September in History
School is back and the sun is gone, September is here with the first search engine, the first man made object on the moon and the world’s first android smartphone!
September 14th 1959
“Houston… we have crashed”
It would be another 10 years before man set foot on the moon but in September of 1959, the first man-made object landed on the moon. Landed is quite a stretch, the Russian (Soviet) space probe crashed into the surface of the moon. Luna 2 secured a place in the history books as the first man-made object to reach another celestial body.
12 hours after take-off, luna 2 released a cloud of sodium gas which aided in tracking the probe and acted as an experiment on the behaviour of gases in space. A day later, all radio contact with Luna ceased, indicating that it had crashed into the surface of the moon.
So, landed was a bit of a stretch
September 2nd 1993
“Okay Google, what was the worlds first search engine?”
Unlike other early search engines, the W3 catalog didn’t attempt to index all sites by crawling but made use of the high-quality manually maintained lists of web resources that already existed. It then effectively mirrored these pages and input the results as individual entries. Its glory was short-lived and W3Catalog was retired in 1996.
September 23rd 2008
The first android was a (HTC) Dream.
Google and T-mobile teamed up to create an android phone to rival the first iPhone, Blackberry and other early operating software. it was praised for its open design, notifications system and integrations with Google services like Gmail. It also introduced the “android market” for users to download additional apps.
It was thought to look “retro” at the time of release, described as a gadget from a 70s movie set in 2030. What does that make it now?
Come back for next month’s spooky month in history where we see a radio reading of ‘War of the worlds’ sent fear across the nation.
“No one would have believed, in the middle of the 20th century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligence greater than man’s.”