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,…
Browsing: Inventions
Read More
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Burroughs of New York patented the first successful American adding machine, a device that remained in service until superseded by electronic calculators in the 1970s.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 July 5, 1994, Amazon, the internet mega-retailer, was founded by Jeff Bezos, his creation eventually making him the richest person in the world, worth $194.4 billion. Amazon provides an enormous inventory without the need for physical stores letting you shop at your desk. Digging Deeper The internet has brought incredible wealth to some people, placing them in the ranks of the wealthiest on the planet. Here are some of those folks that used the internet to their financial advantage: Elon Musk, net worth $180.7 billion, made a lot of his fortune with PayPal, an online money…
A Brief History On July 1, 1966, Canada had its first ever color television broadcast in Toronto, Ontario. Back when color TV hit the airwaves in the US, 1950 and 1951, no normal people had color TVs anyway. 1950s color TVs were horrible, with round screens that cut off a lot of the picture and garish colors like a bad cartoon. Digging Deeper TVs from the 1950s and early 1960s did not come with remotes, and they took forever to warm up, starting with a little dot of light in the middle that grew into a picture. Using CRTs and…