Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On September 5, 1980, the Gotthard Road Tunnel from Uri Canton to Airolo in Switzerland opened for travel, at the time the longest highway tunnel in the world at 10.5 miles long.  Today, we look at some other real and fictional tunnels: Digging Deeper The Channel Tunnel, or, “Chunnel,” connecting France and England with an under the sea section of 23.5 of its 31 mile length. The Time Tunnel, a TV show from 1966 to 1967, featuring two lost time travelers going from one historical adventure to another. The Delaware Aqueduct, the longest tunnel in the world,…

A Brief History On September 4, 1882, the Pearl Street Station opened for business in New York City, the first commercial provider of electric power to customers.  Built and operated by the Edison Illuminating Company, a new era began of providing the public with mass quantities of electric power. Digging Deeper In the century plus since 1882, the US has seen an electrical grid fed by over 11,000 utility type electric plants.  Coal originally fired most electric plants, but today natural gas provides over 38% of our electricity.  Coal accounts for 22%, while nuclear energy provides almost 19% of our…

A Brief History On September 3, 1935, Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah was the scene of an historic automobile event, the first ever car to achieve a documented speed of over 300 mph.  Sir Malcolm Campbell, motor journalist and race car driver, piloted a Rolls-Royce V-12 powered Campbell-Railton Blue Bird to a new land speed world record, a record he himself already held since March of 1935 in the same car. Digging Deeper Campbell had set new world land speed records in his Blue Bird five times, and in other cars four more times, making him a nine time world…

A Brief History On September 2, 1963, CBS Evening News made TV history by becoming the first major nightly news show to be 30 minutes long instead of only 15 minutes.  Prior to this event, the evening news was 15 minutes of local and 15 minutes of national news. Digging Deeper Other big changes to TV news include NBC switching its national news shows to color in 1966, quickly matched by rivals ABC and CBS.  Still, a majority of Americans watched the news in black and white until 1972 when color TVs finally became the majority. Cleveland’s Dorothy Fuldheim became…

A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania.  The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations.  Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host.  Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …