Category Archives: History

One Hundred and Seventy Years Ago Today …

Marked the first publication of the Cambridge Chronicle, the oldest surviving American newspaper. This is a very long time for a publication to survive. A very long time. Especially when many publications in today’s internet age only last a few years. Even the Red Herring ceased print publication in 2007, less than fourteen years after it was founded. (There was a time when it was as popular, if not more so, than Wired, an internet age publication that actually survived the internet age, but which still is only 23 years old.)

Even the New York Times did not start until five years later (and celebrates it’s 165th birthday on September 18 of this year). This blog, while the second oldest surviving independent blog in the Supply Management space (at 10 years), is just a blip when compared to the Cambridge Chronicle. Let’s hope that digitization does not wipe these publications out because ad-sponsored journalism is not really journalism at all. (When even South Park knows the danger of ad-funded “journalism”, you know something is very, very wrong.)

One Hundred and Sixty Five Years Ago Today …

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the very first World’s Fair, opened in Hyde Park in London (England).

Organized by Henry Cole and Prince Albert, it was attended by numerous notable world figures of the time and contained exhibits from Britain, its ‘colonies and dependencies’, and 44 ‘foreign states’ in Europe and the Americas. With over 13,000 exhibits, it was a tremendous undertaking for the time and inspired a series of world fairs that followed (which still continue to this day, with the next world fair being Expo 2017, taking place in Astana, Kazakhstan [as sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions, which has served as the international sanctioning body for world’s fairs of the universal, international, and specialized variety since 1928]).

A special building, The Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton and which took the form of a massive glass house 1851 feet long and 454 feet high, was built specifically to house the show. After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common, and stood until its destruction by fire in 1936. However, its legacy lived on as the site was used as the Crystal Palace motor racing circuit between 1927 and 1974 and inspired the Crystal Palace Garden Parties between 1971 and 1980.

And over six million people attended the fair. One has to remember that in 1851, the population of Great Britain and Ireland combined was only 29M-ish (and Britain itself only 19M-ish) and the world population was only slightly over 1 Billion. This contributed to a profit of £186,000 (£18,370,000 in 2015), and that surplus funded the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, and the National History Museum as well as an educational trust for scholarships and industrial research which still provides funds today.

RIP, PER

Fifty-Five (55) years ago today, the Pacific Electric Railway, once the largest electric railway in the world in the 1920s, ended operations.

It was a sad day in history because despite the perceived infrastructure cost, electric transportation can be a lot a cheaper than gas-transportation with the regular, repeated, rises in oil that have been happening over the past 40 years, especially when you consider improvements in electricity generation from sustainable sources including sun, wind, and water power that is almost free once the infrastructure has been paid for.

As this isn’t an engineering or energy blog, we won’t dive into pages of discussion as to why clean, smog-free electric streetcars are much preferable to the gas-guzzling busses of today, but simply mourn the passing of the streetcar and the great networks that used to power the great cities of North America.

One Hundred and Twenty years Ago Today

Mr. Charles Dow published the first edition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a mere 12 years after Mr. Charles Dow composed his first stock average (of nine railroads and two industrial companies). And while there have been many averages, including a number created by Mr. Charles Dow himself, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the second oldest US market index (after the Dow Jones Transportation Average) is the most famous of these. The only index that come close in fame is the S&P 500.

It’s famous as many investors believe it can be used to describe the market, but all it can really be used for is a baseline to compare the return on specific investments in a historical period to the index. A good investor should beat the index, and a bad investor doesn’t hit it. However, simply judging a price against a price weighted index doesn’t really tell you much about the market, just the historical performance of a small portion of it. It’s a useful measurement of past performance, but not necessarily a good indicator of future performance of the market overall. But all analysis has to start from somewhere, and this did give rise to a new era in stock market analysis, which, for better or worse, did lead to new advancements in analytics and computing, we have to at least recognize it.

Still Grumbling About DST?

It was 98 years ago today that the US Congress established time-zones and approved daylight savings time, two years after Germany and Austria-Hungary organized the first implementation, which began on April 30, 1916.

A good history of daylight savings time is over on Wikipedia. Interesting facts include it was first conceived by a New Zealander, used extensively during the world wars to conserve coal during daylight hours, and didn’t become common place until the 70’s as a result of the energy crisis.

And if you’d prefer to listen to a brief history, John Oliver did an interesting segment last year on Last Week Tonight.