Today in Tech History – January 27

1880 – Edison Patents Incandescent Lamp

             Thomas Edison patents the electric incandescent lamp. While other incandescent lamps were created before his, Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than other were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

1948 – IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuit made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays.

1967 – Apollo 1 Tragedy

             Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their spacecraft and planned launch which never took place was posthumously named Apollo 1, in the astronauts honor.

1994 – Jim Clark Leaves Silicon Graphics to Start Mosaic Communications

              Silicon Graphics Inc. co-founder Jim Clark leaves the company to start Mosaic Communications with Marc Andreessen. Mosaic became Netscape Communications Corp., and the company’s first product was a web browser, subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator. The share of Netscape users peaked in the mid-1990s, but had fallen to less than one percent by the end of 2006.

2006 – Western Union discontinued Telegram and Commercial Messaging services

             Founded in 1851, Western Union was responsible for getting the important messages from point A to B. whether through telegram or commercial messaging; Western Union was synonymous with the service. But on January 27, 2006, that all ended. As Western Union wrote: “Effective 2006-01-27, Western Union will discontinue all Telegraph and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”

2010 – iPad Introduced

             Apple introduces the iPad. While still only a few years old, the introduction of the iPad triggered the close of the PC era and will certainly go down in history as one of the pivotal points in computing history.

2016 – Google’s DeepMind researchers published a paper in Nature announcing that their machine intelligence AlphaGo had defeated Fan Hui, a three-time European Go champion. The computer won five games of Go without a defeat.

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