Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Time Travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world

NewImage


1882 – The first United States Labor Day parade is held in New York City.

NewImage

Labor Day in the United States is a public holiday celebrated on the first Monday in September. It honors the American labor movement and the contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, laws and well-being of the country. It is the Monday of the long weekend known as Labor Day Weekend and it is considered the unofficial end of summer in the United States. The holiday is also a federal holiday.

Beginning in the late 19th century, as the trade union and labor movements grew, trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate labor. “Labor Day” was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, which organized the first parade in New York City. In 1887, Oregon was the first state of the United States to make it an official public holiday. By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty U.S. states officially celebrated Labor Day.

Read more.


1932 – Robert H. Dennard, American electrical engineer and inventor is born.

NewImage

…In 1966 he invented dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), for which a patent was issued in 1968. Dennard was also among the first to recognize the tremendous potential of downsizing MOSFETs. The scaling theory he and his colleagues formulated in 1974 postulated that MOSFETs continue to function as voltage-controlled switches while all key figures of merit such as layout density, operating speed, and energy efficiency improve – provided geometric dimensions, voltages, and doping concentrations are consistently scaled to maintain the same electric field. This property underlies the achievement of Moore’s Law and the evolution of microelectronics over the last few decades.

Read more.


1977 – Voyager Program: NASA launches the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

NewImage

Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. Having operated for 39 years, 11 months and 27 days as of September 1, 2017, the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and return data. At a distance of 139 AU (2.08×1010 km) from the Sun as of July 1, 2017, it is the farthest spacecraft from Earth as well as the farthest man-made object. It is also the most distant object in the solar system whose location is known, even farther than Eris (96 AU) and V774104 (~103 AU).

The probe’s objectives included flybys of Jupiter, Saturn and Saturn’s large moon, Titan. While the spacecraft’s course could have been altered to include a Pluto encounter by forgoing the Titan flyby, exploration of the moon, which was known to have a substantial atmosphere, took priority. It studied the weather, magnetic fields and rings of the two planets and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons.

After completing its primary mission with the flyby of Saturn on November 20, 1980, Voyager 1 began an extended mission to explore the regions and boundaries of the outer heliosphere. On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause to become the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space and study the interstellar medium. Voyager 1’s extended mission is expected to continue until around 2025, when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments.

Read more.


2004 – Hackaday is born!

NewImage

Back in 2004 Adafruit’s managing director Phillip Torrone founded Hackaday! His first post was this Radioshack Phone Dialer Red Box Project.

i thought i’d start out with this hack while we’re in beta, since it was one of the first ones that really got me interested in the way phones worked and how many consumer electronics can be used for new and educational things. a “red box” was a device that would simulate coins being dropped in to a pay-phone, hence free phone calls for many people until the phone systems changed. the most popular device to modify was a radioshack tone dialer, a simple solder of a 6.5536 mhz crystal was all it took and you could “drop” 5, 10 and 25 cents at a time to make calls.

No comments:

Post a Comment