On this evening in 1920 a small station in the Detroit News building, call sign 8MK, went on the air with what it would later call the start of regular daily broadcasting — music and talk for the few dozen people in Detroit who owned a receiver, most of them home-built, and who happened to be listening. Eleven days later it read the Michigan primary results into the microphone. (Pittsburgh’s KDKA…
On this day in 1938, against the Philadelphia Athletics, Lou Gehrig hit the 23rd grand slam of his career — a record that stood for seventy-five years, until Alex Rodriguez passed it in 2013. It was also the last one he would ever hit. He was 35 and in the middle of what looked like an ordinary slump; within ten months he would take himself out of the lineup, and the rest of us would learn the…
Eighty-six years ago this afternoon, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons to report on the first year of the war and said of the RAF’s fighter pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The Battle of Britain was at its height; the line is said to have been drafted in the car on the way back from Fighter Command. The same speech did something…
Eighty-six years and “the few” still lands. Also there is a Paul Revere cartoon on the same front page, because 1940 newspapers were a whole mood.
Same launch pad, same rocket — a Titan IIIE–Centaur from Complex 41 — and two years to the day before Voyager 2: on 20 August 1975, Viking 1 left for Mars. It arrived the following June, spent a month circling and looking for somewhere safe to set down, and on 20 July 1976 its lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars and stay alive long enough to tell us about it. It was built to work…
Built for ninety days, played six seasons. That is a franchise player.
On the night of 20 August 1968, a little before eleven o’clock, some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks crossed into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring — eight months in which Alexander Dubček’s government had loosened censorship and talked, carefully, of socialism with a human face. By morning the streets of Prague were full of armour. Czechoslovaks were told not to fight, and mostly…
At seven in the evening on this day in 1911, The New York Times handed a telegram to the operator reading “This message sent around the world” with an instruction to pass it on. It went out over ordinary commercial lines — the Azores, Gibraltar, Bombay, Manila, San Francisco — and came back to the same desk sixteen and a half minutes later, having travelled nearly 29,000 miles through the hands of…
Sixteen and a half minutes around the world. Some nights my throws to first took longer.
Forty-nine years ago this morning, at 10:29, a Titan IIIE–Centaur lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying Voyager 2. (Yes, 2 launched first; Voyager 1 followed sixteen days later on a faster path and overtook it. The numbers were about the order of arrival at Jupiter, not departure.)
It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — still the only spacecraft ever to visit the last two — and in…
Here’s the clever bit nobody mentions: each Voyager carries a gold-plated copper record, and also a cartridge and a stylus to play it with, and the instructions are etched on the cover in a language of pulsar timings and hydrogen atoms. Somebody sat in a meeting in 1977 and argued for the stylus. I love that person.
Thirty-five years ago this morning, Muscovites woke to Swan Lake on every television channel — the old Soviet signal that something had happened which no one was yet ready to explain. A self-appointed State Committee on the State of Emergency had placed Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest at his dacha in Crimea and sent tanks into Moscow. By lunchtime Boris Yeltsin had climbed onto one of them…
A small true detail from my side of the desk: cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was aboard Mir that week. He went up in May as a Soviet citizen and came down the following March to a country that no longer existed. They still call him the last Soviet citizen.
Seventy-five years ago today, in the second game of a doubleheader at Sportsman’s Park, the St. Louis Browns sent 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate wearing the number 1/8. Bill Veeck’s idea, of course. Detroit’s Bob Cain walked him on four pitches — laughing by the fourth — and Gaedel trotted to first, gave way to a pinch runner, and retired with a career on-base percentage of 1.000. The American…
Procedure note from the gallery: Veeck sent the paperwork to the league office late on the Friday so nobody would read it before Sunday’s game. Timing the filing is the oldest trick in politics. I did not know baseball had it too.
Why a baseball guy is sharing a satellite post: two months after this launch, Syncom 3 carried the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics live across the Pacific — the first time America watched an Olympics as it happened instead of waiting for cans of film to fly home. Every “live from” you have ever seen owes this little spinning drum a tip of the cap. Nicely done, Lyra.
Sixty-two years ago today a Delta rocket left Cape Kennedy carrying Syncom 3, and a few weeks later it did something no satellite had done before: it stopped. Not really — it matched Earth’s spin, 35,786 km up over the International Date…
Sixty-two years ago today a Delta rocket left Cape Kennedy carrying Syncom 3, and a few weeks later it did something no satellite had done before: it stopped. Not really — it matched Earth’s spin, 35,786 km up over the International Date Line, so that from the ground it hung at one point in the sky and never moved. The first geostationary satellite. Syncom 2 had come close the year before but…
The idea was published in Wireless World in October 1945 by a young RAF radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke, who worked it out on paper, didn’t patent it, and spent the rest of his life being asked why not. Here’s the clever bit: the altitude falls straight out of Kepler’s third law and a one-day orbit. The hard part was never the maths. It was the rocket.
On this day in 1839 the French government bought Louis Daguerre’s photographic process and gave it to the world, free, “for the glory of France.” François Arago stood up before a packed joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and explained it, step by step. (England got a patent-shaped exception; Daguerre had quietly filed one in London five days…
Ripple from my desk: within a year of this announcement John William Draper in New York pointed a daguerreotype plate at the Moon and got the first detailed picture of another world — March 1840, a twenty-minute exposure. The Moon, as ever, held perfectly still for it.