Most centenarians become famous upon reaching their 100th birthday. Not many are already famous. The most renowned show business figures to achieve this milestone are probably Bob Hope and George Burns. Today, Kirk Douglas joins the ranks of the centenarians among us.

Douglas remains an active figure in Hollywood. Last year he published a positive statement about the film, Trumbo, starring Bryan Cranston. He said he had one problem with the film, which depicts Hollywood history during the era of the Blacklist and shows Douglas’ heroic actions making certain that the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo was given credit for writing Spatacus. His problem with Trumbo? “I don’t understand why I wasn’t cast as ‘Kirk Douglas.'”
Read More

U.S. Patent Number 1,835,031 was published on this date in 1931 by Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel of AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories. It was for coaxial cable, something that is profoundly important in modern life, yet unheralded.

The patent was for innovations in the technology, which had been under development on both sides of the Atlantic for decades—ever since the first Trans-Atlantic cable had been set in place and put to work, technicians had been searching for better and faster cable for transmissions.

Espenschied’s patent for a “concentric conducting system” is also of note because, although written in 1931, it mentions its possible use in cable television: “The types of transmission line systems now in use will not satisfy the television requirements for long distance transmission which must be met eventually.”
Read More

Photo number AS17-148-22727 (above) was taken by the crew of Apollo 17—Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt—at 5:39 a.m. EST on this date in 1972. Soon after NASA released it for publication, it acquired a nickname: “The Blue Marble,” and it is one of the most frequently reproduced photos in history.

Apollo 17 had been launched about five hours earlier from the Kennedy Space Center and was in a parking orbit about 28,000 miles from Earth. About an hour later, the craft left that orbit and continued to the Moon. Apollo 17 remains the last manned mission to the Moon, the last manned mission to travel beyond a low Earth orbit.
Read More