January 15, 2001. Wikipedia is born.
September 10th 1981. Pablo Picasso's masterpiece, Guernica, changes its residency from New York's MoMA to Madid's Museo del Prado.
June 11 1910. Jacques Yves Cousteau is born in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, France.
June 23 1912. Alan Turing, an absolute pioneer in both computer science and artificial intelligence, is born in London. Twenty seven years later that baby would break down the Nazi’s Enigma machine, one of the key events that made the war end. A man who lived a life of genious, cute eccentricity and mean injustice. England, C'mon.
March 23 1857. The first passenger elevator, designed and implemented by the Otis Elevator Company, starts operating in New York City’s Haughwout Building.
October 4, 1957. The USSR puts in orbit Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite.
July 13 1937. Gibson is awarded the first patent for an electric guitar, the Gibson E-150. Five years and four and a half months later, Jimi Hendrix decided it was time to be born.
April 10 1912. Titanic starts in Southampton, England, its maiden voyage.
February 14, European Sexual Health Day. And Valentine's Day.
September 5, 1977. Space probe Voyager 1 is launched to space. 35 years later, it has become the farthest manmade object from Earth. Actually, it’s believed that it will soon leave our Solar System to become the first manmade object to enter insterstellar space. Holy crap.
April 8, 1953. Hollywood premiers the first major studio 3-D movie, the film noir Man In The Dark.
August 4 1922, 6:30 pm. That was the moment when Alexander Graham Bell‘s funeral started, a couple days after his death. As a tribute, for the following minute all telephone service in both United States and Canada was suspended. The curly wire was cut off; temporarily for the phone, for good for his legally recognized inventor. That is, his patent holder.
March 1, 1872. The US Congress creates by law the first National Park, Yellowstone.
December 16, 1832. Gustave Eiffel is born in Dijon, France.
November 26, 1922. Howard Carter and his team open Tutankhamen’s tomb.
December 23, 1947. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, with support from colleague William Shockley, demonstrate the transistor at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. For a lot of people, 20th century’s most important human invention, as the little thing our modern hypertechnological world runs on.
September 19, 1982. Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, types the first internet emoticon in a department bulletin board suggesting its use “for joke makers”. Offline emoticons date as back as to 1881, dang!
October 19, Breast Cancer Awareness Day.
November 12, 1912. Captain Scott’s Antarctica expedition is found dead. The race against Amundsen is tragically over.
October 30, 1938. Orson Welles dramatizes H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel War Of The Worlds in his radio show.
June 25 1982. Blade Runner, Ridley Scott‘s -first- science fiction masterpiece, premiers in the United States. The week before it was E.T. the one hitting the theatres. Boy what a month!
May 15 1953. 23 year old Stanley Miller what would be called the , basically a lab experiment that proves that life can come out of a compound made with inorganic elements and the intervention of the key factor, heat.
May 28 1937. The Golden Gate Bridge, the place in the world where more people commit suicide -as much as one every two weeks-, is officially inaugurated.
May 11 1997. Computer Deep Blue bests then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov.
April 30 1897. JJ Thomson announces he’s discovered what would later be called the electron.
April 24 1990. The Hubble Telescope is launched to space.
April 16 1943. Albert Hoffman accidentally discovers the psychedelic properties of LSD.
April 2, World Autism Awareness Day.
March 6 1937. Russian Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman to orbit the Earth.
January 27th 1888, 33 now dead guys found the National Geographic Society, which immediately started issuing the world famous nature magazine National Geographic. Alexander Graham Bell was one of those 33 now dead guys.
February 8 1865, Gregor Johann Mendel reads his paper establishing what is now known as the Mendelian Inheritance. Peas and eye colors, such a school classic.
February 21 1947. Edwin Land presents the first instant camera, the Polaroid Land Camera.
January 10th 1927, Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis premiere. Boy, what a movie.
December the 1st, World AIDS Day. From a technical point of view the comparison is rather embarrasing, but when I finished this I instantly thought about Charles Burns, the author of my all-time favorite comic book: Black Hole.
August 13 1961. The Berlin Wall's construction starts. I tried to show that there wasn’t just one wall but two. Concrete vs. wood, The Wall vs. The Picket Fence, Comunism vs. Capitalism.