Today in History: Dec. 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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.'”
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John Glenn: A Memory

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“It was quite a day. I’m not sure what you can say about a day in which you see four beautiful sunsets in one day, but it’s pretty interesting.”—John Glenn, February 20, 1962

October 29, 1998, was a Thursday. John Glenn, about to become a former U.S. Senator, was on board the space shuttle Discovery, and if all went according to plan, he was going to shatter the records for longest time between trips into orbit, oldest person to travel into space, and probably a few other things. He was 77 and had orbited Earth on February 20, 1962, thirty-six years earlier.
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Today in History: Dec. 8

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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.”
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