You’ve heard of the “two Steves” who founded Apple Computer, but there was a third founder as well: Ronald Wayne. Today is his 90th birthday.  Wayne met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when all three were working at Atari. Wayne was older, and at Atari created the company’s manufacturing and inventory control system. He was… Continue reading

If you go to a shoe store in the US and aren’t sure what size shoes you need, they’ll be happy to measure your feet, using a…thing. A gadget. A device. The apparatus is basically a flat plate you stand on, with sliders that touch specific places on your foot. Although nobody has ever come… Continue reading

In some cases, students caught daydreaming in school are severely punished. In other cases, daydreaming students grow up to create amazing works fueled by their imaginations. And in at least one case, both things were true.  Today is the birthdate of Lyman Frank Baum, who published his many books and stories as “L. Frank Baum.”… Continue reading

If you’ve read Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (published in 1945), you may remember the character Doc. The novel is set in Monterey, California, during the Great Depression (1929 to about 1939), when Monterey was primarily a fishing village. The title refers to a street where several fish-packaging businesses are located; it was informally called… Continue reading

Just about everybody has heard of Isaac Newton, who figured out a lot of stuff that’s pretty basic to modern science and engineering. But just because Newton came up with his his principles and observations didn’t mean that everybody simply said “Oh, yes, that’s a better way to understand the universe.” It’s science, after all,… Continue reading

If you’ve ever found technical drawings useful, particularly those with 3-D projections, raise a glass and toast the anniversary of the birth of Gaspard Monge. He was born May 9, 1746 in France, and invented those things, as well as differential geometry (which you could use to describe the surface of that glass you’re raising). … Continue reading

If you like American musical theater, you must know the name Oscar Hammerstein, who, as part of the duo Rodgers and Hammerstein, contributed many of the classic musicals to the genre. What you might not know is that Hammerstein was Oscar Hammerstein II. His grandfather was Oscar Hammerstein I, who founded the multigenerational Hammerstein musical… Continue reading

Now that we’re in the digital age, it can be hard to remember that a great many of the things we enjoy because of digital circuitry were available in the past, in analog form. For instance, we take it for granted that we can snap a picture and see the results right away. There’s nothing… Continue reading

If you had been a resident of Speyer in the mid 1600s, you would probably have known about Johann Joachim Becher, who was the leading intellectual of that area. The city of Speyer is still around, and now it’s in Germany. When Becher was born, on May 6, 1635, it was in the Holy Roman… Continue reading

Today marks a weird historical coincidence in the state of Idaho in the US. It all started in 1942, in the small town of Caldwell. Clement Leroy Otter was born there on May 3. His father was a sort of traveling electrician, and the family moved around quite a lot. Otter attended no fewer than… Continue reading