February 15 is a date that’s not divisible by two or ten, which is slightly weird when you look into what’s happened on various February fifteenths. It was February 15 in 1945 that ENIAC was formally introduced as the world’s first programmable digital computer that functioned electronically. The name ENIAC stood for “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer,” which more than anything probably shows that John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, the designers, had made wise decisions when they chose careers in physics and electrical engineering rather than advertising. Nobody knows how close the world came to experiencing automobiles like the Self Propelled Longitudinally Accelerating Truck or Universal Glossy Lip Yellower cosmetics. But thanks to the University of Pennsylvania project funded by the US Army, we never had to find out.
It was a particular department of the army that had a use for an electronic computer: the Ballistic Research Laboratory, which needed to calculate trajectories of ammunition as well as the potential effects of nuclear weapons. ENIAC was a good solution; in 30 seconds it could calculate a trajectory that a human needed 20 hours for.
Since it was 1945 and the transistor, along with most other solid-state electronics, had yet to be invented, ENIAC used vacuum tubes and crystal diodes. 18,000 vacuum tubes, to be precise. The printed circuit also lay in the future, so the machine was wired together with over 5 million hand-soldered connections. It didn’t really have much in common with modern computers like the one you’re using right now, but it did use binary logic, and its “accumulators” — the units that stored numbers for use in the next step in a calculation — were decimal; they each stored ten digits. See what I mean about February 15 being a bad fit, numerically, for the introduction?
ENIAC was just the start of the line of electronic computers that still continues, and it was significant enough that today is ENIAC Day. But strangely enough, ENIAC day isn’t an international holiday. It’s not even a national celebration. In fact, it isn’t even a state-designated holiday in Pennsylvania, where ENIAC was designed and built. The only place in the world where it’s ENIAC Day today is the city of Philadelphia. The machine, or at least large pieces of it, is still on display there, at the University of Pennsylvania. They don’t have the entire thing — altogether ENIAC took up 1,800 square feet and weighed 30 tons. But you can get a sense of the machine from the panels on display.
Another event illogically — or perhaps innumerably — connected to February 15 happened in 1971. Before that day, a British pound was made up of 20 shillings. A shilling consisted of 12 pence (pennies). There were also halfpenny coins, as well as half-crowns (which were worth two shillings and 6 pence) and farthings, worth a quarter of a penny. Farthings had been retired ten years earlier, though, probably on the basis that a quarter of a penny had become functionally equivalent to zero. February 15, 1971 was Decimal Day (even though the date wasn’t a factor of ten), and after that British currency was based on tens, with shilling equal to five pence and a pound equal to 100. British currency was late to the decimalization game; in China, money had been decimal for more than 2,000 years. The decimal Russian ruble dates to 1704, and the United States adopted decimal money in 1792.
I can’t help but notice that all of those nations seem to have missed the opportunity to choose a decimal date to introduce their decimal cash. I may not be entirely correct, though, because our current Gregorian calendar hasn’t been used in all those places on those dates. Our calendar standard isn’t as old as you might think, either — it wasn’t until 1923 (on February 15, in fact) that Greece adopted it. Greece was the last holdout in Europe.
It’s important for countries to agree on things like calendars if they expect to also agree on some aspects of law and regulation. Copyrights, for example, last for a specific period of time, but if you’re using different calendars, that period of time might get pretty complicated. Copyrights depend on other things than time, of course. For one thing, not everything can be copyrighted. Printed words have been the subject of copyright law for centuries, but when new media, like recorded sound and video, came along it wasn’t at all clear whether they could be copyrighted too. Or rather, it was clear: they couldn’t. Not until February 15, 1972, that is. That’s the date — not really that long ago — that US federal copyright protection was extended to include recordings made on or after that day. Things got very complicated for older recordings until the regulations were simplified in 2018 to simply say “okay, recordings are just copyrighted and never mind when they were recorded.” The Music Modernization Act doesn’t say so quite in those words, of course, but wouldn’t things get a lot easier if legal language was clearer? Seems like it might.
One thing that’s not protected by copyright, though, is something like an oral argument before, say, the US Supreme Court. So let’s take one of the most famous Supreme Court cases of all time: the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Even if one of the attorneys arguing the case had been able to record herself, it wouldn’t have been subject to copyright because…oh, well in fact, it wouldn’t have happened at all, because female attorneys weren’t allowed to present arguments to the Supreme Court until 1879. You may not be surprised when I tell you that the change happened on February 15 of that year, when the President at the time (Rutherford B. Hayes) signed a new bill into law.
So time goes on and the world keeps changing, trying to keep up. And somehow it all seems perfectly normal pretty soon after a new change happens. So today, if you hear about a copyright dispute about some sound recordings that were being sold at a particular price expressed in decimal currency, and the sales were so huge that they needed computers to calculate the royalties, and the dispute reaches the Supreme Court, where, say, Annette Hurst, Esq. is arguing the case on February 15 — you wouldn’t think twice about it. But it wasn’t really that long ago that none of those things could have happened at all.
