A Brief History On January 25, 2019, the people of Brumadinho, Brazil, found out how dam failure can be a catastrophe when a mining dam broke and 270 people were killed. The same mining company previously had a dam fail in 2015, at Mariana, Brazil, killing 19 people, far fewer than some other major dam failures. Digging Deeper In the US, the worst dam failure as far as human fatalities, was the South Fork Dam failure in Pennsylvania in 1889, an earthen dam overwhelmed by heavy rains that killed 2,208 people. This dam had failed before! Another US earthen dam…
Browsing: Inventions
Read More
A Brief History On January 24, 1935, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey, introduced the world to the convenience of beer in cans. Lucky for American servicemen, canned beer became popular in time for World War II, making transporting beer to thirsty troops a much easier task. Digging Deeper If you are wondering, soda pop did not appear in canned form until 1955 when Coke first made the leap and then in 1964 when RC Cola first canned their bubbly soda in aluminum cans, a further refinement of the beverage industry. As usual, the dates of these…
A Brief History On January 23, 1957, inventor Walter Morrison sold his plastic flying disc to the Wham-O company, which named the item “Frisbee” and has now sold over 100 million of the tossable toys! Digging Deeper The invention dates back to the 1930s when Morrison got the idea by throwing the lid to a popcorn can before graduating to cake pans. Now made of plastic and copied by numerous companies, the beauty of the Frisbee is in its simplicity, with no moving parts, no batteries, and low cost. After serving as a fighter pilot during World War II and…
A Brief History On January 19, 1983, a space traveling chimpanzee named Ham died at the age of 25 at the North Carolina Zoo. Born in Africa and sent to The Miami Rare Bird Farm in Florida, Ham was then acquired by the US Air Force in 1959. Digging Deeper The Air Force obtained 40 chimps to prepare for use as test ape-ronauts prior to sending humans into space aboard Mercury space capsules. After whittling down the candidates, #65 was chosen for the January 1961 flight aboard the Mercury capsule launched by a Redstone Rocket. You may have noticed that…
A Brief History On January 7, 1954, Georgetown University teamed up with IBM to perform the first public computer translation of different languages automatically, showing the promise of speedier and easier translation tasks. Digging Deeper In the so-called “Georgetown–IBM experiment” the computer was tasked with translating over 60 sentences of the Russian language into English, although this early stage of computer translations required programs geared toward the general field discussed in the languages being translated. The computer used in this experiment was an IBM 701, also known as the Defense Calculator or the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine, developed…