This week’s milestones in tech history include Yahoo going public, the founding of MIT, the greatest invention of the 19th century, the birth of computer programming as a profession and of Betamax, and LiveJournal going live.
April 10, 1861
MIT’s charter, the "Act to Incorporate the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" is passed by the Massachusetts legislature and approved by Governor Andrew.
The proposal to found MIT came from University of Virginia professor William Barton Rogers (later MIT’s first president), who wrote in 1843:
The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
April 11, 1936
German civil engineer and early computer pioneer Konrad Zuse files for a patent on the automatic execution of calculations, a process that will become central to the Z-1, Germany’s first computer.
April 12, 1827
English pharmacist John Walker sells the first friction matches, which he called “Friction Light,” from his pharmacy in Stockton on Tees. The previous year, Walker discovered through a lucky accident that a stick coated with chemicals burst into flame when scraped across his hearth at home.
Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the process by which fire was created was slow and laborious. Walker’s friction match revolutionized the production, application and the portability of fire.
Frederick Schwartz observed in “The end of the millennium (as we know it)” in Invention & Technology (Winter 2000): “…the first item on [The New York Times’ list of greatest inventions of the 19th century, published in 1899] was one that is often forgotten today: friction matches, introduced in their modern form in 1827. For somebody to whom the electric light was as recent an innovation as the VCR is to us, the instant availability of fire on demand had indeed been one of the greatest advances of the century.”
Which invention of the last 100 years is overshadowing an even more important invention of recent years? Which recent—and much talked-about—invention will no longer be important in a few years?
April 12, 1947
Computer code “written in the modern paradigm” is successfully executed for the first time, according to the authors of ENIAC in Action. This was the birth of computer programming as a profession, as the formation of the group tasked with this demonstration and subsequent coding work, “truly established computer programming as a job in its own right.”
April 12, 1996
Public shares of Yahoo! are offered in the company’s initial public offering (IPO). The shares, which were initially offered at $13, trade for as much as $43 before settling at $33 at the close of market, valuing the company at $1.1 billion.
Verizon’s $4.48 billion acquisition of Yahoo is set to close by the end of April 2017. Verizon plans to establish “Oath” as the overall brand name that will include all its media properties such as Yahoo, AOL, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget.
April 14, 1894
The first commercial exhibition of motion pictures in history is given in New York City, using ten Kinetoscopes. Though not a movie projector—it was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet housing its components—Edison’s Kinetoscope introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter.
Scott Kirsner brings to life the scene on this day in 1894 in Inventing the Movies:
The Holland brothers had rented a former shoe store at 1155 Broadway… and turned it into the world’s first Kinetoscope parlor. … Greeting patrons at the entrance was a bust of Thomas Edison… painted to look like it had been cast out of bronze, and perched atop a Greek column to give the place an air of class…. The novelty of life and motion stored inside a box and triggered on command–the startling realism of those flickery, black-and-white scenes–was what drew in customers, not the films being exhibited. … By the close of the first day of business, nearly five hundred people have watched Edison’s movies, and the Holland brothers had raked in $120.
A year earlier, Edison wrote about the invention: “I’m doubtful there is any commercial feature in it, and fear it will not earn their cost. These… devices are of too sentimental value to get the public to invest in it.”
He was wrong. The Kinetoscopes were an immediate hit. Edison sold nearly a thousand of them at $200 each to a syndicate; his $24,000 investment in experimentation had by February 1895 returned $177,847 on machines and films. And then, says Harold Evans in They Made America, “[Edison] took the first step on a long, long road to synchronized talking pictures, when he installed a phonograph in a peep-show machine.”
April 15, 1999
LiveJournal is launched by Brad Fitzpatrick, age 19, as a way of keeping in touch with his high school friends. LiveJournal started as a blogging site that incorporated social networking features inspired by the WELL. It was bought in January 2005 by blogging software company Six Apart which sold it two years later to Russian media company SUP Media.
April 16, 1975
Sony launches the Betamax videocassette format in Japan. Sony’s corporate history explains the origins of the name: “‘Beta’ is the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape. From this sprung the idea of using the word ‘beta.’ [In addition,] the tape path in the new loading system closely resembled the Greek letter beta, when seen from above. This symbol is associated with good luck and can be construed as a drawn-out pronunciation of the English word ‘better.’ ‘Max,’ an abbreviation of the word ‘maximum’ was intended to impart a meaning of grandness, and was then added to the end. The name ‘Betamax’ was born.”
Sony’s official history continues:
While Sony believed it had a revolutionary product on its hands, it still had to convince consumers throughout the world how to benefit from a Betamax VCR in their homes. [Sony's President] Morita thought the best way to achieve this was through a short, catchy slogan, and the slogan “time-shift” was created. This encapsulated the core concept behind the Betamax; to build a machine that frees consumers from the constraints of watching television programs on the day they are broadcast. With the time-shift function, consumers could record their favorite programs and watch them whenever they liked.
Betamx ended up losing to another videocassette format, VHS, mostly because VHS had longer playing time and much less complex tape transport mechanism.
Or, as Marc Wielage and Rod Woodcock put it:
“Oh, somewhere there’s a VCR
that’s been a huge success,
That format now is thriving
and is known as VHS;
And somewhere tapes are playing
and films are rented out.
But there’s no joy at Sony…
Mighty Beta has struck out.
Of course, both (analog) formats gave way to (digital) DVDs which have been taken over by (virtual) online video streaming.
