Today in History: June 11

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration of FM radio to an audience of engineers and everyday listeners 80 years ago today.

Anyone who has listened to an AM broadcast for more than a few hours has encountered its drawbacks: crackles, hisses, static-y noises, pops. Armstrong, building on 15 years of research into high frequency signals, had devices that could send and receive high frequency signals. Armstrong played a jazz record through AM equipment and then through FM. A reporter who was there wrote, “If the audience of 500 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds.” It worked, yet the FM radio era lay decades off in the future.
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Mountains out of Steps

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My least favorite cases are staircases. My least favorite ways are stairways. My least favorite air is a stair.

The photo above (not at all) accurately depicts (for reasons of comic exaggeration) what every staircase resembles in my mind’s eye. Including the one in my home. It is life with mobility impairment. Once upon a pair of teenage legs ago, I took stairs two at a time.

In 2012 my first neurologist, Dr. M, diagnosed me with late-onset Friedreich’s ataxia, or at least he reported that he felt I have a form of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), a disease that has dozens of forms and is genetic in origin.
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Gordie Howe, 1928–2016

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

He remains the only professional hockey player to play in six different decades: full-time from 1945-1980, when he retired at age 52—wait, pause there. 52.

And then he skated one shift for a professional minor league team in 1997, when he was almost 70. Six decades. Gordie Howe died today at the age of 88.
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