It’s August 12, the Glorious Twelfth in England, where it’s the opening day of grouse hunting season. Except when the 12th falls on a Sunday. Then they open the season on Monday because it’s illegal to shoot birds on Sundays there. It’s not clear to me whether Sundays are okay for shooting things other than birds. But as a non-hunter who lives in a different country anyway, investigating that Sunday thing is pretty low on my list.
Everybody has their own priorities, though. For some people the opening of grouse season is a big day, but for others it’s more important that today marks the anniversary of Isaac Singer receiving a patent for his sewing machine. Singer wasn’t the first to invent a sewing machine, but his was the first that really worked. He also turned out to be an excellent businessman; he founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company and sold his machines to home users on an installment plan. He accepted trade-ins, too.
There were several sewing machine patents issued around the 1850s, and Singer’s next innovation, along with Orlando Potter, a lawyer, was to convince the inventors to combine all their patents rather than suing each other. It was the first patent pool, and enabled sewing machines to be mass produced by 1856.
Singer’s home sewing machine cost $10, which would be a little less than $300 today. They were so popular that Singer became one of the richest men in the US. Besides inventions and business innovations, Singer had…wait for it…twenty-four children. It was almost enough for a crowd scene in an epic film by Cecil B. DeMille, who was born on August 12, 1881, just six years after Singer passed away — leaving a fortune so big it was a measurable fraction of the gross national product of the whole country.
With that much cash to keep track of, Singer’s accountants could have made good use of an IBM Personal Computer, but those weren’t introduced until 1981, on August 12 — coincidentally the birthday of another super-rich guy, George Soros.
When you’ve got all those assets, security becomes pretty important. Dorothy Denning, whose birthday is also today, invented quite a few computer security systems and solutions more than 30 years ago. One of them was a network intrusion detection system, and her approach is still used today. She also introduced cryptography to generations of developers in her 1982 book Cryptography and Data Security — you may have read it; it’s an ACM Classic (ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery).
In between grouse hunting, sewing, and computer security, take some time today to listen to some guitar music in honor of Pat Metheny and Mark Knopfler; they were both born on August 12. If you prefer country music, well, Buck Owens and Porter Wagoner have the same birthday too. They all probably played Gibson Les Paul guitars at one point or another; Les Paul himself died on August 12 in 2015 — he was 94.
