Time Travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world
1848 – Inventor Lewis Howard Latimer is born.
In 1874, he co-patented (with Charles W. Brown) an improved toilet system for railroad cars called the Water Closet for Railroad Cars (U.S. Patent 147,363).
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell employed Latimer, then a draftsman at Bell’s patent law firm, to draft the necessary drawings required to receive a patent for Bell’s telephone.
In 1879, he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, with his brother William, his mother Rebecca, and his wife Mary. Other family members, his brother George A. Latimer and his wife Jane, and his sister Margaret and her husband Augustus T. Hawley and their children, were already living there. Lewis was hired as assistant manager and draftsman for the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, a company owned by Hiram Maxim, a rival of Thomas A. Edison.
1882 – NYC’s Pearl Street Station becomes the first commercial central power plant in the US.
It was located at 255-257 Pearl Street in Manhattan on a site measuring 50 by 100 feet (15 by 30 m), just south of Fulton Street and fired by coal. It began with six dynamos, and it started generating electricity on September 4, 1882, serving an initial load of 400 lamps at 82 customers.By 1884, Pearl Street Station was serving 508 customers with 10,164 lamps. The station was built by the Edison Illuminating Company, which was headed by Thomas Edison. The station was originally powered by custom-made Porter-Allen high-speed steam engines designed to provide 175 horsepower at 700 rpm, but these proved to be unreliable with their sensitive governors. They were removed and replaced with new engines from Armington & Sims that proved to be much more suitable for Edison’s dynamos.
1888 – George Eastman secures the trademark Kodak and receives a patent for his camera that uses roll film.
Kodak was founded by George Eastman and Henry A. Strong on September 4, 1888. During most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film. The company’s ubiquity was such that its “Kodak moment” tagline entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that was demanded to be recorded for posterity.[8] Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s, as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography. As a part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak began to focus on digital photography and digital printing, and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation.
1972 – The television gameshow The Price Is Right premieres on CBS.
The Price Is Right premiered on September 4, 1972 at 10:30 am ET (9:30 CT) on CBS, one of three game shows to debut that day, the other two being The Joker’s Wild at 10:00 am ET and Gambit at 11:00 am ET. The show was first billed as The New Price Is Right to distinguish itself from the earlier/original version (1956–65) hosted by Bill Cullen, but it proved so popular in its own right that, in June 1973, the producers decided to drop the word “New” from its title. On March 26, 1973, CBS moved The Price Is Right to 3:00 pm ET, pairing it with Match Game as part of what became the highest-rated pairing in daytime. The show remained in that time slot until August 11, 1975 when it permanently returned to the morning lineup at 10:30am ET. During one week (September 8–12, 1975), the show bumped Gambit off as it experimented with sixty-minute episodes. The result of the experiment led to the permanent expansion on November 3, 1975, moving its start time to 10:00 am EST. On March 7, 1977, The Price Is Right moved back to 10:30am and remained there until April 23, 1979, when it assumed its 11:00 am EST slot, where it has been since then. The format of the show has since remained virtually unchanged.
1998- Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Google was initially funded by an August 1998 contribution of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; the money was given before Google was incorporated. Google received money from three other angel investors in 1998: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, and entrepreneur Ram Shriram.
After some additional, small investments through the end of 1998 to early 1999, a new $25 million round of funding was announced on June 7, 1999, with major investors including the venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
Early in 1999, Brin and Page decided they wanted to sell Google to Excite. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer. Vinod Khosla, one of Excite’s venture capitalists, talked the duo down to $750,000, but Bell still rejected it.