1989: The first of 24 satellites that will make up the global positioning system is put into orbit.

GPS revolutionized navigation, both at sea and on land, by providing position reports with unprecedented, pinpoint accuracy. Each satellite is placed in a specific orbit at a specific altitude to ensure that four or five satellites are always within range from any point on the planet. A GPS receiver picks up signals from the satellites and trilaterates the data to fix the position.

This satellite system is so valuable — besides navigation, GPS has applications in mapmaking, land-surveying and the accurate telling of time — that even though it was developed and is maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense, it’s been available since 1993 without charge to anyone, anywhere on Earth.

Although GPS has eliminated the need for determining a ship’s position by shooting the sun or stars, no sailor worthy of the name would put to sea, even now, without the ability to use a sextant. Electronic navigation devices fail, and even GPS isn’t immune to the odd glitch, and the open ocean is a lonely place to be if you don’t know where you are.

photograph of Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison, and Harvey Samuel Firestone- the fathers of modernity.

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor, scientist, and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. 

Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (now Edison, New Jersey) by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large teamwork to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. He is credited with numerous inventions that contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures. 

His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison originated the concept and implementation of electric-power generation and distribution to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Manhattan Island, New York.

Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games.

2005: Samuel Alderson, inventor of the automotive crash-test dummy, dies. His creation saved countless lives … and amused millions along the way.

Alderson graduated from high school at age 15, but the realities of the Great Depression repeatedlyinterrupted his college education: He needed to help his father run the family’s sheet-metal business in Southern California. As a result, he studied at various times at Reed, Caltech, Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. Alderson returned to Berkeley and started work on a Ph.D. in physics under J. Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence, but left without finishing his dissertation.

Alderson worked on servomotors for missile-guidance systems during World War II. He founded Alderson Research Labs in 1952 and built dummies for the military to test jet-ejection seats and parachutes. He also engineered one for NASA to test the safety of the Apollo lunar-command-module splashdown.

The dummies matched the size, shape and weight of pilots and astronauts, had joints to mimic human biomechanics, and contained scientific instruments to measure acceleration and impact forces. Alderson tried adapting one to test automobile safety in 1960, but was a few years ahead of his time.

Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed and the subsequent National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 created a market for a high-quality automobile-test dummy. Automobile engineers had for decades tested their cars using cadavers, but the research results were unsatisfactory: The stiffs were, well, stiff. Also, no two cadavers were alike, and after a couple of tests they degraded rapidly (to say the least). That made it difficult to generate consistent and reproducible results.

Alderson’s first auto-test dummy to go into production was the VIP model in 1968. It featured a steel ribcage, articulated joints and a flexible spine. Engineers at General Motors combined elements of Alderson’s dummies with those from rival Sierra Engineering to create a dynasty of Hybrid dummies. Today’s Hybrids include men, women, children and infants.

The dummies are used to test seat belts, air bags and other safety features. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates those devices have saved more than 300,000 lives since 1960.

Alderson’s obituary in The New York Times listed his surviving family and went on to note: “His cultural legacy includes Vince and Larry, the ubiquitous dummy stars of highway safety advertisements in the 1980s and ’90s; the television cartoon Incredible Crash Dummies and the pop group Crash Test Dummies.” The dummies also spawned toys and a videogame.

In case you’re wondering, Alderson, like the inventor of the three-point seat belt, died of natural causes. He was 90 and suffering from myelofibrosis and pneumonia.

1996: The first chess game between a human champion and a computer takes place, with international grandmaster Garry Kasparov losing to IBM’s Deep Blue in Philadelphia.

Had Kasparov gone on to lose the whole match, it would have only stoked the fears of those believers in a dystopian world where man is ruled by his inventions.

But Kasparov, who became the world’s youngest grand master in 1985 at the age of 22, recovered his equilibrium after his initial stumble. He won the next game, then drew twice before taking Games 5 and 6 to win the match, 4-2.

Kasparov lost a rematch to Deep Blue the following year — his first match loss ever to any kind of opponent. Then, in 2001, he managed a 3-3 draw against Deep Junior, an entirely different software program.

Aside from their stunt value, these man-vs.-computer matches have changed the way that chess is played, and not necessarily for the better. “We don’t work at chess anymore,” complained grandmaster Evgeny Bareev. “We just look at the stupid computer, we follow the latest games and find small improvements. We have lost depth.”

Others, however, are more philosophical: “Cars can outrun us, but that hasn’t stopped us from having foot races,” said U.S. grandmaster Maurice Ashley. “Even if a computer is the best player on the planet, I’ll still want to go around the corner, set up the chess pieces and try to kick your butt.”

Matt Blum assayed the significance of the first match on Wired.com’s GeekDad blog in 2010:

While nobody could have known at the time, this was the moment when machines truly began their conquest of Earth. Despite Kasparov rebounding from his first-game loss to beat Deep Blue in the match, the computer’s win demonstrated the inevitability of the rise of artificially intelligent devices. When the upgraded Deep Blue won the rematch against Kasparov the following year, there were those who thought this presaged humanity’s downfall, but they were largely scoffed at as conspiracy theorists.

So raise a glass in toast to our robot overlords… Did I say “overlords?” I meant “protectors.”

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/02/0210computer-deep-blue-beats-chess-champ-kasparov/

1996: “Cyberspace” is not yet a household word but is about to get a big boost in the public consciousness with an international, one-day event, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.

Top editors, photographers, computer programmers and designers, contributing from all over the world, collaborated to document a single day on the internet. It became not only a digital time capsule but a coming-out party, of sorts, for a medium whose impact was as dramatic in its day as television was a half century earlier.

24 Hours in Cyberspace was the inspiration of photographer Rick Smolan, who created the “Day in the Life” photo-essay series. Smolan used the same formula as “Day in the Life,” recruiting 150 photojournalists to go out and chronicle a slice of everyday life, in this case as it pertained to the then-counterculturish phenomenon of the web.

The technology of the internet was not the subject: Smolan wanted (and got) pictures of how different people in different cultures were using the internet, and the effect that the medium of cyberspace was having on their lives.

The resulting work was edited and then displayed on a website. It also appeared as the cover story of that week’s edition of U.S. News and World Report and, soon thereafter, as a coffee-table book.

Vice President Al Gore, already a vocal defender of the environment, wrote the forward. His wife, Tipper, was one of the photographers.

The project, billed as the “largest one-day online event,” cost around $5 million and was bankrolled by companies — like Sun Microsystems and Adobe — with a vested interest in the internet’s growth, as well as by individual contributors.

As it turned out, Feb. 8, 1996, fell on the very day that President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act (later overturned in court). Many activists turned their websites black that day, a protest mentioned briefly on the 24 Hours website and in the book. 

1958: Science writer Rachel Carson writes to The New Yorker editor E.B. White suggesting that he write an article about the danger of pesticides. White demurs, but suggests that Carson write the article. It’s the genesis of her pioneering book, Silent Spring.

White wasn’t throwing a Hail Mary pass to an unknown receiver on this play. Carson was already a successful scientist and author. She’d earned a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins and worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service as an aquatic biologist and editor. She’d already written forThe New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and other publications, and authored a best-selling book.

Carson wrote a letter to Reader’s Digest in 1945 proposing an article on the destructive effects of spraying the pesticide DDT. The magazine wasn’t interested.

The New Yorker in 1951 serialized excerpts of her manuscript, “A Profile of the Sea,” which was soon published in book form as The Sea Around Us. It was a best-seller and received the National Book Award.

So, Carson was no environmental Jenny-come-lately in January 1958 when her friend Olga Huckins sent her a copy of a letter she’d written to a Boston newspaper. Huckins reported that many birds had died on her private, two-acre bird sanctuary in southeastern Massachusetts after planes sprayed pesticides to kill mosquitoes in 1957. Huckins wanted Carson to get somebody in authority to take note.

Carson was also aware of the opposition to pesticide spraying to control gypsy moths on New York’s Long Island, and she wrote to White suggesting that he write that story for The New Yorker. White quickly said the magazine wanted it, but that she should write the article herself.

Carson’s scientific training, literary stature and passion for nature made her uniquely qualified for this assignment. What started as a magazine article or perhaps a short book became a multiyear project, interrupted by the death of her mother and Carson’s own diagnosis with breast cancer in 1960.

Carson called her book Silent Spring, calling forth the image of a spring without birdsong. She painstakingly pointed out how insufficiently tested pesticides were being widely released into the environment, killing hundreds or even thousands of beneficial species, and reducing biodiversity.

Not only did the chemicals often not work against their intended targets, Carson wrote, but they concentrated, as small animals and poisoned vegetation were eaten by other animals, who were eaten by larger animals and so on up the food chain. Nor had the interactions of multiple chemicals or their possible effects on humans, pets and farm animals been properly studied, she pointed out.

The New Yorker started serializing Silent Spring in June 1962, and it was published in book form later that year. It was a runaway best-seller, later serialized in newspapers across the country.

With its concluding warning that it was arrogant to believe humans could totally control nature, Silent Spring is probably the most influential environmental book of the 20th century. Still in print today, it stands on par with the previous century’s Walden as a foundation volume of eco-awareness.

Carson galvanized the modern environmental movement. Despite a massive counterattack by the chemical industry, the book was instrumental in bringing about the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Occupational Safety and Health Act and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency — all within a decade of its publication.

Carson, however, had succumbed to breast cancer in 1964, 18 months after Silent Spring was published. She was 56.

1046: English monks record the onset of a cold snap so harsh that “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Little do they realize that they are chronicling what might have signaled the beginning of a centuries-long cooling period now referred to as the Little Ice Age.

The monks set down their observations in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a loose collection of historical records kept in monasteries across England between the eighth and 12th centuries. The full weather report, given amid the lives and deaths and comings and goings and various perils facing the Anglo-Saxons, read:

And in the same year, after Candlemas [Feb. 2], came the strong winter, with frost and with snow, and with all kinds of bad weather; so that there was no man then alive who could remember so severe a winter as this was, both through loss of men and through loss of cattle; yea, fowls and fishes through much cold and hunger perished.

Remember, this was before the advent of heated barns and Gore-Tex.

Although modern climatologists agree that the Little Ice Age began after a warming period known as the Medieval Warm Period, they’ve been unable to fix exact dates for either its beginning or end. Nor do they have a consensus regarding its reach. The Little Ice Age was originally believed to have been a global phenomenon. Subsequent research suggests that it may have been confined mainly to the Northern Hemisphere and was not nearly as severe as previously thought.

For dating purposes, the main part of the Little Ice Age can be said to have lasted from roughly 1250 to 1650. During this time, a growing Atlantic ice pack was observed, along with a consistent decline in summer temperatures across Northern Europe. During the mid-1500s, there were reports of expanding glaciers in both hemispheres.

In contrast to today’s climate-change phenomenon, human impact on the environment played little, if any, role at all in the Little Ice Age. The cause is generally ascribed to a combination of diminished solar activity and large volcanic eruptions.

Still, referring to it as an “ice age” at all may be an overstatement. Research suggests that, overall, the mean temperature decreased less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the affected areas.

You want an ice age? Science identifies four or five periods that qualify, including the biggest one that occurred roughly 700 million years ago. Now that was an ice age.

Explorer 1 launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 31, 1958, atop a Jupiter-C rocket.

1958: The United States enters the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirms the existence of a radiation belt girdling the Earth.

Explorer I, known officially as Satellite 1958 Alpha, blasted into orbit from Cape Canaveral atop a Jupiter-C rocket, a modified version of Wernher von Braun’s Redstone ballistic missile, which itself was a direct descendant of another von Braun production, the German A-4/V-2 rocket.

The project was carried out at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the U.S. Army (before NASA was founded). It was already on the drawing board but was accelerated dramatically following the successful launch of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union the previous October. In all, it took 84 days to modify the rocket and to design and build the satellite.

Explorer I was tiny, weighing 30 pounds fully loaded. More than half the weight was instrumentation, which included a cosmic-ray-detection package, a variety of temperature sensors and a microphone for picking up micrometeorite impact. Data was sent back to Earth using 10- and 60-milliwatt transmitters.

It was a model of simplicity, and it worked. In NASA’s own words: “Because of the limited space available and the requirements for low weight, the Explorer I instrumentation was designed and built with simplicity and high reliability in mind. It was completely successful.”

Dr. James Van Allen, an astrophysicist working on the project as part of the International Geophysical Year 1957-58, designed the on-board equipment that helped detect and return data on the radiation belts circling the Earth, belts that now bear his name.

The Van Allen belt is, in effect, two croissant-shaped belts girdling the Earth. Trapped within these belts, which run in depth from roughly 125 to 620 miles above the Earth, are radioactive particles capable of penetrating about 1 mm of lead.

The existence of the Van Allen belt poses some difficulty for space flight, both with and without crews. Radiation can damage solar cells, integrated circuits and sensors necessary to satellite operation, and astronauts passing through the field may run a slightly higher risk than normal of developing cancer.

In response, NASA has taken to turning off sensors as they pass through the Van Allen belt, as well as improving the protective housing for sensitive instruments. The belt has not seriously impeded human travel in space, though that’s often cited by believers in the Apollo moon-landing hoax.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/01/0131explorer1-discovers-van-allen-belt/

Did you know that...

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff on this date in 1986, killing all seven crew members. After a comprehensive examination it was determined that cold weather contributed to an O-ring failure.

1967: Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee are killed on the launch pad when a flash fire engulfs their command module during testing for the first Apollo-Saturn mission. They are the first U.S. astronauts to die in a spacecraft.

The command module, built by North American Aviation, was the prototype for those that would eventually accompany the lunar landers to the moon. Designated CM-012 by NASA, the module was a lot larger than those flown during the Mercury and Gemini programs, and was the first designed for the Saturn 1B booster.

Even before tragedy struck, the command module was criticized for a number of potentially hazardous design flaws, including the use of a more combustible, 100 percent oxygen atmosphere in the cockpit, an escape hatch that opened inward instead of outward, faulty wiring and plumbing, and the presence of flammable material.

Regarding the cabin atmosphere and hatch configuration, it was a case of NASA overruling the recommendations of the North American designers. North American proposed using a 60-40 oxygen-nitrogen mixture. But because of fears over decompression sickness, and because pure oxygen had been used successfully in earlier space programs, NASA insisted on it being used again.

NASA also dinged the suggestion that the hatch open outward and carry explosive bolts in case of an emergency, mainly because a hatch failure in the Mercury program’s Friendship 7 capsule had nearly killed Gus Grissom in 1961.

So CM-012 was completed as ordered and delivered to Cape Canaveral.

The three astronauts knew they were looking at a potential death trap. Not long before he died, Grissom plucked a lemon from a tree at his house and told his wife, “I’m going to hang it on that spacecraft.”

The test on Jan. 27 was a “plugs-out” launch simulation designed to see if the Apollo spacecraft could operate on internal power only. It was considered a non-hazardous test.

Several problems delayed the beginning of the test until evening.

Once the test was underway, Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were strapped into their seats when a voltage fluctuation occurred. Grissom was heard shouting “Fire!” and White followed immediately with “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit.”

It was all over within 30 seconds, perhaps the longest half-minute in NASA’s history. Pandemonium broke out as the capsule filled with flames and toxic smoke, and Chaffee could be heard yelling, “Let’s get out! We’ve got a bad fire! We’re burning up!”

Screaming was heard before the communications cut out. The command module ruptured. The three astronauts lost consciousness and died of smoke inhalation within 15 to 30 seconds after their suits failed, the official report estimated.

Rescuers were prevented by the flames, and by toxic fumes — their gas masks were faulty — from opening the hatch for a full five minutes, and in any case the idea of rescue was futile.

The bodies had severe third-degree burns, and the flames were so intense that the space suits of Grissom and White were fused together. After six hours of investigation, it took 90 minutes to remove the charred bodies from the melted spacesuits and nylon material from the module interior.

Investigators determined that the cabin pressure at the time of the fire would have prevented the hatch from being opened, even if White, the astronaut charged with operating the hatch in an emergency, had been able to reach it. Although the exact cause of the fire has never been determined, a review board concluded that the combustible material inside the module almost certainly contributed to its severity.

As a result of the tragedy, the Apollo command module underwent a thorough redesign.

Grissom and Chaffee are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. White is buried at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.