Today in History – September 19, 1982 – Invention of the Smiley Face emoticon by Scott E. Fahlman. A lot of people have asked me about this, so I put together this account, which I am reprinting for the Engineering Pathway educational digital library. Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes [...]

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Today in History – September 15, 1997 – Google registered as a domain name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at  Stanford and collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. They decided that the BackRub name doesn’t quite have the buzz needed and came up with  Google – a play on the word [...]

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Today in History – September 14, 1959 – In 1959, a spaceship fell out of the lunar sky and hit the ground near the Sea of Serenity. Although the ship itself was shattered, the mission was considered a success, making Luna 2 from the Soviet Union the first manmade object to “land” on the Moon. [...]

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Today in History, September 12, 1992, Dr. Mae C. Jemison became the first woman of color to successfully travel into space. Dr. Jemison’s accomplishment came over three decades after the first American traveled to space and a decade after the first African American male did so. Through her historic accomplishment, Dr. Jemison made the dream [...]

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Today in History – September 7, 1998 – Google is founded. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at  Stanford and collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. They decided that the BackRub name doesn’t quite have the buzz needed and came up with  Google – a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical [...]

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