David Buick, American Inventor
Inventor Dateline: September 17
David Dunbar Buick (September 17, 1854 – March 5, 1929) was an American inventor born in Scotland. He is best known founding the Buick Motor Company.
He was born in Arbroath, Angus, Scotland. The family moved to Detroit, Michigan, USA, as emigrants when he was only two years old.
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Tim Berners-Lee’s Invention of the World Wide Web (WWW)
The Internet has become an enormous network linking billions of computers worldwide. It came a long way when it began as a small operation in the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Internet’s Early Years
The Internet came about in the early 1960s. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was the birthpace of the Internet. That time, dial-up phone lines were used to form the basis of Internet connections. In the mid-60s, the first real wide-area connection came through when a computer at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) eventually connected with a California computer. With the inadequacy of the telephone’s lines, the concept of packet switching was began, giving birth to the ARPANET in 1966.
ARPANET – Initial Name of the Internet
ARPANET was the term used for the Internet. In December 1969, it went online under a contract led by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), initially connecting four major computers at universities in the southwestern U.S. By early 70s, many more universities and organizations joined this newly formed Internet.
The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. The early Internet was a very complex system, mainly used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, librarians, and related professionals within the academic disciplines.
TCP/IP Architecture
The Internet matured in the 1970′s as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Bob Kahn at Bolt, Beranack and Newmann and further developed by Kahn and Vint Cerf at Stanford. It was adopted by the Defense Department in 1980 and universally adopted in 1983. In 1986, the National Science Foundation funded NSFNet as a cross country 56 Kbps backbone for the Internet. They maintained their sponsorship for nearly a decade, setting rules for its non-commercial government and research uses.
Tim Berners-Lee Breakthrough
In 1989, scientists and technical experts led by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Conseil European our la Recherche Nucleaire, more popularly known as CERN, proposed a new protocol for information distribution. This protocol became the World Wide Web in 1991, based on hypertext, a system of embedding links in text that link to other text, now commonly used. This was followed in 1993 by the development of the graphical browser Mosaic by Marc Andreessen with his team at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications.
In the early days of the Internet, various developers contributed ideas on the web development. There was concern that it would become a mess of unrelated protocols with different software platforms.
In 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was developed by Tim Berners-Lee and Michael Dertouzos of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Sciences, in order to develop a more standardized Web, in doing so, come up with a component that are present in every browser.
Since that time, commercial networks began to grow, facilitating routing communication traffic from one commercial site to another.
Today, the Internet is an enormous network connecting the world practically anywhere, not just in businesses but at our homes, as well as producing other technological effects.
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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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iPod History from 2001 to Present
And who haven’t heard of iPod iPhone, touchscreen iPod Touch or Apple’s iTunes? Since the start of the millennium, the young genaration of users have made it their in-thing. The iPod is Apple’s. The company designed, marketed and launched it sometime end of year 2001.
Here’s a brief biography of the iPod and its product-lines. Designed by Apple, Inc., iPod is a portable media player (PMP) for storing and playing audio files encoded by MP3 or AAC compression algorithms. It can hold anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand of songs, perhaps more. Selling by millions, it has surpassed mere popularity worldwide.
Apple, Inc. began looking at the range of digital devices since they had missed competing on video and still cameras, and hand-held organizers. As they have produced software for storing and playing digital music, they also realized the players of the digital music were not user-friendly.
MP3 players of the time were disappointing, flash memory chips had limited tracks hard drives were too big to store music on. Aside from difficulty in navigating the player menus, the process for transferring songs from computer to players was slow.
The story goes that a computer engineer, Tony Fadell, had an idea for a new style of MP3 player, which could be linked to its own digital music store. He promoted his idea to some manufacturers, one of them, Apple, Inc.
Read the full article — iPod History: 2001 to Present
(Image is Apple’s iPod Shufle.)
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History of Ice-Cream
Ice-cream (originally, iced cream) or gelato in Italy, is a frozen dessert made from dairy products, like milk and cream, combined with sugars, flavorings and other ingredients. The mixture is stirred slowly while cooling to prevent ice crystals from forming. Result is a smoothly textured ice cream. Here is ice-cream’s early history.
Water-ices
Ice-cream started around the time as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Fruit juices were kept cold by being packed with snow but they were really ‘water-ices’ rather than the real ice-cream that we know.
First Frozen Creamy Mixture
In 1550 Blasius Villefranca found that freezing-point could be reached if salt were added to snow, and so he managed to produce a creamy, frozen mixture.
Ice-Cream in Europe
In England during the 17th century, it’s been said that King James II in 1686, was served with something like ice-cream, while his exiled brother, Charles II, earlier in 1660, was known to have eaten ice-cream in Paris.
Ice-Cream in the US
In the United States, the first president, George Washington, was said to be keen on ice-cream in 1790.
In 1832, Augustus Jackson, a confectioner from Philadelphia, created new recipes for making ice-cream, and in 1846, Nancy Johnson patented a hand-cranked freezer that established the basic method of making ice cream still used today. William Young patented the similar “Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezer” in 1848.
In 1851, Jacob Fussell, a milk supplier of Baltimore, USA, set himself up as a supplier of ice-cream to other milkman, establishing the world’s first ice-cream factory.
Ice-Cream Factory in London
Around twenty years later, in 1870, an ice-cream factory was set up in London for the benefit of a large number of Italian immigrants who arrived about that time.
Ice-cream is said to have become really popular in 1922, when British Thomas Wall, a sausage manufacturer in Acton, was worried that fewer sausages will be sold during the summer months, so he began to manufacture the first wrapped blocks of ice-cream as an alternative. It was an instant success.
Note: My sources are varied, from library reference materials down to smaller light reading science and invention books. Among my entertaining short readings, I like Ken Ireland’s Who Invented, Discovered, Made the First..? (Ravette Books, 1988)
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