Google currently says that September 27, 1998 marks the birth of its search engine. That’s not what they’ve always said, though. It’s not the day they registered their domain name, google.com — that was September 15, 1997. It’s not the day the company was incorporated either. That was September 4, 1998. It’s not the day they got their first funding (from one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) — that was in August 1998. And it’s not the date they began what was at first a research project at Stanford. That was in January, 1996. But if you, er, google it, you’ll see that today’s the day they’re currently touting.
There are some little-known facts about Google that they don’t much share, although they don’t keep them secrets. The two founders, “Larry and Sergei,” didn’t write the search engine program. That was Scott Hassan, who never joined the company. And that famously simple home page they’ve always had (it was super-simple in the early days)? It wasn’t clever design; they just didn’t know very much about creating web pages; that was as complicated as they could make it at the time. Oh, and their early investors? Jeff Bezos was one of the first three. He’d founded Amazon, by the way, all the way back in 1994.
Since Google did come to be, on one or all of those dates, it’s now easy to find out that September 27 is a big day in railroading history. In 1825, it marked the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first one to use steam locomotives. There were railroads before that, but horses pulled the carriages. Then in 1903, again on September 27, the Wreck of the Old 97 happened. It was a mail delivery train in Virginia; they were behind schedule and put on too much speed. It would have been just another train disaster except for G.B.Grayson and Henry Whitter, who wrote the ballad Wreck of the Old 97 in 1924. Vernon Dalhart released it on a record, and it became the first country music hit to sell over a million copies.
if you do a bit more googling about September 27, you’ll discover that it’s the day in 1908 that Ford Model T production started. It kept going for the next 19 years — but not at the factory where they started. The first factory was in the city, in Detroit, and it isn’t a particularly large building (In fact you can see it; it’s still standing. The Model T was so popular Ford needed bigger factories, and moved out after two years. That first building stayed in the auto business, though; Studebaker bought it and produced cars there — many fewer than Ford — until 1933. Today there’s an auto museum in the building.
Thanks to the pollution caused in large part by cars, September 27, 1962 was the date Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the book that kicked off the environmental movement and led to the creation of the EPA. It’s also the day, just recently, of worldwide strikes and protests about climate change.
Google will tell you that September 27 has shipping-related firsts too; in 1941 the SS Patrick Henry was launched. It was the first Liberty Ship built in the US to deliver freight to Europe during WWII. Over 2700 were finally built, and although the Patrick Henry was the first to be launched on September 27, 13 more were launched that same day, creating an “instant fleet.” The SS Patrick Henry, by the way, made it through WWII intact, but then ran aground off Florida after the war. Bethlehem Steel bought the ship for $76,000 and melted it down in 1958.
In spite of climate change (or in some areas, because of it), the weather in the Northern Hemisphere is turning cooler and Christmas is on the way. You might remember the old carol Good King Wenceslaus — and guess what, he was born on September 27, 1271. Or possibly that was his son, who was also named Wenceslaus; the carol is sadly imprecise. But then, Google search results are imprecise too. In a way, that’s the whole point. Because while data is precise, information can be kind of messy, and oddly enough it’s more useful the messier it is…up to a point, at least. But anyway, happy September 27, and incidentally — these posts never involve a single Google search.
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