Tag: 1870s

1870s

Santa Clara Valley

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 16, 2020

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Santa Clara Valley

“The Santa Clara Valley (the valley between Palo Alto and San Jose) was known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” because it was an endless expanse of orchards. Its agriculture was growing rapidly and, thanks to the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, it soon became the largest fruit production and packing region in the world. At one point there were 39 canneries in the valley, notably the San Jose Fruit Packing Company. At the peak, Chinese workers represented 48% of agricultural labor in the Santa Clara Valley. In 1863 the second railroad of California (after the pioneering Sacramento-Folsom of 1855) connected San Francisco to Mayfield (now Churhill Avenue in Palo Alto), a rough town popular with loggers (and later with students), and then to San Jose (in 1864) with a daily ride that took three and a half hours. The Menlo Park depot (built in 1867) was the major station on that route until Palo Alto began to grow.”

“The first transcontinental railroad was finally completed in 1869, linking the East Coast with Oakland (and then by ferry to San Francisco).”

“Perhaps the first “high tech” of the Bay Area came in the form of the aerial tramway invented in 1867 by the British-born Andrew Hallidie, a former gold miner and a bridge builder. Installed on high towers that frequently overlooked incredibly steep slopes, it was used across the Sierra Nevada to transport ore, supplies and miners. In 1873 Hallidie, using a similar design with help from German-born engineer William Ep, inaugurated the Clay Street Hill Railroad in San Francisco, the world’s first cable-car system.”

“At the time the Bay Area also had its flirt with oil, in fact predating the celebrated Edward Doheny well of 1892 that started the oil rush in Los Angeles. In 1879 a San Francisco banker and politician, Charles Felton, founded the Pacific Coast Oil Company (PCO). Within a few months the new company discovered large oil deposits on Moody Gulch, a few kilometers west of San Jose in the south bay. In 1880 PCO opened a refinery in the island Alameda, located near Oakland by the bay, i.e. with good access to the railroad terminal and the port. In 1902 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, that two years earlier had acquired PCO, built a new refinery further north, in what is now Richmond, one of the largest and most advanced refineries in the world. In 1907 this refinery invented Zerolene, one of the most successful Standard Oil products.”

“The agricultural boom increased the demand for firewood and lumber, which made the fortune of the Santa Clara Valley Mill & Lumber Company of Felton. (But mostly the boom made the fortune of the “railroad barons”, who provided the main form of transportation for goods and people. In fact, Santa Clara county confronted the arrogant railroad empires in a case that became famous in and had consequences for the whole nation: in 1886 the Supreme Court of the USA decreed that corporations should have the same rights as persons, and therefore the Southern Pacific Railroad Company was entitled to deduct mortgage from its taxable income just like any household). And, of course, ports dotted the bay, notably Redwood City’s port that shipped lumber to San Francisco. Redwood City was located in the “Peninsula,” i.e. the stretch of land between San Francisco and Palo Alto.”

“Most of the Peninsula belonged to San Mateo County and was underpopulated. The county road from San Francisco to Belmont (north of Redwood City) served the wealthy San Franciscan who had bought a mansion in the countryside, typically for the summer, when San Francisco was blanketed by its famous fog. These mansions usually controlled a large tract of land and constituted self-sufficient agricultural units. The First World War (1917) helped populate one town, Menlo Park, just north of Palo Alto, where the Army established Camp Fremont to train tens of thousands of soldiers.”

“The Bay Area became one in the early years of the 20th century. In the 1880s Frank Smith, who had made his fortune with his borax mines in Nevada and Death Valley, settled in Oakland and began to create a network of railways that eventually (1903) would become the Key System, connecting San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose.”

“Not much else was going on in the sleepy bay accidentally discovered in 1769 by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola.”

“A lot was going in the rest of the US. The nation was booming with innovative ideas revolutionizing agriculture, industry, mining and transportation. Since there were more and more numbers to crunch, it is not surprising that in those years inventors devised several computing machines. The most influential were William Burroughs’ adding machine of 1885 and Herman Hollerith’s tabulator of 1890 (chosen for the national census). However, the new sensation at the turn of the century was electricity, which was enabling a whole new spectrum of appliances, from the light bulb to the phonograph.”

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History

Silicon Valley After the Gold Rush

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 16, 2020

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After the Gold Rush

“Just over twenty thousand people lived in San Jose in 1900 compared with San Francisco’s 342,000, one of the top 10 cities of the USA. There is a good reason to argue that the San Francisco counterculture was founded in 1859 by Joshua Norton, an English Jew raised in South Africa who had emigrated to San Francisco at the time of the Gold Rush but ended up dealing with rice instead of gold, and who in that year declared himself Emperor of the United States. He wore Napoleonic clothes and issued his own currency. Not only was he respected by the citizens of San Francisco, but a huge crowd showed up at his funeral (he died penniless in 1880).”

“An Italian Jesuit priest named Giuseppe Neri, who had studied chemistry, built his own electrical lighting system using a device that had been used in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and demonstrated his futuristic system to the public in 1871, eight years before Thomas Edison (on the other coast) demonstrated his light bulb. In July 1876 (the centennial of the US declaration of independence) Neri lit San Francisco’s Market Street with arc lamps (the predecessors of the light bulb). In 1879 the California Electric Company (now known as PG&E) started providing electricity to customers in San Francisco, although that electrical power could be used only for arc lamps. San Jose followed suit and, eight years before Paris had the Tour Eiffel, the city erected the 72-meter tall San Jose Electric Light Tower, inaugurated in 1881 by newspaper publisher JJ Owen, the world’s tallest free-standing iron structure.”

“When James Lick died in 1876, he was the wealthiest man in California. His “high-tech” occupation had been piano manufacturing. He had in fact accumulated a little fortune by building and selling pianos in South America. In Peru he had met Domingo Ghirardelli, a maker of chocolate. When Lick moved to California, he invited Ghirardelli to set up shop in San Francisco, an advice that turned out to be golden: one year later gold was discovered near Sacramento, and both immigrants benefited from the economic boom. Lick was smart enough to buy land all around the Bay Area, while living in the small village of San Jose.”

“Lick was planning to use his fortune to build himself the largest pyramid on Earth, but somehow the California Academy of Sciences convinced him to fund the Lick Observatory, the world’s first permanently occupied mountain-top observatory, to be equipped with the most powerful telescope on Earth. That observatory, erected in 1887 on nearby Mt Hamilton, was pretty much the only notable event in the early history of San Jose.”

“Denis Kearney was the exact opposite of Emperor Norton. A populist agitator and demagogue during the economic depression of 1873-78, his rallies attracted thousands of people in San Francisco. He railed against the political establishment, the media, and the illegal Chinese immigrants (that constituted about 20% of the labor force). In 1878 his Workingmen’s Party won the elections and changed the state constitution to ban Chinese immigrants (a measure popular enough that in 1882 the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act).”

“In 1872 California’s governor Newton Booth, a saloon keeper turned lawyer, enacted the state’s first civil code, which was revolutionary in scope and reach. One section in particular made California unique: it banned “non-compete agreements”, i.e. it made it illegal for a company to require that its employees join a competitor or start their own firm to compete with their former employer.”

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History Software Engineering

Actual Bug Found – First “Debugging” – 1947 A.D.

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 5, 2020

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1947

Actual Bug Found

Howard Aiken (1900–1973), William “Bill” Burke (dates unavailable), Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992)

“Harvard professor Howard Aiken completed the Mark II computer in 1947 for the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. With 13,000 high-speed electromechanical relays, the Mark II processed 10-digit decimal numbers, performed floating-point operations, and read its instructions from punched paper tape. Today we still use the phrase “Harvard architecture” to describe computers that separately store their programs from their data, unlike the “von Neumann” machines that store code and data in the same memory.

But what makes the Mark II memorable is not the way it was built or its paper tape, but what happened on September 9, 1947. On that day at 10:00 a.m., the computer failed a test, producing the number 2.130476415 instead of 2.130676415. The operators ran another test at 11:00 a.m., and then another at 3:25 p.m. Finally, at 3:45 p.m., the computer’s operators, including William “Bill” Burke, traced the problem to a moth that was lodged inside Relay #70, Panel F. The operators carefully removed the bug and affixed it to the laboratory notebook, with the notation “First actual case of bug being found.”

Burke ended up following the computer to Dahlgren, where he worked for several years. One of the other operators was the charismatic pioneer Grace Murray Hopper, who had volunteered for the US Navy in 1943, joined the Harvard staff as a research fellow in 1946, and then moved to the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1949 as a senior mathematician, where she helped the company to develop high-level computer languages. Grace Hopper didn’t actually find the bug, but she told the story so well, and so many times, that many histories now erroneously credit her with the discovery. As for the word bug, it had been used to describe faults in machines as far back as 1875; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1889, Thomas Edison told a journalist that he had stayed up two nights in a row discovering, and fixing, a bug in his phonograph.”

Strowger Step-by-Step Switch – 1891 A.D.

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 4, 2020

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1891

Strowger Step-by-Step Switch

Almon Brown Strowger (1839–1902)

“The Bell Telephone Company was incorporated in July 1877, and by the 1880s it was quickly expanding. The switchboards that connected phones together and completed calls were manually run by operators.

The early phone system didn’t have dials or buttons. Instead, there was a crank, connected to a tiny electrical generator. Users would pick up the phone and turn the crank, and electricity would travel down the phone line to signal the operator.

Almon Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri. He noticed that his business had declined as the telephone became more popular. Strowger learned that one of the telephone operators was married to his competitor, and whenever a phone call came in for the undertaker, she would direct the call to her husband. Motivated, Strowger invented the step-by-step switch, an electromechanical device that would complete a circuit between one phone and a bank of others depending on a sequence of electric pulses sent down the phone line. Instead of relying on an operator to connect, Strowger envisioned that people would tap out a code using a pair of push buttons.

Working with his nephew, Strowger built a working model and got a patent. Although other inventors had experimented with operator-free dialing systems—thousands of patents were filed—this system “worked with reasonable accuracy,” according to a 1953 article in the Bell Laboratories Record.

Strowger, family members, and investors then created the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company in 1891. They went to La Porte, Indiana, which had recently lost its telephone system because of a patent dispute between the local independent operator and the Bell Telephone System, and set up the world’s first automated telephone exchange with direct dialing—at least for local calls—in 1892.

The switch was called “step-by-step” because of the way that a telephone call was completed, one dialed digit at a time. Step-by-step exchanges remained in service throughout the United States until 1999, when the last was removed from service, replaced by the #5ESS computerized local exchange.”

Semiconductor Diode – 1874 A.D.

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 4, 2020

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1874

Semiconductor Diode

Michael Faraday (1791–1867), Karl Ferdinand Braun (1850–1918)

“Semiconductors are curious devices: not quite conductors like copper, gold, or silver, not quite insulators like plastic or rubber. In 1833, Michael Faraday discovered that the chemical silver sulfide became a better conductor when heated, unlike metals that lose their conductivity under the same conditions. Separately, in 1874, Karl Ferdinand Braun, a 24-year-old German physicist, discovered that a metal sulfide crystal touched with a metal probe would conduct electricity in only one direction. This “one direction” characteristic is what defines diodes or rectifiers, the simplest electronic components.”

“In 1904 the British chemist John-Ambrose Fleming had invented the two-element amplifier, or ‘diode’, and a few months before DeForest the Austrian physicist Robert von Lieben had already built a three-element amplifier, or triode.” (Fair Use: B07XVF5RSP)

“Braun’s discovery was a curiosity until the invention of radio. The diode proved critical in allowing radio to make the transition from wireless telegraphy to the transmission and reception of the human voice. The diode of choice for these early radio sets was frequently called a cat’s whisker diode, because it consisted of a crystal of galena, a form of lead sulfide, in contact with a spring of metal (the “whisker”). By carefully manipulating the pressure and orientation of the metal against the crystal, an operator could adjust the electrical properties of the semiconductor until they were optimal for radio reception. Powered only by the radio waves themselves, a crystal set was only strong enough to faintly produce sounds in an earphone.”

“Crystal radio receivers were used onboard ships and then in homes until they were replaced by new receivers based on vacuum tubes, which could amplify the faint radio waves so that they were strong enough to power a speaker and fill a room with speech or music. But tubes didn’t mark the end of the crystal radio: the devices remained popular for people who couldn’t get tubes—such as on the front lines in World War II — as well as among children learning about electronics. In the 1940s, scientists at Bell Labs turned their attention to semiconductor radios once again in an effort to perfect microwave communications. In the process, they discovered the transistor.”

“Braun went on to make other fundamental contributions to physics and electronics. In 1897, he invented the cathode-ray tube (CRT), which would become the basis of television. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize with Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) “in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.””

Baudot Code – 1874 A.D.

Post author By Cloud Monk
Post date November 4, 2020

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1874

Baudot Code

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot (1845–1903), Donald Murray (1865–1945)

“Early telegraph systems relied on human operators to encode and transmit the sender’s message, and then to perceive, decode, and transcribe the message on paper upon receipt. Relying on human operators limited the maximum speed at which a message could be sent and required operator skills that were not easily available.

Émile Baudot developed a better approach. A trained French telegraph operator, Baudot devised a system that used a special keyboard with five keys (two for the left hand and three for the right) to send each character. Thirty-one different combinations arise from pressing one or more of the five keys together; Baudot assigned each code to a different letter of the alphabet. To send a message, the operator would type the codes in sequence as the machine clicked, roughly four times a second. With each click, a rotating part that Baudot called the distributor would read the position of each key in order and, if the key was pressed, send a corresponding pulse down the telegraph wire. At the other end, a remote printer would translate the codes back into a printed character on a piece of paper tape.

Baudot was one of the first people to combine key inventions by others into one working system. He patented his invention in 1874, started selling devices to the French Telegraph Administration in 1875, and was awarded the gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878. Baudot’s code was adopted as the International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1 (ITA1), one of the original international telecommunications standards. In recognition of his contribution, the baud, a unit of data transmission speed equal to the number of signal changes per second, is named after him.

In 1897, the Baudot system expanded to incorporate punched paper tape. The keyboard was disconnected from the telegraph line and connected to a new device that could punch holes across a strip of paper tape, with one hole corresponding to each key. Once punched, the tape could be loaded into a reader and the message sent down the telegraph wire faster than a human could type. In 1901, the inventor Donald Murray developed an easier-to-use punch that was based on a typewriter keyboard. Murray also made changes to Baudot’s code; the resulting code was known as the Baudot-Murray code (ITA2) and remained in use for more than 50 years.”