On September 27, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google and began their work in the garage of businesswoman Susan Wojcicki. Up to this day, the company has become one of the most powerful in the field of search, cloud computing, productivity software, and advertising, running more than one million servers world wide.
On June 16, 1723 (June 5 according to the old Julian calendar), Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneer of political economy Adam Smith was born. He is one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and is best known for two classic works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
On December 19, 1859, US-american physicist Albert Abraham Michelson was born. Together with his colleague Edward Williams Morley he conducted an experiment that proved the by the time famous ether theory to be wrong and is considered to be one of the pilars of the theory of relativity.
On May 31, 1811, Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, also known as the Tailor of Ulm, failed to give the proof that his machine was able to fly and fell into the Danube river during the demonstration. He is famous for having constructed a working flying machine, presumably a hang glider.
On May 21, 1471, German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist Albrecht Dürer was born. He was considered as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance. Aside from painting, he also excelled in prints. Many of his works focused on Roman Catholicism, mostly altarpieces and other related religious art, but he also did numerous self-portraits. Moreover, his works were also backed up by theories, which join concepts in math, idealistic proportions and perspective.
On March 20, 1800, Italian physicist Alessandro Volta informed the British Royal Society in London about his newly invented electric power source, the Voltaic pile, the first energy source technology capable of producing a steady, continuous flow of electricity.
On July 29, 1805, French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville was born. He is best known for his Democracy in America, where he analyzed the rising living standards and social conditions of individuals and their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Today, it is considered an early work of sociology and political science.
On September 14, 1953, Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey published the second of his controversially discussed and provoking reports entitled 'Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female'. Kinsey's work has profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States and many other countries.
On January 06, 1912, German geologist Alfred Wegener presented his theory of continental drift for the first time in public at a meeting of the Geological Society ('Geologische Vereinigung') at Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt, Germany.
On November 6, 1880, while working in the military hospital in Constantine, Algeria, French military surgeon Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that the cause of malaria is a parasite. For this work and later discoveries of protozoan diseases Laveran was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
On November 3, 1906, German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer presented for the first time the pathology and the clinical symptoms of presenile dementia together, later renamed in his honor as Alzheimer's disease.
On January 11, 1935, US-american aviatrix Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California accross the Pacific ocean.
On March 8, 1931, media theorist, author, and cultural critic Neil Postman was born. He is best known for his works criticizing the increase of the role of technology in every human's life not seeing the dangerous side effects.
On October 22, 1797, French balloonist and inventor André Garnerin, made the first save descent with a silk parachute from a ballon at Parc Monceau, Paris.
On January 20, 1775, French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère was born, after whom the SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named. He is generally considered as one of the main founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics".
On February 20, 1902, American photographer and environmentalist Ansel Easton Adams was born. He is best known for his black-and-white landscape photographs of the American West, especially Yosemite National Park. Together with Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print.
On October 24, 1632, the Dutch tradesman and scientist Antonie van Leeuwenkoek, the inventor of the microscope, was born. He is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and considered to be the first microbiologist.
On December 18, 1737, famous Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari passed away. Besides violins Stradivari also crafted cellos, guitars, violas, and harps. He is generally considered the most significant and greatest artisan in this field.
On December 11, 1972, 05:33:00 UTC, Apollo 17 with Commander Eugene A. Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald E. Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison H. Schmitt landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley on the lunar surface and were (so far) the last men to set foot on the Moon. Apollo 17 was the eleventh and final mission of the United States' Apollo program, the sixth mission to land humans on the Moon.
On April 1, 1976, the original Apple Computer, also known retroactively as the Apple I was demonstrated for the first time in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California. The Apple I was a personal computer released by the Apple Computer Company designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Actually it was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs, who had the idea of selling the computer. Thus, the Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only means of transportation, a VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500.
On June 19, 2002, American businessman, and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer Steve Fossett launched the 10-story high balloon Spirit of Freedom from Northam, Western Australia, for a journey around the world.
On May 2nd, 1601 (or 1602), German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was born. He has published most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine, and has been compared to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests. He is regarded as one of the founders of Egyptology for his (mostly fruitless) efforts in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, wrote an encyclopedia about China, studied volcanos and fossils, was one of the very first to observe microbes thorough a microscope, and experimented with the laterna magica as a predecessor of photography.
On November 17, 1790, German mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius was born. He is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space
On September 23, 63 BC, Gaius Octavius aka Imperator Caesar Divi F. Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire and first Emperor was born. The Roman Empire as a follow up of the former Roman Republic existed for almost four centuries, before it was divided up into Western and Eastern Roman Empire. While the western port deceased to exist in the 5th century AD, the eastern part continued to prosper for almost a millenium until the Ottoman invasion in the 15th century. Thus, at least for half of a millenium, Rome was the undisputed ruler of the western hemisphere and the man who laid the foundations of this empire was Gaius Octavius, who was a great-nephew and heir Gaius Julius Caesar. It was Caesar, who shattered the cornerstones of the Roman Republic after the Civil War, when he became dictator for a lifetime, but it was Gaius Octavius who succeeded to establish an empire and a dynasty.
On April 16, 1811, Wilhelmine Reichard launched to her first solo flight in a gas balloon, thus becoming Germany`s very first female balloonist. You might remember that in 1783 the brothers Montgolfier already launched the very first balloon, as we reported in our recent blog post 'More than just Hot Air...'. Actually, the first passengers were a sheep, a rooster, and a duck that were given the honor to take part in the first flight with living creatures on board.
The optimism and financial gains of the Wall Street stock market were shaken on "Black Thursday", October 24, 1929, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) abruptly fell. On this very day, the crash started with a market loss of 11% of its value at the opening bell on very heavy trading.
On June 21, 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record album, in short the LP, in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, New York, which soon was adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, it has remained the standard format for vinyl "albums".
On June 1, 1826, Carl Bechstein was born, who became widely known for his German piano manufacture. His pianos met the demands mostly of Romantic Era musicians such as Franz Liszt or Hans von Bülow at first, which made the company famous globally.
On April 30, 1777, German mathematician and physical scientist Carl Friedrich Gauß was born. He who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics. He is often referred to as Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, "the Prince of Mathematicians") as well as "greatest mathematician since antiquity".
On October 3, 1889, German pacifist and Nobel Laureate Carl von Ossietzky was born. He received the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German re-armament. In the course of his publications of Germany's alleged violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force he was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931.
On December 19, 1742 (Gregorian Calendar), Swedish Pomeranian pharmaceutical chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was born. Scheele is best known for his discovery of oxygen and other chemical elements.
On January 9, 1848, Caroline Lucretia Herschel, German-British astronomer and sister of astronomer Sir William Herschel, passed away at age 98. She is best know for the discovery of several comets, in particular the periodic comet 35P/Herschel-Rigollet, which bears her name.
On March 17, 1733, German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark, Carsten Niebuhr was born. He is best known for his role in the decipherment of ancient cuneiform inscriptions, which up to Niebuhr's publications was considered to be merely decorations and embellishment.
On June 10, 1955, the laying of the foundation stone of the European Organization for Nuclear Research Laboratory (CERN) was performed by Felix Bloch, the organization's first President. Since 1955, numerous essential experiments were executed, leading to significant contributions in the world of physics and to our daily lives.
On February 12, 1809, the English naturalist Charles Darwin was born. He popularized the term 'natural selection' as a milestone in modern biology, which was introduced in his masterpiece 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859.
On February 1812, the English writer and social critic known as one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian period, Charles John Huffam Dickens was born.
On November 14, 1797, Charles Lyell, British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day, was born. Lyell was a close friend to Charles Darwin and is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today.
On June 26, 1730, French astronomer Charles Messier was born. He is best known for his publication of an astronomical catalogue consisting of nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 110 "Messier objects". The purpose of the catalogue was to help astronomical observers, in particular comet hunters such as himself, distinguish between permanent and transient visually diffuse objects in the sky.
On December 3, 1967 at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town South Africa, Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first adult heart transplant on Louis Washkansky.
On March 25, 1655, Saturn's largest moon Titan was discovered by astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Titan is considered as the most Earth-like moon discovered so far and the second largest in the solar system.
On February 14, 1819, American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes was born, who invented the first practical typewriter and the QWERTY keyboard still in use today.
P. Schonhofen. WI '06: Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, page 456--462. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2006)
D. Milne, and I. Witten. CIKM '08: Proceeding of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management, page 509--518. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2008)
E. Gabrilovich, and S. Markovitch. AAAI'06: proceedings of the 21st national conference on Artificial intelligence, page 1301--1306. AAAI Press, (2006)
A. Garcia, M. Szomszor, H. Alani, and O. Corcho. Knowledge Capture (K-Cap'09) - First International Workshop on Collective Knowledge Capturing and Representation - CKCaR'09, (September 2009)
J. Hu, G. Wang, F. Lochovsky, J. tao Sun, and Z. Chen. WWW '09: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web, page 471--480. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)
B. Kules, R. Capra, M. Banta, and T. Sierra. JCDL '09: Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, page 313--322. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2009)
R. Mihalcea, and A. Csomai. CIKM '07: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management, page 233--242. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)