Today in History – August 27, 2003 – World’s largest battery is connected to provide emergency power to Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city. Backup power is critical here as Alaska could become an “electrical island” when the power lines go down. In fact, environmental conditions cause a total city blackout every two or three years. In [...]

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_ Today in History -August 7, 1944 – Largest electromechanical calculator ever built. The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (also called the Harvard Mark I) was the largest electromechanical calculator ever built and the first automatic digital calculator in the United States. Its size was 51 feet wide and eight feet high and weighted [...]

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Today in History – July 30, 1959 – Noyce patents the integrated circuit – 50th anniversary. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at the small Fairchild Semiconductor start-up company were both working on the concept of an integrated circuit in 1958. Prior to this invention, only parts of a circuit – such as [...]

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Today in History – July 6, 1997 – the Sojourner Rover (above), carried by the Pathfinder spacecraft, rolled onto the Mars’ surface. Click on the image above right to see a video of its initial positioning. Sojourner was designed as a six-wheeler that used a rocker-bogie suspension system; each wheel having its own drive motor, [...]

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Today in History – July 4, 1997 – Launched on December 4, 1996, Pathfinder impacted the surface of Mars on July 4, 1997 at a velocity of  18 m/s (40 mph) and then bounced into the air 15 times at a maximum height of  15 meters (50 feet), before rolling and coming to rest  1 [...]

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