One of the most important photographers of the 1800s was born June 11,1815, in Calcutta, which is now in India and known as Kolkata. There are a number of surprising things about this particular birthday bio. First, the important photographer we’re talking about is a woman, Julia Margaret Cameron. She was born into a British… Continue reading

The most common way to power an automobile at the moment, at least, is with an Otto-cycle engine. The Otto cycle is a description of a repetitive thermodynamic process where a flammable gas is compressed inside a chamber (say, a cylinder), ignited, forcing the chamber to expand and producing heat, then the chamber contracts again,… Continue reading

You’re reading this thanks to the work of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP, and the URL addressing system you use to open web pages. He was born June 8, 1955, in London. Berners-Lee had an early start in math and technology; his mother was a mathematician and his father was… Continue reading

Today we remember two aircraft designers — one quite mainstream, and the other controversial and somewhere outside the conventional history of aeronautics. First up is Henri Coandă, who was born June 7, 1886 in Bucharest, Romania. In 1909 he enrolled in a brand-new school in Paris teaching aeronautical engineering, and graduated at the head of… Continue reading

On June 3, the birthday of Pietro de’ Medici, we explored some of the typical tropes about rich kids being self-indulgent waste cases. But not everybody born into wealth squanders their lives and fortunes. Consider, for example, Otis Barton, who was born June 5, 1899 into a wealthy New York family and accomplished some remarkable… Continue reading

As you’re enjoying your coffee, possibly an espresso-based drink, give a thought to Angelo Moriondo, who was born 173 years ago today in Turin. Why, you ask? Simple. Moriondo invented the espresso machine. Or, well, at least pretty much the basic kind of espresso machine used today. Moriondo was born into a family of entrepreneurs… Continue reading

There’s a clever vehicle you can ride in and even, if you want, own and drive yourself. It doesn’t have wheels. No tank treads either. It doesn’t float in water. It doesn’t fly. But despite all that it can travel over any terrain and over water. And the very first one was made out of… Continue reading

Family dynasties can be very powerful and enduring organizations. A good example is the Medici family of Florence several centuries ago. It’s so long ago that nobody knows all the details, but one of the major factors in their ascendance was the Medici Bank. Giovanni de’  Medici founded it around 1397, and it became the… Continue reading

If you’ve been to (or live in) the midwestern section of the US, you’ve probably seen or even visited a Bob Evans restaurant. As you might expect, the restaurants are named after the founder, Bob Evans, who was born May 30, 1918.  Evans didn’t originally set out to be a restauranteur; he was a farmer.… Continue reading

There’s a very handy tool for anybody who needs to reach things like the top of a high wall, the high ceiling of a house, branches of trees that are out of reach. It’s been around for millennia: the ladder. But to use a ladder, you have to have something sturdy to lean it against… Continue reading