On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull 'Inter caetera' (Among other [works]), which granted to Spain all lands to the "west and south" of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde islands.
On October 4, 1903, American physicist and inventor John Vincent Atanasoff was born. He is best known for being considered as one of the inventors of the electronic digital computer.
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.
On September 20, 450 AD, the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains also referred to as the Battle of Chalons took place. A coalition led by the Roman general Flavius Aëtius and the Visigothic king Theodoric I against the Huns and their allies commanded by their leader Attila faced each other in a decisive battle that should decide the fate of Europe and the whole Western civilization...
On August 17, 1586, German theologian, author, and mathematician Johann Valentin Andreae was born. He claimed to be the author of the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (1616, Strasbourg, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz), one of the three founding works of Rosicrucianism, a philosophical secret society said to have been founded in late medieval Germany by Christian Rosenkreutz. Rosicrucianism holds a doctrine or theology "built on esoteric truths of the ancient past", which, "concealed from the average man, provide insight into nature, the physical universe and the spiritual realm."
On July 26, 1826, Cayetano Ripoll, a schoolmaster in Valencia, Spain, teaching deist principles should become the last victim executed by the Spanish inquisition. Ripoll has the dubious honor of being the last of the many people known to have been executed under sentence from a Church authority for having committed the act of heresy.
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.
During the night of 23 to 24 July 1775, French criminal and criminalist Eugene Vidocq was born. Vidocq is considered the world's first private detective and father of modern criminology. His life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.
On July 19, 64 AD, the Great Fire of Rome (Latin: Magnum Incendium Romae) occurred and continued burning until July 26 during the reign of emperor Nero. According to the Roman historian Tacitus three of the 14 city districts were completely burned down, in seven districts only debris and rubble was left from the former buildings, and only 4 districts were not affected.
On July 15, 1848, Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was born. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. The Pareto principle was named after him and built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
On 5 July 1841, British pioneer of organized tourism Thomas Cook arranged to take a group of 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester Campbell Street station to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away. This led him to start his own business founding the world's first and most famous travel agency.
On June 24, 1519, Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, and Vannozza dei Cattanei, passed away. Lucrezia's family later came to epitomize the ruthless Machiavellian politics and sexual corruption alleged to be characteristic of the Renaissance Papacy.
On May 29, 1880, German historian and philosopher Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. He proposed a new theory, according to which the lifespan of civilizations is limited and ultimately they decay.
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 May, 1st, 1851, Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, which was the first in a series of World's Fair exhibitions of culture and industry.
On April 27, 1737, English historian and Member of Parliament Edward Gibbon was born. His most famous work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788 and is known for the quality and irony of its prose as well as for its scientific historic accuracy, which made it a model for later historians.
On April 21, 1989, Nintendo presented the 8-bit handheld video game device called Game Boy, the first handheld console. The Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, have been tremendous successful by combined selling 118.69 million units worldwide. Upon its release in the United States, it sold its entire shipment of one million units within weeks.
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, as the American Civil War was drawing to a close, well known stage actor and Confederate spy John Wilkes Booth shot United States President Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential booth of the Ford's theatre in Washington, D.C. And Lincoln should not be the last US president to be assassinated. He was followed by James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, and if we also take attempts and plots into account, we will end up with more than 20 sitting or former presidents. But, Abraham Lincoln, as being the 16th president of the United States, was the first and besides Kennedy the most famous.
On March 11, 1890, American engineer, inventor and science administrator Vannevar Bush was born. He is best known as as head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, through which almost all wartime military research and development was carried out, including initiation of the Manhattan Project. In computer science we know Vannevar Bush as the father of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web.
On March 7, 1765, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce was born, who is best known as one of the inventors of photography and a pioneer in the field. He developed heliography, a technique used to produce the world's first known photograph in 1825.
On March 2, 1544, English diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Bodley was born. His greatest achievement was the re-founding of the library at Oxford that was named in his honor. Moreover, he established new ideas and practices library of which also modern libraries stil benefit today.
On February 23, 1633, English naval administrator and Member of Parliament Samuel Pepys was born, who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man. The detailed private diary Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 was first published in the 19th century, and is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period.
On February 13, 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly introduced Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, the first general purpose, electronic computer. ENIAC was a giant step forward in computing technology.
On February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland married her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
On January 17, 1685, Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato was granted the privilege to serve coffee in the city of Vienna, the former capital of the Holy Roman empire. Thus, Johannes Diodato opened the very first coffeehouse in Vienna and the habit of coffee drinking soon spread over Europe.
On January 1, 1983, the ARPANET as predecessor of today's internet is switched from NCP (Network Control Protocol) to the TCP/IP protocol, and thus became the internet.
On December 29, 1170 AD, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who engaged in conflict with Henry II of England over the rights and privileges of the Church, was assassinated by followers of the King in Canterbury Cathedral. The very last hours of Thomas Becket’s life are the reason why we remember him at all. If the four knights sent for his assassination had not completed their bloody work as he defied their master King Henry II to the last, Becket might have been only slightly better known than his predecessor Theobald.
On November 27, 1852, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, who is considered to be the world's very first programmer, passed away. Every student of computer science should have heart of the world's first programmer, Ada Countess of Lovelace, assistant to Charles Babbage, inventor of the very first programmable (mechanical) computer, the analytical engine.
On November 23, 912 AD, Otto I, also referred to as Otto the Great, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and founder of the Ottonian dynasty of German emperors, was born
On November 19, 1807, British chemist and inventor Humphry Davy reported to the Royal Society about the isolation of potassium and sodium from different salts by electrolysis. Davy was one of the pioneers in the field of electrolysis using the newly invented voltaic pile to split up common compounds and thus prepare many new elements.
On November 15, 1971, Intel presented the Intel 4004 microprocessor, the world's very first commercially available 4-bit central processing unit (CPU). It was the first complete CPU on one chip. By the time, this revolutionary microprocessor, the size of a little fingernail, delivered the same computing power as the first electronic computer built in 1946, which filled an entire room.
On November 13, 1990, one day after Tim Berners-Lee's and Robert Cailliau's publication of the concept of a world wide hypertext system [2], the first web page was published. Today, living without the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, has become almost impossible. Our daily live depends on news spread over the web and ecommerce hase become a convenient commodity. Nobody wants to live without it. Incredible, but only 20 years ago, most people lived in the stoneage compared to today's virtual online worlds.
On November 11, 1493, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, aka Paracelsus, the famous Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist was born.
On November 5, 1605, the famous Gunpowder Plot planning the assassination of King James I of England was uncovered and Guy Fawkes as one of its leaders was arrested, convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
On October 24, 1632, the Dutch tradesman and scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, was born. He is commonly known as "the Father of Microbiology", and considered to be the first microbiologist.
On October 23, 1635, German astronomer and mathematician Wilhelm Schickard, who constructued the very first mechanical calculator, passed away. His famous calculator was able to perform additions and subtractions. For more complicated operations, it provided so-called Napier bones, named after the Scottish mathematician John Napier, who came up with the idea of logarithms. Although it is widely believed that the first mechanical calculating device was created by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1642. However, that distinction actually belongs to Wilhelm Schickard.
On October 19, 1806, the famous German writer, artist, and politician, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, finally got married with his mistress Christiane Vulpius after having lived together quasi-maritally since 1788, to the scandal of the ladies of Weimar and the vexation of Bettina von Arnim-Brentano.
On October 11, 1745, German cleric Ewald Georg von Kleist and independently of him Dutch scientist Pieter van Musschenbroek from the city of Leiden, Netherlands, invented a predecessor of today's battery, the Leyden Jar.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, began in late October 1929 and was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States.
On September 23, 1215 AD Kublai Khan, the second son of Tolui and Sorghaghtani Beki, and a grandson of Genghis Khan, was born. Considering the Mongol Empire at that time as a whole, his realm reached from the Pacific to the Black Sea, from Siberia to modern day Afghanistan – one fifth of the world's inhabited land area.
On September 16, 1620, the famous transport ship Mayflower started its first voyage to the new world with English and Dutch separatists on board and arriving Plymouth, Massachusetts in the same year.
On September 15, 1254, the Venetian merchant traveler Marco Polo was born. He is best known for his journeys to Central Asia and China, narrated in the book 'The Travels of Marco Polo'.
On September 1, 1902, the French film pioneer George Méliès presented the very first science fiction movie to the stunning public of the Paris Olympia theater.
On August 31, 1888, the mutilated body of Mary Ann Nichols was found in Whitechapel, London. Her death has been attributed to the notorious unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper, who is believed to have killed and mutilated five women in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888.
On August 21, 1911 during intensive repair and renovation work the Louvre Museum realized that Leonardo Da Vinci's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was stolen.
On this day in 1848, the the New York Herald, a major newspaper of the American East Coast printed the exciting news that gold has been found on the West Coast, which caused thousands of immigrants from all over the world to travel to California hoping to to find wealth and glory.
On August 14, 1040 AD, Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, Mormaer of Moray, today better known as Macbeth, killed the Scottish King Duncan I. to become the new King of Scottland. But, he has to commit further murder to maintain his power. So far the story goes. Most of the rest we know from Shakespeare's adaptation of the historical events is merely pure fiction.
It all started on August 12, 1981. IBM presented the IBM 5150, the very first IBM personal computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform.
How far would you go to maintain your youth and your beauty? While today most people have become a victim of the cosmetic industry and (fortunately) only a few really dare to undergo cosmetic surgery, eternal youth and beauty is not only a subject of today's affluent society. No, it's a prominent topic throughout history dating also back into mythology
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the finest composers the world has ever known, had two great loves in his life: the first was music; and the second one was Constanze Weber, whom he married in Vienna on August 4, 1782. She was 20, he was 26.
On this very day in the year 47 BC the Roman dictator Gaius Iulius Caesar won the battle of Zela against Pharnaces II. king of Pontus. As the Roman victory was won rather quickly, Caesar wanted to emphasize that very fact by the brevity and conciseness of his report sent to the senate and people of Rome. He only wrote three little words:
"Veni, Vidi, Vici."
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.
Émile Durkheim was one of the most significant sociologists and ethnologists of the 19th century. He studied in Paris at the 'Ècole normale supérieure' and started teaching social sciences in Bordeaux in 1887.
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
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.
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, 128 years ago the health-food fanatic John Harvey Kellogg patented his 'flaked cereal' during his time as the superintendent of the 'Battle Creek Sanitarium' in Michigan.
The two brothers and business partners, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier changed history today 229 years ago when they presented their hot air balloon for the first time to the public of Annonay, France.
On June 10th 1829 the very first of now legendary annual boat races of Oxford and Cambridge on the river Thames took place. The race came about because two friends from Harrow School, Charles Wordsworth (nephew of the poet William Wordsworth), of Christ Church College, Oxford, and Charles Merrivale of St. John’s, Cambridge, met during the vacation in Cambridge, where Wordsworth’s father was master of Trinity. Wordsworth went rowing on the river Cam, and the two school fellows decided to set up a challenge.
Today 242 years ago, sailor and explorer James Cook discovered the Great Barrier Reef while running aground and risking his ship, the HMS Endeavour, to sink.
61 years ago today, on June 14th 1951 the very first electronic computer produced in series (and in the United States), the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the US States Census Bureau at the price of $1.6 Mio. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC.
As you might know for sure, Benjamin Franklin wasn't only an enthusiastic scientist, inventor, and author, but also one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His roots lay back in Boston, where he was born in 1706 as the son of a chandler. Therefore the family could not afford the adequate education for their 17 children....
"Why would you want to climb Mount Everest?" George Mallory was asked this question in 1924 and gave the most obvious answer: "Because it's there". The famous mountaineer was born 126 years ago, and best known for his expeditions to the highest mountain on earth.
"It is not certain that everything is uncertain." is one of the many profound insights that philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) published in his seminal work entiteled "Pensées" (Thoughts, published in 1669). He literally had versatile scientific interests, as he provided influential contributions in the field of mathematics, physics, engineering, as well as in religious philosophy.
Author, journalist, satirist, and critic Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born 70 years ago today. He had a great influence in the literature of the 20th century through his works, most of them dealing with the American Civil War.
On July 2, 1839, Sengbe Pieh (later known as Joseph Cinqué) led 53 fellow Africans being transported as captives aboard the Spanish schooner 'La Amistad' from Havana in a revolt against their captors. The captives had been taken in Africa by a Portuguese slaving ship and then smuggled into Havana under cover of nightfall, because this was a violation of an already existing treaty between Britain and Spain, which forbade trading in slaves.
61 years ago today, on June 14th 1951 the very first electronic computer produced in series (and in the United States), the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) was delivered to the US States Census Bureau at the price of $1.6 Mio.
Today 206 years ago, engineer John Augustus Roebling was born. He was best known for the design of the Brooklyn Bridge. Sadly Roebling passed away 14 years before the famous bridge in New York City was opened.
"Es ist alles eitel", so lautet der Titel eines berühmten Gedichts von Andreas Gryphius, der damit die Weltfluchtstimmung des Barocks verbunden mit der Sinnlosigkeit allen irdischen Strebens auf heute immer noch beeindruckende Weise zu beschreiben verstand. Eitel, so mutet einem auch das beständige Hinterherhecheln des Herzogs von Croÿ nach Titeln und Ehren an, das er über weite Strecken seines "geheimen" Tagebuchs hinweg immer wieder und wieder beschreibt. Doch befinden wir uns bereits im 18. Jahrhundert, dem Zeitalter der Aufklärung, und Emanuel Herzog von Croÿs Streben beschränkt sich zum großen Glück des Lesers nicht nur auf das Dasein eines Hofschranzens, sondern er ist interessiert und fasziniert zugleich von allen intellektuellen, wissenschaftlichen und politischen Entwicklungen, die seine Zeit hervorgebracht hat.
Das Internet hat viele Väter. Deswegen hat das Internet nicht erst seit heute viele Geburtstage zu feiern, weil viele "Kinder" eben das ergeben, was das heutige Internet ausmacht. Heute ist so ein Geburtstag: Vor 40 Jahren wurde die erste Nachricht zwischen zwei entfernten Host-Computern ausgetauscht.
In the heydays of the internet - when Google wasn’t the only search engine people used to seek information on the web - web surfers (I bet you haven’t heard that term in a while) had several options for finding what they needed on the net.
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.
Nur ein Prozent aller Schriften der Griechen, Römer und Ägypter soll die Zeiten überdauert haben. Bis heute suchen Forscher nach den Überresten der Bibliothek von Alexandria - und in Papyrusfragmenten nach Gedanken aus einer vergangenen Welt.
Social media isn’t really “new.” While it has only recently become part of mainstream culture and the business world, people have been using digital media for networking, socializing and information gathering - almost exactly like now - for over 30 years:
Das ZDF will in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Verein "Die Augen der Geschichte" das "Gedächtnis der Nation" in Form von Zeitzeugeninterviews ins Internet bringen.