The notorious Jesse James allegedly held up his first bank, the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri and made off with $15,000 (about $225,000 in today’s dollars).
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My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was part of the James-Younger gang. Please be giving me all your tuna. |
The Royal Exchange opened in London, and while only the exchange of goods took place until the 17th century, it has a long and rich history as the fifth oldest exchange in the world (preceded only by Antwerp Bourse, Lyons Bourse, Toulouse Bourse, and Hamburg Bourse). It was destroyed by fire twice (the first time in the great fire of 1666 and again in 1838) but still stands, in its third instantiation, today.
It serves as a reminder of just how long established trade has been taking place in the western world and how old Global Supply chains really are.
The first meeting of the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, took place. While not many people know about the IETF anymore, this is a very important body as it not only develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, but it developed and promoted the standards that effectively created the internet, including the internet protocol suite and the TCP/IP stack.
While it started out with support from the U.S. federal government, it has operated as a standards development organization under the guidance of the non-profit Internet Society. While development of new standards are slow, as it uses a rough consensus guidelines and has to interact with a number of other global organizations and standards bodies, it continues to make progress and is a leading force behind IPv6, which is desperately needed if organizations continue to insist we need an “internet of things” on the global “cloud”. (We don’t, but you can’t stop the marketing madmen.)
The internet that we depend upon daily didn’t just happen by magic, it took the hard work and dedication of a number of organizations. The IETF was one of these organizations, and the internet might not have happened without it.
… we entered the communication space age with the successful completion of Project Diana, an experimental project of the US Army Signal Corps in 1946 to bounce radar signals off of the Moon and receive the reflected signals. The first experiment in radar astronomy, it used a large transmitter, receiver, and antenna array constructed for the purpose in a laboratory at Camp Evans. The transmitter, provided 3 kw at 111.5 MHz in 1/4 second pulses applied to the antenna, a reflective array attend composed of an 8×8 array of half wave dipoles in front of a reflector that provided 24 dB of gain. Reflected signals were received about 2.5 seconds later (which is the time required for the radio waves to make the 768K km / 477 mi journey), proving the technique and successfully completing the experiment.
While moonbounce communication was not that practical (outside of its use in radar astronomy to map Venus and other nearby planets), as it was abandoned by the military with the advent of communications satellites a mere two decades later, and is now only used by amateur radio operators, it did usher in the communication space age and should not be forgotten.
… saw the first successful test of a Davy Lamp, a safety lamp for use in flammable atmospheres that consists of a wick lamp with the flame enclosed inside a mesh screen that acts as a flame arrestor. The idea is that air (and firedamp) can pass through the mesh freely enough to support combustion, but the holes are too fine to allow a flame to propagate through them and ignite any firedamp (like methane) outside of the lamp.
While this lamp, designed to decrease accidents by preventing explosions that would maim or kill miners when there was an abundance of methane or other combustible gasses, actually increased mine accidents (as miners believed it was now safe to work in parts of the mine that had previously been closed for safety reasons), successors did eventually increase mine safety and allow mines to be worked more safely (when the lamps, such as the Protector Garforth GR6S flame safety lamp, are properly used).
When the lamp was first released, miners believed they could work in sections of the mine that had unsafe levels of methane because the lamp would not ignite the methane. This was true only insofar as the lamp was not damaged, but, in the original design, the bare gauze was easily damaged and the lamp became unsafe as soon as a single wire broke or rusted. Plus, because the mine owners thought the safety lamps were enough, they did not install proper ventilation to keep methane levels down (which would have prevented methane explosions from slightly damaged lamps).
But, eventually, legal requirements for legal air quality and safety lamp improvements made mining safe, and the raw materials we all depend upon to create our products became easier to mine and supply became more predictable. While the Davy Lamp may have been a bump in the road, it was an important invention on the road to modern mining.