Browsing: Inventions

A Brief History On February 24, 2007, Japan launched a spy satellite into orbit, presumably to help keep track of threats to Japan from their neighbors China and North Korea.  Maybe Russia, too.  Since the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in the “Space Race” in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, several other nations have joined the club of nations with the ability to launch rockets into outer space.  Used for weather monitoring, Earth mapping, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), research, communications (radio, telephone, television, digital), exploring other planets and even beyond, and spying on other countries, space programs have…

A Brief History On February 16, 1960, the US Navy submarine, USS Triton SSRN-586, set out on a voyage of circumnavigation of the Earth, the first time anyone had made such a voyage completely underwater!  Called Operation Sandblast, the voyage of the Triton is one of the most famous trips around the Earth that we list today, joining other pioneering events that have gone down in history as famous trips around the globe. Digging Deeper 1. USS Triton, 1960 (First Underwater). The Triton was a submarine called a “radar picket sub,” of course nuclear powered and commissioned in 1959.  She…

A Brief History On January 29, 1886, Karl Benz, a German engineer, became the first person to patent a successful gasoline powered automobile.  Not counting impractical inventions and steam powered cars, the Benz Patent Motorcar was the first of what we would recognize as a “real” automobile,” although of course it looked a lot different from the sleek machines we see on the roads today.  A funny looking 3 wheeled flimsy vehicle, the Benz creation was the first internal combustion engine car built to actually be sold on the commercial market.  Its 1 liter gasoline powered engine produced a pathetic…

A Brief History On January 3, 2009, the Genesis block, the first of the blockchains, of the crypto-currency known as Bitcoin was first established online by creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, an alias for an unknown person or persons.  The form of “currency” invented by Nakamoto (or whatever) does not entail any tangible coins or paper money and is purely theoretical online tradable currency.  A decentralized payment system, Bitcoin allows financial transactions of many types to be conducted without the oversight or vagaries of governments or a central bank. Digging Deeper A crypto-currency is a system that uses digital data as a…

A Brief History On December 17, 2003, the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight of a human piloted aircraft flown by Orville Wright was marked by another aviation first, that being the first supersonic flight by a human piloted aircraft that was built by a private company when SpaceShipOne, piloted by Brian Binnie achieved Mach 1.2 in a rocket powered test flight to a lofty altitude of 20.67 kilometers (almost 68,000 feet).  SpaceShipOne is a privately developed space plane designed to take passengers into suborbital space flight, space being defined as at an altitude of at least 100 kilometers. …