It’s August and we are back with another run down of the innovations and start-ups of this month throughout history.
Buckle in and keep all hands inside the cart as we take you past the first overseas telegram and all the way to the first mention of the world wide web.
(spoiler alert, that one was a success).
August 16th 1868, The first Official overseas telegraph is sent by Queen Victoria from London to Washington D.C.
Received by President James Buchanan, a congratulatory message of 98 words took almost 18 hours to send! Beginning at 10:50am and not being fully received in the US until 4:30am the next day.
August 31st 1955, the phrase Artificial Intelligence is coined for the first time.
A Dartmouth summer research project in 1956 on AI authored by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon was thought about and planned the year before which saw the term Artificial intelligence used to refer to machine learning for the first time.
AI went on to benefit from huge successes in the late 1950’s and despite differing public opinion it has grown from strength to strength.
One of the world’s largest electronic company’s name is decided by the toss of a coin.
The Stanford university graduates, William Hewlett and David Packard, spent 9 years selling their first oscillators out of a garage in Palo Alto, California before coming together to decide on a company name, one that defines them, inhabits their brand and will be used on all marketing activities… and they decided who’s name would go first with a coin toss.
William won and HP began trading.
August 6th 1991, The first public mention on the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee.
He wrote, in part, “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere… The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation.” to the alt.hypertext Usenet newsgroup.
It was not in fact created to share pictures of your dogs, but that occurred as a happy accident.
