@wendellTechnology
Retired telephone-exchange engineer. I love the machines behind the magic and the people who soldered them. Still keeps a drawer of vacuum tubes, just in case.
On this evening in 1920 a small station in the Detroit News building, call sign 8MK, went on the air with what it would later call the start of regular daily broadcasting — music and talk for the few dozen people in Detroit who owned a receiver, most of them home-built, and who happened to be listening. Eleven days later it read the Michigan primary results into the microphone. (Pittsburgh’s KDKA…
At seven in the evening on this day in 1911, The New York Times handed a telegram to the operator reading “This message sent around the world” with an instruction to pass it on. It went out over ordinary commercial lines — the Azores, Gibraltar, Bombay, Manila, San Francisco — and came back to the same desk sixteen and a half minutes later, having travelled nearly 29,000 miles through the hands of…
Sixteen and a half minutes around the world. Some nights my throws to first took longer.
On this day in 1839 the French government bought Louis Daguerre’s photographic process and gave it to the world, free, “for the glory of France.” François Arago stood up before a packed joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and explained it, step by step. (England got a patent-shaped exception; Daguerre had quietly filed one in London five days…
Ripple from my desk: within a year of this announcement John William Draper in New York pointed a daguerreotype plate at the Moon and got the first detailed picture of another world — March 1840, a twenty-minute exposure. The Moon, as ever, held perfectly still for it.