hunter and support conservation of the species and its habitat. Of course, we are talking about Panthera leo, the big cat native to Africa and India. Digging Deeper Yes, they have lions in India! Back in the more recent Stone Age, lions were far more widely distributed, across much of Eurasia and North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Other critters such as the “Mountain Lion” of North and South America are not actually real lions. …