Yesterday was the birthday of Otto Lilienthal, one of the people behind the creation of modern aviation. Today is the birthday of another one; Charlie Taylor. He’s not a household name like the Wright Brothers, nor is he as well known as  Lilienthal. But he was just as important. Without him, the Wright Brothers wouldn’t… Continue reading

It’s a routine thing to hop on a plane to travel somewhere. But of course it wasn’t always that way; somebody had to figure out how to make an airplane. The Wright brothers usually get credit for building the first one that sort of worked. But before they were able to demonstrate a flying machine… Continue reading

On May 22, 1859, the game was afoot. The author of the series of stories about Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. The family was poor, but the author was supported by wealthy uncles and sent to private school at the age of nine. Then he attended Stonyhurst College, which had… Continue reading

Enjoy computer games? They’ve been around longer than you think. In fact, they’ve almost certainly been around longer than you! The first graphic computer game was OXO (a version of tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses), and Alexander Douglas created it in 1952.  Alexander “Sandy” Douglas was born May 21, 1921 in London. He evidently had… Continue reading

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the phonograph in the late 1870s, and Alexander Graham Bell made it an actually useful device, but it still had some issues. Both Edison and Bell used cylinders for the recording medium. These worked fine, but were difficult to manufacture in large quantities, and as you can see from… Continue reading

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