Today in Tech History – April 9

1860 – Parisian typesetter and inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville used his Phonoautogram to record sound onto paper but had no way to play it back.

1919 – Presper Eckert was born in Philadelphia. Eckert became famous for his work, with John Mauchly on the ENIAC project.

1943 – ENIAC Contract Signed

              The contract is signed between the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering and the US Army to build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a machine capable of the then-remarkable speed of 5,000 additions per second. ENIAC was shrouded in wartime secrecy since its main purpose was to compute “firing tables” for artillery shells. Before ENIAC, this was done by women (called “computers”) working in large groups and using mechanical desktop calculators. ENIAC was not completed until after the war (February 1946) but a generation of computer designers learned from its design and from the summer course given by Eckert and Mauchly at the Moore School between July and August of that same year. ENIAC could solve a wide range of general purpose computing problems and was also used for classified military projects, including preliminary calculations for the US hydrogen bomb.

1959 – The Mercury Seven

             NASA announces the selection of the United States ‘first seven astronauts, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald Slayton, The seven were chosen from 110 applicants to participate in the Mercury program, the nation’s first manned space program. The news media quickly dubs the group the “Mercury Seven.” On May 5^th, 1961, Shepard will become the first American in space during the flight of Freedom 7.

2012 – Facebook Purchased Instagram

             Facebook – trying to get a hold on photosharing – decides to not wait for their iPhone app to come out but instead purchase Instagram for 1 billion dollar ($300 million and 23 million shares of Facebook stock). The reason Facebook made the purchase was for the closed to 50 million Instagram users. Facebook had plans to keep both companies separate, but found later that joining the two via databases would help both companies grow. The companies finalized the deal on September 6, 2012.

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