Attack of the Wikipedia birthday meme
Go to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/). Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.
Events:
1883 - The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey.
1915 - George Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.
2038 - The Unix time stamp exceeds the storage capacity of a 32-bit integer, creating the Year 2038 problem.
Births:
1736 - James Watt, Scottish inventor (d. 1819)
1813 - Sir Henry Bessemer, English inventor (d. 1898)
Deaths:
2000 - Hedy Lamarr, Austrian-born actress (b. 1913)
Also as noted in Wikipedia:
Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received U.S. patent #2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The patent was little-known until recently because Lamarr applied for it under her then-married name of Hedy Kiessler Markey. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the patent. It had expired by the time the U.S. military barely began using this system after 1962. It took electronics technology a long time to catch up with the concept.
Lamarr's frequency-hopping technology served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. In 1997, the two of them received an EFF Pioneer Award for the invention.
(But y'all knew that about Hedy Lamarr, right?)
Events:
1883 - The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey.
1915 - George Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.
2038 - The Unix time stamp exceeds the storage capacity of a 32-bit integer, creating the Year 2038 problem.
Births:
1736 - James Watt, Scottish inventor (d. 1819)
1813 - Sir Henry Bessemer, English inventor (d. 1898)
Deaths:
2000 - Hedy Lamarr, Austrian-born actress (b. 1913)
Also as noted in Wikipedia:
Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received U.S. patent #2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The patent was little-known until recently because Lamarr applied for it under her then-married name of Hedy Kiessler Markey. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the patent. It had expired by the time the U.S. military barely began using this system after 1962. It took electronics technology a long time to catch up with the concept.
Lamarr's frequency-hopping technology served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. In 1997, the two of them received an EFF Pioneer Award for the invention.
(But y'all knew that about Hedy Lamarr, right?)