A windmill is a mill with sails or vanes which by the action of wind upon them drive machinery for grinding corn, pumping water, and so on.
Windmill
Windmills were used in the east in ancient times. An Arabic document of the year 644 contains the first known reference to one. Piruz Nahavandi, a Persian Sasanian soldier who in that year assassinated the caliph Omar in the mosque at Medina was described as a Persian builder of windmills.
Nashtifan, a village in northern Iran, uses 1000-year-old windmills made of clay, straw, and wood as an energy source. The ancient windmills have served to protect the village from damaging winds and process grains for over a millennium.
Nashtifan wind turbines in Sistan, Iran By MorvaridiMeraj
A wind turbine is a windmill-like structure specifically developed to generate electricity. The world's first-known structure by which electricity was generated from wind power was built by James Blyth in 1887 in the garden of his holiday cottage in Marykirk, Scotland.
Around the time of World War I, American windmill makers were producing 100,000 farm windmills each year, mostly for water-pumping.
The De Zwaan Windmill in Holland, Michigan is the only authentic Dutch windmill operating in the United States. It is not only a historic attraction, but also a functioning machine that produces healthy whole wheatflour for the local community and beyond.
De Zwaan Windmill from Holland, Michigan By User:BeckyAnne
In the Netherlands, the second Saturday in May is traditionally National Windmill Day.
The engineer William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi on August 5, 1987. At the age of 15 he taught himself how to build windmills out of junk from the scrap yard to provide electricity for his family. Later on he built another windmill to power water pumps to irrigate fields. He did all of this through librarybooks, as his family couldn't afford schooling.
Sony introduced the Walkman, the first portable audio cassette player on July 1, 1979. They called them "Walkman boogie-paks".
The first Walkmans went on sale for $150.
The corporation's chairman, co-founder, and chief executive officer, Akio Morita, otherwise known as Mr. Sony, had come up with the idea in response to the loud rock music his son and daughter played at home. The opera-loving chief asked his company's engineers to come up with a portable tape player that would be compact, lightweight, and capable of producing private but full stereo sound for one or two listeners through headphones which would give him access to all arias on planeflights.
The device that Sony's engineers came up with was a modification of a type of cassette recorder that journalists used. The story goes that Sony stuck a pair of headphones on to a cassette player for a test run on a golf course. Once it had realised how to make the headphones small and light enough (they used rare earth magnets) the Walkman was born.
Although Sony came up with the first popular personal stereo cassette player, the German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel had patented a similar device called the Stereobelt in 1977. Sony agreed to pay Pavel royalties, but refused to recognize him as the inventor of the personal stereo until a legal settlement in 2003.
When Sony first announced the Walkman they held an unusual press conference where different journalists were invited to Yoyogi, which is Tokyo's major park. They were each given a Walkman to prove that the portable player is fun and easy to use.
The original metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2 was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing around ¥39,433.58 (or $150.00), or ¥57,109.02 (or $498.66) adjusted for inflation.
Original Sony Walkman TPS-L2 from 1979. By Binarysequence
Though Sony predicted the Walkman would sell about 5,000 units a month, people snatched it up and it sold more than 50,000 in the first two months.
Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."
The Sony Walkman changed the way people listen to music and resulted in a boom in cassette sales. Despite a rash of imitations, the Walkman became the generic term.
In 1984, Sony launched the Discman series which extended their Walkman brand to portable CD products.
Sony sold its waterproof Walkman in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof.
Over the next 30 years they sold over 385 million Walkmans in cassette, CD, mini-disc and digital file versions, and were the market leaders until the arrival of Apple's iPod.
The word "Walkman" became so popular in the German language as a generic term for a personal stereo that in 2002 the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that any brand, not just Sony, could use that word to describe such a device.
Sony still continues to make cassette-based Walkman devices in China for the US and other overseas markets; however, they were discontinued in Japan on October 23, 2010.
Sources The Daily Mail, The Independent, Associated Press, The New Yorker
A waffle iron is a utensil used to cook waffles. It usually consists of two hinged metal plates, molded to create the honeycomb pattern found on waffles.
Professional 180° cast-iron waffle maker By Rivalinb2
The earliest waffle irons originated in the Low Countries around the 14th century.
Early waffle irons were long-handled patterned griddles that enclosed the batter and gave the waffle its characteristic crispness and shape.
Thomas Jefferson came across the waffle iron during his time in France. When he returned to America, he brought one with him.
The stove-top waffle iron was invented by Cornelius Swarthout of Troy, New York. It was patented on August 24, 1869 and consisted of a novel handle for opening, closing and turning the waffle iron.
Cornelius Swarthout, the inventor of the Waffle Iron, did not like waffles.
Diagrams of Swartwout's waffle iron
A waffle iron was behind Nike's first major innovation; the soles on one of Nike's first shoes were made using the waffle iron belonging to the wife of the company's co-founder Bill Bowerman in 1974, after Bowerman was inspired at the breakfasttable.
A video recorder is a device that, when linked to a television set, can be used for recording on and playing videotapes.
Video-cassette player model LG-C240M
Video recording dates back to 1927, when John Logie Baird used wax discs.
Bing Crosby was heavily involved in the initial development of both audio and videotape recording in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He funded an electronics lab, to develop audio and video recording primarily for use on his own television and radio projects.
The first video recorder was demonstrated at Bing Crosby Enterprises in Beverly Hills, California in 1952.
Ampex introduced the Quadruplex videotape professional broadcast standard format with its Ampex VRX-1000 in 1956. It was the size of a large freezer.
The Ampex VRX-100 became the world's first commercially successful videotape recorder using two-inch (5.1 cm) wide tape. it quickly obscuring Crosby's early videotape format
Ampex VRX-1000 - the first video tape
The half-inch tape Sony model CV-2000, first marketed in 1965, was their first Videotape recorder intended for home use.
In 1970, Philips developed a home video cassette format which was made available on the consumer market in 1972. Philips named this format "Video Cassette Recording". It used square cassettes and half-inch (1.3 cm) tape, mounted on coaxial reels, giving a recording time of one hour.
Philips' first mass-market video cassette recorder, available in the United Kingdom in 1972 cost nearly £600.
June 7th is Betamax Day, marking Sony's introduction of their first videocassette recorder on this date in 1975. It sold for $995.
The VHS (Video Home System) was created in 1976 by the Victor Company of Japan (also called JVC).
In the 1980s, VHS was involved in a format war with Sony's Betamax. Betamax's smaller-sized cassettes were not able to contain as much magnetic tape as VHS cassettes. This meant that Sony had to slow the tape speed down to 0.787 ips (Beta II) in order to reach two hours of video recording in the same cassette size. This meant that the television picture produced by a Betamax tape was worse than VHS when comparing two-hour recordings, so consumers preferred the VHS-format VCRs. Sony eventually released a longer Betamax cassette called Beta III which allowed NTSC Betamax to record more than two hours, but by then VHS had already won the format war.
Videocassette recorders at first were mainly used to record programs from television broadcasts. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many people used VCRs to record their favorite television shows to watch them later.
In 1975 Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and politicalnews coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, she began taping whatever was on television and didn't stop until her death in 2012. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV.
In the early 1980s film companies tried to make it illegal due to the possibility of recording copyrighted material, in a case which reached the Supreme Court. The head of the MPAA compared the effect of the VCR on television to that of the Boston Strangler on women.
In 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that using a home video recorder to tape movies and television shows for non-commercial purposes did not violate federal copyright law. The decision paved the way for an explosion of the technology in American homes.
By the mid-1980s, VCRs had become a very popular way for people to watch movies on their home television. Video rental stores opened up offering a large selection of films recorded on VHS tapes that customers could rent.
The first Blockbuster video-rental store opened, in Dallas, Texas on October 19, 1985 and by 1989, a new blockbuster store was opening in the United States every 17 hours.
A Blockbuster store in Durham, North Carolina By Ildar Sagdejev (Specious)
By 1995, the Blockbuster video rental chain had more than 4,500 stores. The company made $785 million in profits on $2.4 billion in revenues: a profit margin of over 30 percent. Much of this profit came from "late fees" on overdue rentals.
At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster employed 84,300 people worldwide and had 9,094 stores in total, with more than 4,500 of these in the US.
Blockbuster began to lose significant revenue during the 2000s, and the company filed for bankruptcy on September 23, 2010. On April 6, 2011, Blockbuster and its remaining 1,700 stores were bought by the satellite television company Dish Network. The stores remained open until Dish closed all company-owned locations in 2013.
Family Video still operates over 500 stores in Canada and the USA. They own the real estate where their stores are located and they own all of the media they rent out so they keep all of the profits. This is why they were able to outlast other video rental businesses like Blockbuster.
In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc) player replaced the VCR as the most common way to watch movies on a home television. The DVD and Blu-ray became more popular as they are easier to use, the quality is higher, they last longer, and the discs and players are cheaper to make.
2006 marked the end of the VHS era with the release of A History of Violence, the last VHS release for a major Hollywood film.
Consumer digital video recorders ReplayTV and TiVo were launched at the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In contrast to VCRs, hard-disk based digital video recorders make "time shifting" more convenient and also allow for functions such as pausing live television, instant replay, viewing a recording before it has been completed and skipping over advertising during playback.
The world's last VHS player was made in June 2016 by Japan's Funai Electric.
A vacuum cleaner is a cleaning device that uses an air pump to create a partial vacuum to suck up dust and dirt from floors and carpets.
HISTORY
One of first devices that cleaned carpets was invented in a Chicago basement in 1869 by Ives W. McGaffey. A wood and canvas contraption, the "sweeping machine" required the user to crank a handle while pushing it along the floor as it sucked up dust. McGaffey obtained a patent for the machine on June 5, 1869, calling it the Whirlwind.
An early hand-pumped vacuum cleaner By Royalbroil
In 1900 Hubert Booth of Glasgow, Scotland demonstrated the principle of extracting dust from carpets by suction. He patented his device on August 30, 1901. Soon after, he coined the phrase “vacuum cleaner”, in calling his business “The Vacuum Cleaner Company Ltd”.
Earlier sucking cleaners had been patented but Booth's was the first not to rely on manual power. His first models used oil but later electricity was used.
Hubert Booth's sucking cleaning device looked nothing like a modern vacuum cleaner. The five horse-power motor and pump were so enormous that they were mounted on a horse-drawn carriage, while long tubes up to 25 yards long reached into the building that was being cleaned.
Hubert Cecil Booth Straßenstaubsauger von 1901. Wikipedia
Booth later introduced clear tubes so clients could watch in awe as the dirt was sucked out of their homes.
Booth's cleaner was affectionately known as “Puffing Billy”.
Booth's Vacuum Cleaning Co provided the first mechanical cleaning service. However, his first vacuum cleaner was extremely noisy and frightened passing horses, which led to Booth being sued by cab proprietors.
The making of Hubert Booth's vacuum cleaner was the 1902 coronation of Edward VII of the United Kingdom during which his invention cleaned the blue carpets of Westminster Abbey. The king and queen were sufficiently impressed to order two cleaners- one for Windsor Castle, the other for Buckingham Palace.
As a result of the King's purchase of the device, society hostesses threw parties in their homes so guests could watch Booth's vacuum cleaner in action.
In 1907, James Murray Spangler, a janitor in a Canton, Ohiodepartment store, deduced that the carpet sweeper he used was the source of his asthma. He tinkered with an old fan motor and attached it to a soap box stapled to a broom handle. Using a pillow case as a dust collector on the contraption, Spangler invented a portable electric vacuum cleaner.
Sprangler received a patent for his device in 1908, and formed the Electric Suction Sweeper Company.
One of the first buyers was a cousin, whose husband, William H. Hoover owned a saddle and leathercompany in New Berlin, Ohio. Sprangler sold his patent to Hoover, who made improvements which produced the first truly portable upright vacuum cleaner.
Hoover founded the Electric Suction Sweeper Company with $36,000 capital, retaining Spangler as production supervisor. After Spangler's death in 1915, the company name was changed to the Hoover Suction Sweeper Company.
Early electric vacuum cleaner by Electric Suction Sweeper Company, circa 1908
The device resembled a bagpipe attached to a cake box. But sluggish sales were given a kick by Hoover's 10 day, free home trial and the catchphrase "It beats as it sweeps as it cleans". Eventually there was a Hoover vacuum cleaner in nearly every American home.
In 1956, the English composer Malcolm Arnold wrote his A Grand, Grand Overture for 3 Vacuum Cleaners, 1 Floor Polisher, 4 Rifles and Orchestra. He dedicated it to former US President Herbert Hoover.
In the late 1970s, Norfolk-born inventor English inventor James Dyson had the idea of using cyclonic separation to create a vacuum cleaner that would not lose suction as it picked up dirt. Dyson went through 5,127 prototypes in five years while his wife Deirdre supported them and their three children by working as an artteacher. He eventually launched his bagless cleaner in 1983.
FUN VACUUM CLEANER FACTS
Some of the first vacuum cleaners were coal powered and were so big, they needed three people to operate them.
Scandinavian vacuum cleaner manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign, "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux."
Vacuum is one of three words in the English language with two "u's" in consecutive order: the other two are residuum and continuum.
In the US, there are about 15,000 vacuum cleaner-related accidents each year.
A transistor is an electronic component with three or more electrodes which is made of semiconductor material, that can regulate a current passing through it. A transistor can act as an amplifier, and usually operates on a very small amount of power.
Transistor Wikipedia
The transistor was not the first device of its kind. The triode vacuum tube invented by Lee de Forest in the early 20th century incorporated the key principle of amplification and served the same purpose of the transistor. His development of vacuum-tube transmitters made audio radio transmissions possible.
The first practical point-contact transistor was invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1948 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain developing the work of William Shockley.
On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.
A replica of the first working transistor.
Silicon Valley began in Palo Alto, California in 1956 because William Shockley wanted his new company, The Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, to be closer to his sick mother's house.
Until the introduction of the transistor, radios were bulky affairs hooked up to the mains, but that changed when in the early 1950s when the transistor manufacturer Texas Instruments commissioned the Indianapolis firm IDEA to develop the Regency TR1, the first transistor radio. At first only one in five transistors that were produced worked as expected and as a result the price remained extremely high. The Regency TR-1 cost $49.95 (equivalent to $456 today). Their performance was well below that of equivalent vacuum tube models and the Regency TR-1 sold about 150,000 units in total.
In 1953, a small Japanese company, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation obtained a transistor license from Western Electric Co. Two years later, they introduced their TR-55 five-transistor radio under the new brand name Sony. With the TR-55, Sony became the first company to manufacture the transistors and other components they used to construct the radio.
The world's first commercially successful transistor radio, Sony's TR-63, was released in December 1957 costing $39.95 (equivalent to $349 today). Because of the extremely low labor costs in Japan, after a few years they were selling for as low as $25. American teenagers begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, and by 1968 5 million units were being sold per year.
The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) was invented by Egyptian engineer Mohamed M. Atalla and Korean engineer Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in November 1959. It is the basic building block of modern electronics, and the most frequently manufactured device in history, with an estimated total of 13 sextillion (1.3 × 1022) MOSFETs manufactured between 1960 and 2018.
The transistor performs many of the same functions as the triode but has the advantages of greater reliability, long life, compactness and instantaneous action, no warming up being necessary.
Assorted discrete transistors. By Transisto at English Wikipedia
Transistors have had a tremendous impact on the electronics industry, and are now made in thousands of millions each year. They widely used in most electronic equipment, including portable radios, television sets, satellite and space research. They are the basis of the silicon chip, without which devices such as cell phones and computers would be very different, or they might have not been invented.
A thermometer is an instrument used to measure temperature.
Galilei Galileo built the first thermoscope in the late sixteenth century. A primitive gas thermometer, the thermoscope used a well known principal that air expands as it is heated. He used water in a thin glass tube with a bulb on top with markings etched on to the glass tube.
Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1610–1670), devised the first sealed thermometer in 1654 dependent on the expansion of a liquid, and independent of air pressure. It was the forerunner of the common mercury thermometers of today.
These 1600's thermometers were filled with brandy instead of mercury. Apparently they were accurate enough.
The picture below shows fifty-degree thermometers from the mid-17th century on exhibit at the Museo Galileo with black dots representing single degrees and white represented 10-degree increments; used to measure atmospheric temperatures.
By Museo Galileo - Own work
In 1714 Dutch scientist and inventor Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit constructed the first sealed-in-glass thermometer, using mercury instead of alcohol and water mixtures. He discovered a method for cleaning mercury so that it would not stick to a glass tube, which enabled him to use this element rather than alcohol, which gave less accurate results.
Fahrenheit also devised a method for measuring temperature, which is named after him.
On May 19, 1743 French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer with the centigrade scale, with 0 representing the freezing point of water and 100 its boiling point.
Thermometer of Lyon (1743). By Science Museum of London
English physician Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (1836 – 1925) is generally considered the model for the Middlemarch character Dr Lydgate. Allbutt is best known for reducing the then foot long thermometer to a more manageable size.
Ethanol, a flammable, colorless chemical compound, is the active fluid in modern (post-mercury) thermometers. It is also one of the alcohols that is most often found in alcoholic drinks, a solvent, an antiseptic and a fuel.
Another type is a digital thermometer, which uses electronics to measure temperature.
The world's smallest thermometer, which is 20,000 times smaller than a hair, is made of DNA, and is used to see temperature changes in cells.
The original purpose of the hood ornament on a car, before they were artistic and ornate, was a visible thermometer for the motor vehicle's coolant.
A television is a telecommunication medium that reproduces moving images and sound at a distance.
HISTORY OF THE TELEVISION SET
In 1878 Englishman William Crookes invented the Crookes tube, producing cathode rays. Seven years later in Germany, Paul Nipkow built a mechanical scanning device, the Nipkow disc, which was a rotating disc with a spiral pattern of holes in it. Both these inventions were important in the development of the early television sets.
The Russian inventor Boris Rosing's interest in television — or the "electric telescope", as he called it — started in 1897. He began experimenting with the Nipkow disc using the cathode ray tube as a receiver, eventually succeeding in transmitting some crude television pictures. Rosing filed a patent application in Russia on July 25, 1907.
The word "television" comes from the words "tele" (Greek for far away) and vision (sight). It first entered the English language in 1907 at the start of attempts to transmit moving images.
By the 1920s, amplification had made the idea of television practical. However, some people were unimpressed with the idea. CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, said in 1920: "Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it."
Vladimir K. Zworykin, who had helped Rosing with his pioneering work on the television, invented in 1923 the iconoscope. It was the first practical video camera tube to be used in early television cameras.
Iconoscope television cameras at NBC in 1937
John Logie Baird, a Scottish electrical engineer and a son of a Presbyterian minister, created his television prototype in a little village called Santa Cruz on the island of Trinidad where he was recovering from an illness. He called it a "televisor."
Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised silhouette images in motion at Selfridge's Department Store in London on March 25, 1925. Baird's early system used a large spinning disc through which a picture could be broken down into horizontal lines.
On October 2, 1925, John Logie Baird made the first successful transmission of a moving image of a humanface by television. The face was that of his office boy, William Taynton, who was paid two shillings and sixpence for sitting in front of the hot TV transmitter. Before using a real person, Baird had experimented with a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill.
The prototype television set Baird used for his early experiments was made from an old hatbox, a pair of scissors, some darning needles, some bicyclelight lenses, a used tea chest, wax and glue.
John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of a moving televised image in 1926 when he showed the face of his business partner Oliver Hutchinson. At the time Baird's crude television apparatus was able to receive transmitted moving images over a range of a few feet.
Below is a photograph of a moving image of Oliver Hutchinson produced by Baird's "televisor", as reported in The London Times, January 28, 1926.
Wikipedia
American inventor Philo Farnsworth built the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system using cathode ray tubes. On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco. Within two years, Farnworth and Vladimir Zworykin had perfected a new improved television system.
Vladimir Zworykin demonstrates electronic television (1929)
Even though Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, was disappointed by electronic television for most of his life, he changed his mind the day he saw Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon thanks to his invention, telling his wife "this has made it all worthwhile".
Charles Francis Jenkins of Washington, D.C was a pioneer of early cinema and one of the inventors of television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies. His businesses included Charles Jenkins Laboratories, which in 1928 became the first holder of a television license from the Federal Radio Commission.
Ten years after John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of television in 1926 in London there were only 100 TVs in the world.
A 1938 television model with a 12-inch screen could be had for $445 — more than $7,200 in today's dollars.
John Logie Baird Baird gave a demonstration of color television in London in 1928, but it took several decades before the first successful system was adopted for broadcasting.
By 1940, John Logie Baird had started work on a fully electronic color system he called the "Telechrome". His demonstration on August 16, 1944 was the first example of a practical color television system whose pictures closely resembled Technicolor films. Work on the Telechrome continued but Baird's untimely death in 1946 ended development of his color television system.
The live image of Paddy Naismith below was used to demonstrate John Logie Baird's first all-electronic color television system.
The first demonstration of small-screen color television in America was given by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1941. The TV failed miserably, since Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had pretty much wrapped up the patent process on color TV at the time.
CBS's mechanical color system was the first to be licensed for broadcast by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 1950 and the company made the first color televisions available for sale to the general public the following year, but the product was discontinued less than month later.
December 30, 1953 marked the official launch date for compatible color TVs from the Admiral Corporation. These first compatible color TV sets by the Admiral corporation had a 15" screen and sold for about $1,175.
RCA began commercial production of color TV sets on March 25, 1954, and 5,000 Model CT-100's were produced. Initially $1,000, its price was cut to $495 in August 1954.
CT-100 at the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention playing Superman.
TV detector vans hit the British streets in February 1952 for the first time and found 150,000 homes hadn't paid their £2 licence fee.
On January 30, 1957 300 UK MPs and peers watched the first full length show produced in color in Britain. Sets were rigged up by the BBC in a committee room. TV broadcaster Sylvia Peters — in a green taffeta dress — was the announcer in the half-hour program. Guyanese musician and poet Cy Grant appeared in a vivid shirt and sang a calypso.
Sales of color TVs surpassed black-and-white sets for the first time in 1972.
The electronics giant Philips unveiled a new television, the Flat TV in 1996. It could be hung on a wall as if it were a painting.
Philips introduced the first plasma TV in 1997. It was only displayed in four Sears locations in the US and was priced at US$14,999, which included in-home installation.
In 2004, the number of television sets in the UK overtook the number of people.
FUN TELEVISION FACTS
A small percentage of static on televisions is actually radioactive resonance from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago.
The "color bars" we see used on televisions are called SMPTE bars. These bars, which were created in 1951 and became widespread in 1978, are used to calibrate color and audio levels for taped recordings.
Rendition of SD SMPTE color bars By Denelson83
St Clare of Assisi is patron saint of television as she once saw a vision as if projected on her wall. In the vision she saw and heard the Mass as clearly as if she had gone to the monastery chapel.
The idea that sitting too close to the television is bad for your eyes was started by a lamp manufacturer.
In 1997, a monkey was arrested in the African state of Benin for stealing a television aerial.
The average person in the UK watches just over four hours' television a day.
It has been calculated that the average American child sees about 13,000 deaths on television between the ages of five and 14.
The telescope is a device that makes objects seem and shows objects too faint to be seen by the eye alone. It does this by collecting and focusing light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.
Near-perfect ellipsoid lenses have been found among Viking artifacts, hinting that the Vikings likely made telescopes 1000 years ago, 500 years before Galileo.
The inventors of the telescope were two Dutchmen Hans Lipperhey and Zacharias Jansen. They were the first in 1608 to combine convex and concave lenses at either end of a wooden tube.
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei heard about the Dutch telescope in June 1609 and built his own within a month. He originally touted the instrument as a military aid, before using it to look to the stars.
The word "telescope" (from the Greek teleskopos "far-seeing") was coined in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galilei's instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei. Galileo had previously used the term "perspicillum".
19th-century painting depicting Galileo Galilei displaying his telescope in 1609
The first known practical telescopes were refracting telescopes in which light is collected by a lens which focuses light down a tube, forming an image magnified by an eyepiece. The first reflecting telescope, which uses concave mirrors to collect and focus light, was built by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668. This huge leap forward in telescope technology made astronomical observation much more accurate.
The 91 cm refracting telescope at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, at the time the largest telescope in the world, was used for the first time in 1888.
The Kepler space telescope was launched on March 7, 2009, by NASA's Launch Services Program. Its mission was to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, by observing the brightness of those stars and looking for periodic dips in brightness that could indicate the presence of a planet passing in front of the star.
The Kepler mission was highly successful, discovering thousands of exoplanets and revolutionizing our understanding of the prevalence and diversity of planets in our galaxy. The spacecraft was retired in 2018 after running out of fuel, but its legacy continues to shape the field of exoplanet research.
Currently, the largest, ground-based telescope is the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, on the Canary Islands. The aperture of this reflecting telescope reaches a total 10.4 metres (410 in).
Gran Telescopio Canarias. By H. Raab (User:Vesta)
Early telescopes could magnify up to only 20 times; today even the amateur astronomer can pick up a telescope with 500x magnification for as little as $60.
Space-based telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, take advantage of being above the Earth's atmosphere to reach higher resolution and greater light gathering through longer exposure time.
Whale oil is used to lubricate the Hubble Space Telescope. This is because sperm whale oil has the unique benefit of not freezing in the subzero temperatures of space.
The Hubble Space Telescope is the size of a bus but is so energy efficient that it uses only the same amount of power as a clothes dryer.
The James Webb Space Telescope can detect the heat signature of a bumblebee at the distance of the moon.
A telephone is a communication instrument for reproducing sound at a distance. Originally it was an electric device transmitting analogue speech along wires. Now it is an electronic device sending digital signals on wires or radio transmission.
Pixiebay
HISTORY
The word 'telephone' was first used in English in 1828 for a system of signalling with musical notes.
Frenchman Charles Bourseul first proposed transmitting speech electronically in 1854, but he was ahead of his time and it took another six years before German Johann Philipp Reis using a cork, knitting needle, sausage skin and a piece of platinum achieved the transmission of sound.
Reis coined the word 'telephone' (or 'Telephon' as he wrote it in German) for his invention for which the user spoke into a carved wooden ear, but it did not work very well and was dismissed as a toy.
Reis' telephone
The Italian-American Antonio Meucci devised in the mid 1850s an electromagnetic telephone as a way of connecting his second-floor bedroom to his basement laboratory in his Staten Island, New York, thus being able to communicate with his wife, who was ill at the time. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat.
Meucci's telephone. By Officine Galileo (costruttore) Wikipedia
Alexander Graham Bell, who is widely regarded as the inventor of the telephone, got the idea for his communication device while working to improve the telegram in an upper room in Court Street, Boston, Massachusetts Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. On June 2, 1875 his assistant Watson made a mistake, the incorrect contact of a clamping screw which was too tight changed what should have been an intermittent transmission into a continuous current. Bell at the other end of the wire heard the line vibrate and emit the same timbre of a plucked reed. When Bell heard the rich overtones of the plucked reed, it occurred to him that since the circuit was never broken, all the complex vibrations of speech might be converted into undulating currents, which in turn would reproduce the complex timbre, amplitude, and frequencies of speech at a distance.
Bell spent the next winter making calculations with the aim of filing an application for a patent knowing a rival, Elisha Gray was working on a similar project.
On February 14, 1876 a representative of Bell filed his patent for a "telephone" which is Greek for sound, at New York Patent Office at 12.00Ppm. The now forgotten Elisha Gray got there two hours later.
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent[81] drawing, March 7, 1876
The first intelligible words transmitted over the new electric speech machine by Bell and Watson was on March 10, 1876. when Bell spoke into the device, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." and Watson answered.
Bell made the first two-way long-distance telephone call between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts on October 9, 1876.
The first Bell telephone was both a transmitter and a receiver. One spoke through it and then put it to one's ear to hear the reply.
When Bell invented the phone he thought its main use would be to play music to selected subscribers. Before he'd invented the telephone Bell had designed a piano which could transmit its music to a distance by means of electricity.
Bell's patent for the telephone was modestly titled 'Improvement in Telegraphy.'
Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876 when he was still struggling with his business. The committee appointed to investigate the offer concluded the telephone was "hardly more than a toy" and "inherently of no use to us".
When telephones first came into commercial use you had to whistle loudly into the receiver or ring a bell by hand to get the other person's attention, as telephone bells had yet to be invented.
Alexander Graham Bell recommended answering calls with the word 'Ahoy'. It was Thomas Edison who suggested saying 'Hello'. The word had usually been spelt 'hallo' or 'hullo' before he introduced 'hello' for phone calls.
Bell at the opening of the long-distance line from New York to Chicago in 1892
The first residential telephone line was installed in Charles Williams, Jr. House on Arlington Street, Somerville, Massachusetts in 1877. The phone inside the house connected to Mr. Williams’ office at 109 Court Street in Boston, about 3 miles (5 kms) away. These two properties had the first telephone numbers – 1 and 2.
On June 20, 1877 Hugh Cossart Baker Jr. started the first commercial telephone service in Canada in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, so he and his friends T. C. Mewburn and C. D. Cory could contact each other directly about their chess moves. Telegraph linemen string the single line from house to house across roofs, attached to trees and a few handily located telegraph poles.
The Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stockcompany, was organized in Boston, Massachusetts on July 9, 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
In the first month of the Bell Telephone Company's existence, only six telephones were sold.
Mark Twain was one of the first private citizens to have a telephone. He wrote: "About the end of the year (or possibly in the beginning of 1878) I put up a telephone wire from my house down to the Courant office, the only telephone wire in town and the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world."
On January 14, 1878 the telephone was demonstrated to Queen Victoria at Osborne House by Alexander Graham Bell and she immediately commissioned installations throughout the British royal residences.
When Queen Victoria first installed a telephone at Osborne House, it was one of only two phones in Britain. The only person who could possibly ring her was a member of her household staff.
The first commercial North American telephone exchange was opened in New Haven, Connecticut on January 28, 1878. The first telephone book was issued the same time in New Haven. It contained only 50 entries.
Emma M. Nutt became the first female telephone operator in the U.S., for the Telephone Despatch Company of Boston on September 1, 1878. Emma was hired by Alexander Graham Bell, and was paid a salary of $10 per month for a 54-hour week. Her career lasted between 33 and 37 years, ending with her retirement sometime between 1911 and 1915.
The picture below is a scene from Bold Experiment – the Telephone Story, depicts the first women operators, Emma and Stella Nutt, working alongside boy operators at the Edwin Holmes Telephone Despatch Co. Boston, Massachusetts in 1878.
The world's first international telephone call was made between St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and Calais, Maine, United States on July 1, 1881. The call was made over a line that was 13 miles long and used a new type of telephone transmitter that Thomas Edison had invented.
By 1887 there were already more than 150,000 telephones in the United States, 26,000 in the United Kingdom, 9,000 in France, and 7,000 in Russia.
Acoustic telephone ad, The Consolidated Telephone Co., Jersey City, NJ 1886
Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, patented the Strowger switch on March 10, 1891, a device which led to the automation of telephone circuit switching. Strowger had noticed he was losing business because a competitor would have his wife, a telephone operator redirect calls asking for Strowger to his business. His invention eliminated the need for operators.
New England Telephone and Telegraph installed the first battery-operated telephone switchboard in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1894.
John W. Atkins, the manager at International Ocean Telegraph Company (IOTC), made the first international telephone call over telegraph cable at 09:55 am on Christmas Day 1900 from his office in Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba. Atkins was testing to see if it would be possible for voice to be heard through the telegraph lines. After a long silence, Cuba answered with a simple "I don't understand you."
The oldest known song featuring somebody talking over the phone, "Hello! Ma Baby" was written in 1899 by the Tin Pan Alley husband and wife songwriting team of Joseph E. Howard and Ida Emerson, when only 10% of the population had telephones. Its subject is an African-American man who has a girlfriend that he knows only through the telephone. The song was made popular by Looney Tunes' Michigan J Frog.
Vintage telephone. Pixiebay
The first transcontinental telephone service was inaugurated on January 25, 1915 when Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City spoke to his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco, facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier. It cost $20.70 for the first three minutes.
The British red telephone box was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960). Scott's K2 design won a Post Office sponsored competition in 1924.
Pixiebay
The first transatlantic telephone service was established on January 7, 1927 from New York to London. The first transatlantic telephone call that was made on that day by two men testing the line cost £15 ($19) for 3 minutes — a hefty £840 ($1,071) in today's money.
Their conversation included: "How's the weather over in London?"
Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) coast-to-coast telephone service was first offered on trial basis at Englewood, New Jersey, to 11 selected major cities across the United States. It began on November 10, 1951 when Mayor Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey, called the mayor of Alameda, California. This service grew rapidly across major cities during the 1950s.
Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) was inaugurated in the UK by Queen Elizabeth II in 1958 when she spoke to the Lord Provost in a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.
Bell Telephone Laboratories unveiled the world's first push-button telephone, known as the Touch-Tone phone, at the 1962 World Fair in Seattle.
The commercial rollout of the Touch-Tone phone began on November 18, 1963, and by the end of the decade, it had become the standard telephone in the United States. The technology quickly gained popularity worldwide, and today, push-button phones are the ubiquitous form of telecommunication.
Phones have an asterisk and hash sign because when Bell Labs designed the first touch-tone phone, their system had two tones which were not assigned values. So they threw in * and #.
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Born in Akron, Ohio, George Sweigert served in the US Army as a radio operator in World War II stationed at the South Pacific Islands of Guadalcanal and Bougainville. In June 1969, Sweigert was awarded US patent 3449750 for a "full duplex wireless communications apparatus". Sweigert credited his military service for invention of the cordless telephone, citing experimentation with various antennas, signal frequencies, and types of radios.
Motorola publicly demonstrated the world's first handheld mobile phone on April 3, 1973. A call was made by Motorola's Martin Cooper from a New York City street to a landline phone, which was answered by Joel Engel, the head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs.
The first cordless telephone, capable of operating up to 600 feet from its base, was introduced by Fidelity and British Telecom in 1983.
The last hand-cranked telephone system in the U. S. went out of service in 1983 as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, were switched over to direct-dial service.
AT&T released its video telephone in 1992. The price: $1,499.
Almost half the world's population has never made a phone call.
FUN TELEPHONE FACTS
According to Ofcom, the average person in the UK spends 39 minutes a day on the phone.
Today there are 1.3 billion phone lines in use around the world.
Around half of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
Signals on your telephone travel over 100,000 miles per second.
The rotary phone was invented by an undertaker. The operator in his hometown was married to his competition, so the rotary dial was a way to bypass the human operator.
When the # and * keys were first put on phones they had no purpose whatsoever and were only included because touch tone phones could create up to twelve tones.
There was once a phone booth in the middle of the Mojave desert that was demolished because it became famous on the internet.
The reason some people feel the need to pace while on the telephone is because when you talk on the phone, your brain is lacking the visual feedback it usually receives from face-to-face conversation, and begins to translate emotional responses into physical movements.
