A Brief History On April 29, 1953, Los Angeles television station KECA made the first public experimental broadcast of a 3D TV show, an episode of Space Patrol. Sadly, this attempt did not usher in an era of 3D TV for the masses, but it was another step in the advancements that have brought 3D TV to where it is today. Digging Deeper You may be surprised to know that the origins of 3D viewing go back to the 1800s, with a series of inventions concerning stereoscopic viewing of still pictures developed into moving 3D pictures of a sort with…
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A Brief History On April 20, 2023, the giant SpaceX Starship rocket booster vehicle proudly made its first flight, although the huge and hugely expensive rocket blew up only four minutes into that maiden flight! Digging Deeper The most powerful rocket ever made, the Starship’s price per unit is hard to pin down, although the project cost is a whopping $5 billion. Towering 397 feet tall with a diameter of 30 feet, the giant rocket weighs 11 million pounds! Designed to replace SpaceX’s previous rockets, the Falcon series, Starship is expected to provide the heavy lifting needed to launch the…
A Brief History On April 4, 1991, US Senator from Pennsylvania John Heinz along with six other people died when a helicopter suffered a mid-air collision with the small airplane carrying Heinz over Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. Sadly, two of the seven fatalities were children on the ground. Digging Deeper Heinz is only one of many politicians that met an early demise in aircraft crashes, such as the following examples. In 1928, Congressman Thaddeus Sweet of New York became the first US politician to die in an air wreck. In 1947 and again in 1962, State Governors died in air…
A Brief History On February 9, 1996, the synthetic element, Copernicium, was discovered by a research team at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, named after the famous Polish astronomer and polymath, Nicolaus Copernicus (Mikołaj Kopernik in Polish), 10 days after the discovery, on the 537th anniversary of Copernicus’s birth. Digging Deeper Some of the other elements named after people include Curium, Fermium, Mendelevium, Nobelium, Einsteinium, Bohrium, Roentgenium, Lawrencium, and others. Perhaps you recognize some or most of these names as major historical scientists. You might not appreciate a disease or disorder being named after you,…
A Brief History On February 3, 1972, Iran suffered what the Guinness Book of World Records called “the deadliest blizzard in history,” an event known as “The Iran blizzard of February 1972.” Sadly, an estimated 4,000 or more people died in the extreme weather event. Digging Deeper We have almost all experienced the struggles of dealing with extreme snowfall, getting our cars stuck in the snow or sliding all over the road. Trying to drive in a blinding snowstorm is terrifying and dangerous, and people have died just trying to shovel snow from their drives and walks. Some areas of…