543 years ago today, Florentine civil servant, diplomat, historian, philosopher and author Niccolò Machiavelli was born. Besides his seminal work 'Il Principe' (The Prince) he also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and even poetry.
On this day in 1877 Thomas A. Edison conceived the first idea for his phonograph, the very first mechanical tool for recording and reproducing (replaying) sound. The phonograph also was the invention that first gained him public notice.
301 years ago, the great Philosopher David Hume was born. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy as well as the Scottish Enlightenment. In his 'Treatise of Human Nature' (1739), he was about to create a total naturalistic "science of man" examining the psychological basis of human nature.
British Philosopher John Stuart Mill died, maybe the most influential english-speaking philosopher of the 19th century. His views still are significance today and are generally recognized to be among the deepest and certainly the most effective defenses of empiricism and of a liberal political view of society and culture.
207 years ago, the German poet, philosopher, and historian Friedrich Schiller passed away. As a representative of the Weimar Classicism and the 'Sturm und Drang' (Storm and Drive) movement, Schiller published some of the most influential works of the time.
When in 1952 the world's first thermonuclear fusion bomb was ignited, mathematicians and physicists thought it would be rather unlikely that testing the device might result in burning all the nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere. But, the possibility could not be excluded completely. Nevertheless, they have tested the bomb and fortunately for us not the like did happen. One of the key persons behind the development of the hydrogenic bomb was Stanislaw Ulam, who together with physicist Edward Teller came up with the first successful design.
I guess almost nobody except a few mathematicians and computer scientists have ever heard of the Australian computer scientist Charles Leonard Hamblin, who passed away 27 years ago today. And also most of my fellow computer scientists might not have heard of him. But, one of his major contributions to computer science was the introduction of the so-called Reverse Polish Notation. Does that ring a bell?
394 years ago, famous astronomer Johannes Kepler discovered the 3rd and also last of his planetary laws, and concluded the general revolution of our celestial world that started with Nikolaus Kopernikus about 100 years earlier. And that made him rather popular as he still is today. Did you know that there is a Kepler crater on the Moon, a Kepler crater on Mars, a Kepler asteroid, a Kepler supernova, of course there has to be a space mission named after him, even an opera
Ivan Sutherland, The American computer scientist and Internet pioneer has received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for his invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers today.
Bram Stoker in 1897 published his seminal book 'Dracula' in London and established one of the most influential genres in fantastic literature by introducing the Transylvanian blood sucker. Nowadays most people don't know that identifying Dracula with the historical Vlad Tepes -- called the impaler -- was completely made up by Stoker himself.
32 years ago, one of the most famous characters in the history of gaming was born. Pac-Man was developed by the Japanese company Namco and amazed many people around the globe.
Today for us it's pretty normal that electricity can be transmitted on a wire, because it's part of our daily life. But, in the early 18th century, when the English nature-scientist Stephen Gray was able to show that electricity really can be transmitted on a string of copper, it was an unheard-of revelation.
Without difficulty, you can notice that a pioneer in musical engineering is to be remembered today. Today's Google Doodle shows the Moog synthesizer, invented by Robert Arthur Moog, who was born today 78 years ago.
Taxonomy as a science has been founded by the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linné (later enobled Carl von Linné or more fashionable in Latin Carolus Linnaeus). He was born 305 years ago in 1707 and after some difficulties right at the start - he was a rather sluggish student and his dissapointed father saw no other option than to apprentice him to a cobbler...
On May 24th 1844 the very first Morse telegram went over the line. Samuel Morse and his colleague Alfred Vail knew that the very first phrase to be sent with the new telecommunication medium was to be remembered. So what should they transmit? Morse came up with a quote from the bible, certainly well chosen for an historic occasion like this:
"What God had wrought"
sent by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore.
18 years ago today, the very first World Wide Web Conference started with a Welcome Receiption at the restaurant of CERN at Geneva, the European laboratory for particle physics, where the Web also started a few years earlier. The Web (or W3 as they also called it those days) was still some kind of project, but everyone of the 380 participants at the conference knew that they now were taking part in something that could change the internet as we knew it before.
On May 27th 1937 The Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco spanning over the opening of the San Francisco Bay and connecting the City with Marin County was opened for public traffic. When the planning for the bridge started back in 1916 many experts said that a bridge couldn’t be built across the 6,700 ft (2,042 m) strait.
Today 199 years ago, the first (modern) optical telegraph line following the mechanical telegraphy system of the French inventor Claude Chappe was established between Metz and Mainz was established. No, this wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the first to connect the former already in France established telegraphy system with a (now) German city.
Today 219 years ago, the 'martyr of the revolution', Jean Paul Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a 24 year old girl. The physician, natural scientists, and political activist was a member of 'the Mountain', a group active during the French Revolution, and author of the radical newspaper 'L'Ami du peuple'.
Lately, several earthquakes have caused fear and chaos in Italy. Just yesterday, 10 people have lost their lives after the 5.8 quake in Modena and many more are presumably buried underneath the ruins. Earthquakes happen every day around the globe, only this year 7156 quakes have been registered by seismometers, but most of them stay unnoticed for us humans.